Computer architectures

[Echo toxin]

Just some random thinking - I was just wondering what the future holds for the x86 architecture. Are they (Intel/AMD) just going to keep tacking bits on such as SSE3, EM64T, etc. Are there any limitations that are going to be showstoppers some years away? I may not have the full concept of what an "instruction set" is which I may be getting confused with.

I think I am correct in saying that Itanium (2) is a completely brand new architecture for 64-bit use only. Why has it had such a bad press? Is it a server only processor? Have Intel ever mentioned about doing desktop versions? Would Apple, being the pioneers as they are often are called, have entertained the notion of having Itanium processors from Intel instead of switching to x86? Was it purely because there are no mobile/desktop versions of Itanium that prevented them from going that way?

Why is that x86 has got the high marketshare that it has? How come SPARC, PowerPC, etc. are not as prevalent as they could be?

I would be interested to hear other thoughts.

 

[Cob]

*edit*

 

[NathanE]

The Itanium was originally intended to reach the desktop. But then AMD64 came along with a faster road map and Intel was forced to put those plans on the back burner.

X86 is slow, old, inefficient and unscalable. The only reason we have it is backward compatibility. However, now that virtual machines are beginning to take-off the dependance on specific hardware instruction sets is diminishing.

It is for example possible to make a processor that accepts native .NET or Java instructions, and doing so would yield massive massive massive performance gains for such applications.