quote:
Originally posted by Jhrono
Intel's "great" processor on the last years was Pentinum IV.. Mainly, it was a heat-spreader, with few overclock'ability and also a slow performer.. Intel maintained this processor for 3 or 4 years, waiting for the big fish (I guess..)
The Pentium IV is not really one processor, the core has been completely redesigned several times, through NetBurst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott and Cedar Mill.
Other CPUs you might want to look into if you're interested in CPU technology are the DEC Alpha [They aren't making them after this year
], Sun SPARC (It's CRAPS backwards! Really!), various ARM processors, IBM Power, PowerPC [used in some Macs + PSX/PS2], Motorola 68k based CPUs, and check out the CELL, too, very interesting. There are some rare CPUs still being used as well, such as the CPUs in the CRAY X1E.
I'm not a huge fan of the RISC thing, I really like vector processors. However, they just don't exist anymore, not in any real scale. You can't call the SIMD on the Pentiums (>3) vector, really, unless you're dealing with 32 or 16 bit floats.
was put impeccably into words at DebianDay for me last Saturday, by Knut Yrvin of Trolltech - adults try something once, fail, and then are like "ffs this doesn't work". Children try, fail, and then try again, and succeed - maybe on the second, or even fifth retry. But the thing is that they keep at it and overcome the problems in the end.
-andrewdodd13
