I've always chosen the platform that made the most sense at the time - C=64, Amiga600, AMD 486dx4, Intel p200-mmx, AMD K6-2 350 (or was it 333? Buggy at any rate, but nice), Slot-A Athlon 700, Intel P4 northwood 2.53, AMD64 3500+, AMD64x2 4400+... And unless something radical happens, my next box will either be a core2 duo or a core2 quatro, depending.
I've also changed between ATi and NVidia, although I've been sticking with nv for the last few generations because of
very nast ATi drivers. Anyway, that was just to point out I'm not a fanboi (in this regard, anyway ^_^).
Yes, Itanium wasn't marketed at end-users, price tag is too heavy and it's not really suitable for it (sure it'd run spreadsheets and browser and what 90% of end-users need, but pricetag + power consumption...), and the hardware x86 emulation was beaten by software emulation (typical of intel to screw up things like that). I'm not familiar enough with the architecture to say anything else about it, so I'm not saying it would be the perfect candidate for moving us over.
I do think AMD ruined or chances of escaping x86 anytime soon, though... the only thing that would be a big enough carrot (perceived or real) to move people over to a new arch, including pains of porting applications, was 32->64bit move. We aren't going to see anything of quite that magnitude for quite some time.
Yes, I'm very well aware that x86 CPUs are internally RISC, but what I wanted to escape is all the legacy hardware, the junky legacy crap in the CPU (16bit, segments, structures that are more complex than needed for 286 pmode compatibility, defunct hardware taskswitching, heck perhaps even paging). And perhaps a nicer instruction set with destination register and less hardcoded register dependencies, more unshadowed registers, getting rid of instructions that are faster to implement with multiple other instructions, etc.
But we're not going to get that now. Yeah yeah, backwards compatibility etc., but anything 64-bit produced now is fast enough to run legacy 32-bit applications that won't be ported just fine (okay, for games it might be different story).
I personally think the SSE race has gotten out of hand. I guess that is the cost of keeping chip-producing companies in business.
They're adding too many small things too fast, imho... they should focus a bit more on chip bugs and optimization (speeding up vmx, for instance), and then think through the SSE instructions a bit more. I think it's a bit weird seeing CPU crc support.
Not entirely. AMD can continue to low-ball Intel on the cost of the final processor product in order to compete...
How long can they continue to do that without going bankrupt? I wonder if the ATi merger was a good idea... the CPU/GPU integration is somewhat interesting, but mostly for OEMs and not enthusiasts, which tend to be the guys that buy AMD hardware.
