Processor Design

[Catfish_Man]

The best articles about processor tech I've found are at http://www.arstechnica.com. Look around a bit, they have an analysis of the IA-64 (Itanium), AMD K7, and a comparitive analysis of the G4+ and The Pentium 4. It left me slightly more respectful of the P4, if they hadn't ruined it with their push for clockspeed it could have been a really speedy chip (however, they did ruin it). Also, the Itanium is awesome. I realize that the current ones have a lot of problems, but the concepts and technologies they're going for are *awesome*. Let's hope Motorola uses some of them in the G5.

 

[networkman]

i could see moto doing some of that but their main focus is in embedded processors so it is not in their interest financially to go head to head with intel on something as high end as an itanium

 

[pc_convert?]

I'm not sure that Itanium is awesome. Alpha was awesome, but now compaq sold Alpha IP to Intel, Alpha is dead unfortunately.

Itanium is aimed at high end servers, so don't expect to see one one a desktop anytime soon. Also Itanium eats 130W!

see
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT031401225852&pagenum=4

AMD's IA-64 is more likely to succeed in the desktop market. If Apple/Motorola/IBM can sort there issues out PowerPC architecture could ramp up nicely, however with motorolas current problems this seems unlikely

The PowerPC architecture is nice and clean, it doesn't suffer from the need to be backwardly compatiable with a 25 year old architecture, it really deserves to suceed, but deserving something unfortunately doesn't guarantee success.

just my 2 cents...