Re: Computer with better-than-x86 processor that's not extremely expensive?

On Jan 1, 1:00 am, mike3 <mike4...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi.

Is it possible to get a computer with a faster-than-x86 CPU these days
for a "reasonable" amount of money, under $10,000? Even under $8,000?
If not, could this explain some of the resistance to switching off of
the x86 at large?


Are not you tired of asking the same questions (and getting the same
answers)?
You can get 4GHz Power6 blade for less than $7K. Whether it is faster
or slower than x86 depends on your application.
You can get 4GHz Power6 blade for less than $7K. Whether it is faster
or slower than x86 depends on your application.
You can get 4GHz Power6 blade for less than $7K. Whether it is faster
or slower than x86 depends on your application.
..............

One thing I was wondering about was that I heard from a discussion
here that at one point the DEC Alpha processor, now "dead", running an
x86 emulator was actually faster than a real x86 machine at the time.
I was wondering, why didn't people switch to that? It's gotta be the
cost. With the emulator you wouldn't need to do a mammoth movement of
wild software porting en masse, and you could start introducing native
applications as time goes on. So why no switch at that point? I'd bet
it's probably because an Alpha machine must've cost an arm, leg, and
your first born. Is that right?

IIRC, DEC marketing wasn't 100% honest about it. On average their
emulators were faster than 1-year old Pentia but slower the fastest
contemporary Intel stuff. Still, not a bad fit, I should say.
Also FX32! emulated 80-bit x87 arithmetic with their own less precise
64-bit stuff. Most people didn't care, I guess.

As others mentioned here, cost was not the only factor.
FX32! was an application-layer emulator available only on NT (may be,
later, on Linux too, I don't remember). So those who wanted to run
other x386 OSes (like, for example, Windows 9x series, extremely
popular in that time frame) were out of luck. Same for those who had
hardware devices not supported by Alpha version of NT. I never used NT
on Alpha myself but heard that driver support was very poor relatively
to x386 variant of the same OS.
.

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