The End of the x86 Era | John C. Dvorak | PCMag.com: "All this was due to the x86 juggernaut and established mind share."
The Article says the usual gang of suspects are to blame for demise of the x86 structure. Suspects like fussiness, marketing, public relations, appliance envy, general laziness, and computers as toys, are killing the past work-horse PC architecture. But mainly "the x86 era is over because the public stopped caring about it when Apple introduced the first poke-and-shove GUI on the original iPhone in 2007. (Dvorak, John C. Jan 8, 2012)"
The general group of suspects includes the consumer who really "doesn't care how anything works." It was the dream of the ambiguous consumer that " ... Computers would be so simple that anyone could use them with little fuss ... "
Arguments divide "x86 architecture" into "speed freakism," and "brainiacism."
" ... It marked the victory of those who felt that extra performance was best achieved not by constantly upping the processor's clock speed, but by going for ever more parallel systems with much finer control of performance versus power consumption. (Rupert Goodwins, ZDNet.co.uk, 28 July, 2006 LINK)"During the lifespan of x86, other architectures were tried by companies like Intel; they experimented with "Ada" and then with a "neural network processor" only to see them not make it into the public consciousness.
Chances are that we never fully use our x86 type Core 2 Duo type processors with our everyday work-play of Apps and software. If you are not mapping the floor of the ocean, or modeling the earth's crust with seismic readouts, you are probably using only a small part of your x86.
Therefore, the whole push for x86 over the decades has been to fine tune with macro-fusion, and micro-fusion, by recognizing instruction parallels. Intel then established ways to speed up the flow in the pipeline structure of the cores. This was done by recognizing at least one in ten instructions can be combined with another instruction, such as a mathematics comparison. Then, Intel limited the power usage for their cores by shutting down areas that were not being used. Intel got its parameters from studying all kinds of softwares.
For instance, what has powered the blog MooPig? Until this December 2010, it was a Vectra VL420 server type Pentium 4. It is a great machine ... for ten years ago. It was all I needed to post and blog and repeat. It quit working, so I replaced it with this Intel CORE i5 Vostro by Dell. The only difference is that I can do three times the posting, blogging and repeating as before.
That is why I feel sort of goofy when I read about all the power spinning in this new PC. What would happen if I ever tapped that resource? What more could I do?
What does the future hold? If you ask an American author, scientist, inventor and futurist -- Kurzweil, -- the future of computing is that all this you see surrounding you now, will be gone. The aspect of information gathering\processing will be part of our human bodies; some sort of nano-tech cells in our neural network. The future is body enhancement; tatt's and inserts. His inventions include optical character recognition... so that tells you a lot.
Kurzweil is more saint than doomsday prophet as his main industry has been to make the blind see, deaf hear and mute speak. Like a hearing aid, which by the way is very delicately hand made, a person wearing one doesn't care how it works -- he just cares that he can hear. That is the future of x86 architecture, does it work?
We cannot be lulled to sleep with ludicrous predictions doled out by research companies. We cannot be subdued by "battery life so we can sit, giggle, poke, and shove icons on a screen," as John Dvorak says. Rather keep an open mind, and a fervent agenda, so that when the "Singularity happens, it will be ‘very obvious’(LINK)..." But it will not come without demise of the x86's.
'via Blog this'
________________Reference
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398301,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03079TX1K0000585
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/lpv06569/lpv06569.pdf
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d845gvsr/sb/cs-008824.htm
http://www.kurzweilai.net/
No comments:
Post a Comment