Hyperbole In Action
By Nils Dahl
Date: May 17, 2002
This article at Byte's web site, is interesting if only for its blatant, no holds barred, slamming of 'that ancient, obsolete processor design' that AMD makes improved versions of - and that is still Intel's bread and butter in all markets (although Intel doesn't see fit to talk much about its persistent 8086 through Pentium lines of processors).
As I began to read about how Itanium is infinitely superior to the archaic 80386 design, I asked myself how many people are actually using Itanium systems right now. Having a bit of inside information, I know of situations where Itanium systems could not even run ordinary chores - due mainly to their inability to execute optimized voice recognition code that was designed for that 'bad, old, obsolete 80386 architecture'. Now forgive me for sounding a bit sarcastic, but things that work are almost always highly desirable while things that do NOT work are generally regarded as totally useless - no matter how elegant the new stuff may be.
Just a thought. I would be the last person on earth to argue over the potential benefits of rewriting every operating system and every application in the world to a new architecture - even if the costs were zero - to take advantage of some vastly superior design. All I ask it that someone PROVE to me that the new architecture really is superior.
I am waiting.
nils dahl
just an old man
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