@bloodline: Sweet. :-)
PowerPC *is* a good architecture, but not as good as fanatics want us to believe. They also do NOT run cool when pressed into serious desktop usage. I still remember the 200Mhz G3 used in the PowerMac Tower at work. It had a heatsink larger than a stock P4 with a 120mm case fan blowing down on it -- and it still got frickin' hot.
Still, I'm not falling for Apple's new "units of performance" catch phrase. More fake-world benchmark B.S. -- just like Sony's "twice the performance of XBox 360" claims.
I wonder what will happen to Windows PPC, now. :-)
Legerdemain: Actually I installed Windows XP on my old 350MHz Compaq Presario back in the days... optimized it a bit, ran it with only 192MB of RAM and not only did I have a startup at only 7 seconds...
NT is infinitely better than 9x. My brother-in-law was afraid how much slower his laptop would run after I offered to upgrade it from 98 to Win2K. Turns out, it works several times faster, now. I'm impressed, given how much his old Dell laptop sucks to begin with. :-D
What about Transmeta? Wasn't it their main objective to produce an energy efficient CPU for portable devices?
Yes, but they are slow. There's a reason it's recongnized only as an "also-ran."
Transmeta probably wasn't anticipating Intel getting their act together and starting to make their processors more efficient (thanks to AMD and the rise of portable devices). Given Intel's manufacturing capacity, it looks like Transmeta is in serious trouble, now.
I wonder how fast a Crusoe would be running "native" code, rather than trying to emulate x86.
Intel does also have the very efficient i960, but it's not x86 compatible and I've only heard of it being used in arcade games, specifically, Sega Model 2.
Where's SUN, DEC, Toshiba, NEC, Motorolla, Hitachi, Panasonic?
No chipsets for their CPUs. Those guys make workhorses for CGI renderers, heavy machinery, and network routers. I'm actually quite surprised how quickly the whole gaming industry dumped non-PPC chips, given how console developers always custom-engineer their own chipsets (usually on the CPU die).
As for Windows XP, what exactly can it do with 200MB+ that AmigaOS3.9 can't do with 32MB or less?
Most memory used by an OS today is for caching to speed up the system, and in this respect, XP blows away OS3.9. Contrary to popular belief, Windows can be run in low-memory situations quite well.
It's also worth noting that if the OS doesn't suck up all the memory available, it is simply wasting memory. My system idles at 200MB usage, but if I start loading up lots of apps, memory usage doesn't really increase that much. Unless I'm running games, of course. Painkiller tries to allocate more than 900 MB of memory, even though my system has 512.
Games are really stupid when it comes to memory. They just tell the OS, "
GIMME ALL YOU GOT", and the OS has to decide if the game really needs it, or whether it's just being greedy. That's why when you quit a game, it takes a minute of hard-drive swapping to return to the desktop. It's not Windows that's using all that memory, it's the game being a memory-hogging b*stard. :pissed:
