dammy wrote:
Which magic in ia32 and amd64 are you thinking about ?
Does quad core with direct connect architecture for under $200 USD count?
Dammy
Freescale has an 8 core chip running @ 1.5GHz. The QorIQ P4080.
It also has loads of on chip peripherals that ia´s and amd´s doesn´t.
But the focus for PPC market is not desktop PCs anymore. So we should not expect these beasts in our desktops unless somebody at IBM have the crazy idea of selling a POWER6 or a Cell based machine. I don´t believe they will do that.
To be honest, I think ARM and MIPS are better designs than PPC and x86. ARMs can do so much better with less silicon and power consumption than x86. They are cheap also, and sooner or later portable devices will take them to the same performance level that we have today with x86.
An ARM based Amiga could have all those benefits, but back in the late nineties, we had a scenario where PPCs were awesome processors, and ARMs were just quite nice chips. Who would bet they would have gone that far and that PPCs were almost dropped? It would be just like declaring that x86 will be at second place in sales by 2020
