Anybody still hate x86 on principal?

[Hattig]

In the 80s and 90s, it was a valid thing to hate x86, it was nasty back then.

But 68k withered away, and x86 became a complex nasty instruction set running on a nice RISC CPU core hiding behind a rather complex decoder.

Later on, x86 lost a lot of the instruction set nastiness and gained registers and 64-bit capability, and a decent (non-stack based) FPU implementation, and decent vector implementation. And performance++. And since then, performance per watt has been improving massively. The nasty decoder logic is an increasingly small portion of the CPU. Shame about the ISA, prefix bytes, etc, but fewer and fewer people really care about that.

For the PowerPC purists, 64-bit ARMv8 looks like it will take on a lot of the things that are nice about 64-bit PowerPC.  Hopefully ARM will take on a bigger role in mainstream PCs in the next few years.

[Hattig]

It will keep getting attacked on all fronts, not least because ARM's are rapidly getting to the "fast enough" level where most ordinary consumers don't care about performance any more. And then competing with ~40 GBP ARM computers slightly larger than a credit card becomes an unpleasant proposition (my "media centre" is one of those powered via micro-usb, and streaming files from my file server.

AMD can see the writing on the wall, they're designing ARM based 64-bit APUs for the future. Intel's stuck on the x86 train though.

Personally I don't care about AmigaOS on x86, maybe a few years ago I would have been.

Instead port it to run on a Beagleboard ($45) or similar ARM SoC board first, this has a single-core ARM Cortex A8 so Hyperion don't need to worry about that issue with AmigaOS. Binary incompatibility means that they can just push through memory protection and all those other things that AmigaOS is just a bit crap and un-modern at.

[Hattig]

I don't get this ARM thing. What is it? Is it a new hole CPU like PPC is for 68k and x86? Are you saying ARM is going to take over x86 and ARM is not backward compatible to x86?

I am a little confused here in this whole thing.

ARM's not new - it's been around since 1985. It was used in the Acorn Archimedes, the Apple Newton, the 3DO console. Since then the architecture has taken over the mobile phone market, the tablet market (iPad, Android tablets, etc), and is encroaching on the netbook and low-end laptop market. Never mind the billions of embedded ARM cores integrated into thousands of different types of chip.

ARM claims that there were around 2.5 billion ARM CPUs shipped in the past quarter alone. That should give you an idea of just how much ARM is used.

And it's cheap, unlike PowerPC chips, and typical application processors integrating ARM also include decent graphics and video acceleration.

What the SoCs often lack is PC features like several SATA ports, PCI Express, etc - but that's not the case with every product.