Reply to post: Re: Computer says "No"

Re: Computer says "No"

MacroRodent said:

In the 1990's, RISC processors generally ran circles around Intel's 486 and the original Pentium. I am not sure when the tables turned. Maybe around the time when Pentium III was introduced. Should did up old benchmarks.

True, but then again a SPARC or Alpha or MIPs based machines cost a huge amount of money, whereas PCs were pretty cheap. A Silicon Graphics workstation was the object of envy that never sat on my desk at work...

The writing was on the wall by 1995, and by 2000 there was nothing to justify picking anything other than x86, except in particular cases for particular purposes.

The 400MHz PPC7400 PowerPC chip from Motorola was quicker at certain types of maths (DSP) than a 4GHz Pentium 4, largely because Intel hadn't bought into the SIMD idea. It's only quite recently that Intel finally added an FMA instruction to SSE / AVX that meant it wasn't hamstrung. Not adding this was apparently a deliberate policy to make Itanium (which always had an FMA) look good.

Even today there's a lot of radar systems based on PowerPC.

The Cell processor from IBM (think Sony PS3) was quicker (for some specific purposes) than anything Intel had; in fact it took about 6, 8 years for Intel to get close to beating the Cell, and only comparatively recently have they matched its memory bandwidth. Experiencing the full might of a proper Cell processor (i.e. not one inside a PS3) was a mind bending moment, they were truly unbelievably good. Hard to program for, unless one had grown up on Transputers. It's a real pity IBM canned it, because a Cell processor from a modern silicon fab with the SPE count dialled up to max would still eat everything else for breakfast. Though with the idea of today's JavaScript generation getting to grips with something as complex as Cell being laughable, perhaps IBM took the right commercial decision.

Interestingly, the modern CPUs from Intel and especially AMD are resembling Cell more and more (lots of cores on a fast internal bus, lots of IO bandwidth), the only substantive difference is that their cores are full-on x86 cores with (annoying) caches whereas all an SPE was good for was maths and nothing else, run out of their very handy SRAM, with no cache engine to get in the way.