Re: "...[Acorn] imploded..."
>If there was any doubt where you were coming from, it's clear now. And it's not a good place.
Please do forget to mention where that place actually is.
>Lots of people don't have to *imagine* not using "hideous x86 box grunt
>work of compiling all the tools and code for the target".
Because they don't do work in a field that requires them to do lots of compiling, data processing etc.
But they'll consume content that has been processed by machines many times more powerful than their "mobile" device multiple times a day.
>There are still people using stuff other than x86 too, but the
On the desktop? Are there any desktop machines shipping in volume that aren't x86? The only ones I can think of are chromebooks and they aren't exactly winning any ass kicking competitions.
>typical IT department's dependence on
IT departments - The be all and end all of people that think that their job fixing printers is "working in high technology"
>Unix, VMS, etc, as there used to be.
Unix doesn't run on x86? You better tell that to all the Unix vendors that ported their breed of Unix to x86 as soon as they realised fast commodity priced x86 hardware was going to ruin their RISC party.
>If x86 is so brilliant in general, why is it near invisible outside the IT department?
Who said it's so brilliant? All I'm saying is it's not the ISIS of instruction sets and it's not like ARM is some amazing super technology sent from heaven to save us all. It's horses for courses.
If you want your desktop machine to be limited to performance levels of 5 years ago and only able to access a quarter of the RAM that my core i7 setup does knock yourself out.. but I'll be keeping my commodity machine with 32GB of RAM kthnxbye.
And not exactly invisible outside of the IT department unless your job fixing printers involves printers attached to machines that consume multiple rooms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg
Biting the hand that feeds IT
