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From: ajayshah@alhena.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: MIPS, Compaq and Microsoft in bed - NYT story
Message-ID: <29920@usc>
Date: 9 Feb 91 19:55:03 GMT
Sender: news@usc
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
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Originator: ajayshah@alhena.usc.edu


The business section of NYT yesterday had a story on MIPS; 
if not anything else, a early product announcement gets you 
publicity!

The article mentioned plans of going up to 50 mips using the new
technology.  Isn't 50 mips pretty attainable using incremental
growth of implementation on top of SPARC/MIPS architectures?
Surely announcing a new architecture needs more justification
than performance like 50mips?

Is 64 bits important?  IEEE doubles are 80 bits anyway; what
kinds of instructions will run a lot better with 64 bits?  A lot
of integer-performance kind of work is manipulating small objects
(<= 32 bits) anyway, a wider bus wouldn't change anything.  Or
would it?

How is MIPS faring?  Does someone have hard data for market share?
The NYT article mentioned the SPARC installed base as being
1.18e5 machines; that bullshit - this is more like one years
sales for Sun alone.

Today's NYT has an article on how Microsoft will do a portable
OS/2 on the R4000 and Compaq will take the lead in producing the
machine.  This is truly truly vaporware!  A hypothetical CPU in a
hypothetical machine running a hypothetical OS.  Frankly, given
the timescales involved in getting all the ingredients debugged
and shipping in volume, I wouldn't give this much attention.  Two
years in this business is a long long time!

The only ghost-of-a-chance derives from Windows applications --
if Microsoft is smart enough they could setup a 100% portability
on the new machine.  You just copy your files over and say "make"
(i.e., if OS/2 has a make).

But can you imagine nice machines (I have nothing against MIPS
and Compaq) running Windows!!  (AckUgh)  What a waste -- no shell
windows you can fire etc.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
                              The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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