Anybody still hate x86 on principal?

[Pentad]

Is there anybody here who stills hates x86 because PowerPC was better?

You might want to rethink your opinions there.  The PowerPC had/has its share of problems that were never going to be addressed.  The most important for portable, consumer products is PPW.  The same issue Apple saw in the product roadmap and one of the reasons they jumped ship.

Jobs talked about Performance Per Watt and whether you like Apple or not, he was correct.  If you look at the Apple presentation when they announced the Intel move you can see the stats he talks about.  Those are correct BTW.

Rumors were that Jobs begged IBM to reduce PPW so that a G5 could be in a notebook but IBM either wouldn't or couldn't and it forced Apple to move to Intel.  The smartest move they could have done IMO.

Even if you don't care about a PPC notebook, just look at it consumption in a desktop package.  It is a hot and power hungry chip.

ARM is a great portable chip but it is anemic on computational power.  Floating Point is it Achilles heel.

I'm not an Intel Fanboi, I just try keep up with this stuff.  Intel -to me- has to be a tablet CPU with desktop performance.  I'm saying, that people want the power of their notebook or desktop CPU in a backward compatible, power sipping, battery loving CPU that can run their tablet for 15 hours a day.

That is no small task.  Personally, I think Intel has done a great job.  They are not perfect but when you look at what they have done, I think it is very respectable.

-P

[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.

[AppleIIGuy]

Being an Apple ][ Fanboy. I used to have indifference to 68k family we should have been using 65c832's instead of those nasty closed unexpandable mackintoshes. But right now even though I work for Intel. At home the Non x86 machines outnumber my x86 machines (even including my retro x86 machines). But the thing I don't get is why people say the x86 architecture is "icky". The reason why 6502 was replaced by 68k was 68k could run faster and ppc replaced 68k for the same reason. It is also why Apple dropped ppc. and now Arm might do the same to x86. (I hope for my jobs sake it doesn't)

[TheBilgeRat]

Are you all kidding me?  x86, ARM, and motorola/PPC ALL were crap!

It should have been MIPS and SPARC that won!!!!11111111oneoneone

[EDanaII]

I can't say I ever hated x86 "on principal." What I hated was the rise of monopolies, of which Intel was a part. As Intel (and M$) ascended, other options, like the Amiga got squeezed out. In Amiga's case, it didn't help any that Commodore had no real clue what it was they possessed, trying to sell cutting edge hardware as a commodity item. No. I'm in the "if it gets the job done" category and would have been happy with an Amiga powered by x86 as long as I could still choose.

[Heiroglyph]

I can't say I ever hated x86 "on principal." What I hated was the rise of monopolies, of which Intel was a part. As Intel (and M$) ascended, other options, like the Amiga got squeezed out. In Amiga's case, it didn't help any that Commodore had no real clue what it was they possessed, trying to sell cutting edge hardware as a commodity item. No. I'm in the "if it gets the job done" category and would have been happy with an Amiga powered by x86 as long as I could still choose.

100% agreed.  I couldn't put it better myself.

They chose 68k for the price to performance factor.  Had Arm or x86 been the best bang for the buck, we'd have been using those all this time.

The CPU doesn't matter if it's not abandoned like 68k or dare I say PPC.  It's just another off the shelf component.

[OlafS3]

+1

Back in that time hardware was very important and defined what you could do with your computer. Today all components are cheap and off the shelf so OS and software make the difference. What hardware is underneath is not important anymore.

[commodorejohn]

Even if it has a "icky" design, who cares. I am developing software on Windows in normal life and never be confronted with assembler. Even on amiga (as long as you develop software using system routines and not directly hacking hardware) you are not confronted with the "icky" design. And users are not confronted anyway. And system programmer mostly use C (and assembler only on rare cases). So finally it is not important if "PowerPC" "could" be better because it is not.

If you don't find yourself using assembler and don't know or care what goes on under the hood, that's perfectly fine for you, but it doesn't invalidate the opinions of people who do know and care about this stuff. (It does make you less credible on the subject, though.)

When are you really confronted with the "icky" or  "horrible" design when you use a computer or program on it?

Any time I do assembler, that's when.

I think all these "Intel outside" rhetoric is past.  "Amiga" (68k, AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS) should run on the fastest  available and affordable hardware and that is X86/X64 right now. [...] So when we want  some kind of rebirth we need it on competitive hardware.

Oy, again with the "BECOMING THE COMPETITION IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO TAKE BACK THE MARKET WE NEVER DOMINATED IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!" garbage...that attitude is the exact thing holding the community back.

Back in that time hardware was very important and defined what you could  do with your computer. Today all components are cheap and off the shelf  so OS and software make the difference. What hardware is underneath is  not important anymore.

Not to you, maybe.

[commodorejohn]

I never got into PowerPC & if Apple hadn't chosen and promoted it, then nobody else would have done either.

Debate the merits and demerits of PPC all you like, but that's really not true. For a while there, PPC was going to be the Next Big Thing. IBM was counting on it to help them make a comeback in the PC market that they'd lost to the clone manufacturers, and Microsoft was on-board as well with Windows NT. It never caught on, but that's not because they weren't trying.

[commodorejohn]

I don't like x86 because it's a turd that was made to fly while the 68k was discarded like a piece of trash without even trying to upgrade it properly.

This.

[OlafS3]

Why becoming emotional? I only said my view (that is propably shared by many others, obviously not by you). You program in assembler? Fine. When you program in 68k assembler then you can use UAE or you do it on real hardware or FPGA based system (two I can think of). The last two options are for geeks and certainly not for a broader userbase. And UAE runs (almost everywhere). And where is my view the community holding back the community? I do not understand what you mean?

When you program in assembler on other platforms and directly hit hardware than you are rather exotic today.

[nicholas]

Are you all kidding me?  x86, ARM, and motorola/PPC ALL were crap!

It should have been MIPS and SPARC that won!!!!11111111oneoneone

A True Amigan (TM)(C)(R):dancingbanana: would only worship at the alter of PA-RISC!!!111oneone!eleventyone!

[commodorejohn]

But the thing I don't get is why people say the x86 architecture is "icky".

Because it's a CPU from 1978 (complete with a tiny register file, lack of orthogonality between the registers, and horribly awkward addressing scheme) that's been progressively kludged up into a modern processor, and even on the new models you can still see the surgery scars. 68k was a pleasant 32-bit architecture right from the get-go.

[vidarh]

It is also why Apple dropped ppc. and now Arm might do the same to x86. (I hope for my jobs sake it doesn't)

Both PPC and ARM have outsold x86 CPU's for many years (as does MIPS, and possibly even 6502 derivatives if the numbers on WDC's website are to be believed). ARM's are expected to ship in more than 3 billion units this year....

x86 gets all the attention because Intel's and AMD's CPU's are big hulking high cost beasts...

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.

[commodorejohn]

And where is my view the community holding back the community? I do not understand what you mean?

The view that x86 is The Only Way Forward for the Amiga is holding the community back because many people are so shackled to this notion that a "new Amiga" has to compete with, outperform, and eventually (obviously) overthrow the PC clones that they aren't interested in anything else the Amiga hardware world has to offer.

[nicholas]

Personally I like the Alpha architecture a lot.  Shame it never took off really.