Re: [PLUG] software choice

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On 18 Nov, 2003, at 22:22, Tobias DiPasquale wrote:
> P.S. One more thing: the PowerPC architecture is one of the cleanest
> around. Mac software aside, they couldn't have chosen a better
> computation engine against price/performance considerations.

At Supercomputing 1999, there were two hardware architectures given
a "Future." -- Alpha and Power. PARC was declared dead and SPARC
given one more "die-shrink."

Today there is only Power. (Which has nominally been re-christened 
PowerPC).

Will the AMD 64 bit Architecture succeed? The jury is still out.
It did not exist in 1999.

Intel-64 bit architecture did exist in 1999 and it was written off.

About two weeks ago, the last Alpha processor upgrade (EV7 design) 
shipped.

Somewhat juced Madison Itaniums are now shipping - but their performance
still lags the previous Alphas, and don't hold a candle to the new 
Marvel machines.
If this year's IA64 (with Alpha inside) finally appear "next year" as 
"slipped"
(from 2004 to a 2005 release) that may change, but Intel doesn't 
consider them
viable for anything but the high-end Enterprise Server machines.
For everybody else, Intel says,  "let them eat 32 bits."

But by then, Power5 will be on the street.

As for OSX, 10.2 was a good stable release -- 10.3 got released by 
marketing,
probably two months ahead of Engineering's rediness, and has been 
problematic
"at best," some have called it an unmitigated disaster. QAR efforts 
were aborted
in mid test.  "It's good enough" was marketing's attitude. ... pissed a 
lot of developers
off greatly.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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