Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.
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That could very well be true but sooner or later folks had to get passed engineering and design infatuation and accept reality. Faster + cheaper trumps fetish (if you're out there trying to run or create a business or be competitive, I don't apply that to taking interest in things for their own sake as a hobby or pleasurable pursuit).
When my Amiga blew up I got a DEC Alpha because it meant I could run some of the software I still wanted to use at home and wasn't Intel. It was RISC so that was cool. I was even able to justify Windows-NT because they were kind of a marginal group at MS at the time and it used a kernel based on MACH, like NeXT (though NT 3.whatever was painfully ugly). There was even something exceedingly cool about how FX32 worked, the engineering behind it, that let me run Intel apps at full speed (eventually, the more you ran it the faster your performance as it refined the emulation).
Back then the DEC machines killed anything Intel on floating point, which meant everything for CGI. But Intel closed the gap and then surpassed DEC even here, until the Alpha solution was no longer slightly more expensive with much more performance, it was more expensive and slower in every respect. Ultimately, DEC didn't even care. They weren't really interested in being competitive long term or in desktop applications anymore than Motorola + IBM would be in later years. Engineers with no lasting ambition or at least none sympathetic to what desktop users wanted.
We (Digital Domain) absorbed the "NT Group" from Amblin who came in with their DEC Alphas so I got to see the transition go down in a serious way. What I had at home was kind of incidental because I never had the time or inclination to do anything but plink around at home. But the ugly transition from IRIX to everyone having Intel based Windows-NT, including horribly designed, failed attempts to stay relevant by SGI, was a sad era at the company.
Eventually we moved to LINUX and the hardware simply ceased to matter because "who cares?". It either works or it doesn't, is fast or slow, basically. The hardware isn't sexy anymore or interesting. It's all about what software you want to run and how much of a pain-in-the-ass you're willing to put up with to use it.
I got enough exposure to LINUX at work to know I wasn't going to put up with that at home so I've been mostly Mac since NeXT took over. I was sad when Apple dumped Motorola. My Mom worked, over the years, at Motorola, at Freescale and at the Apple-Motorola-IBM facility (Somerset) during the early days of PPC development. But those people were and are complete boneheads, the folks controlling the keys to the PPC castle, and their inability to get their act together meant Apple had no choice. They gave Intel the knife and stretched out their own necks. Lumbergh in
Office Space might as well be based on the management culture of Motorola. When that movie came out I got the impression from Mom that it might as well have been a docudrama, they were that incompetent and wasteful. And look at them now.