Re: OS/2 & Cyrix

[James Eibisch jeibisch@xxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997 21:41:08 -0500, Harmon Seaver 
wrote:

>Absolute nonsense. BTW, don't buy into the recent Intel "MMX" or
>other upgrades -- they aren't, for the most part. They've fudged the
>figures, only about a 20% increase in performance at most. A top honcho
>at NEC just told me this week that RISC is the only possible route for
>any real speed increases

To borrow from Christine Keeler, "they would say that, wouldn't they?"
NEC have invested heavily in the Mips RISC architecture from when it
was an original (non-founding) member of the ACE (Advanced Computing
Environment) initiative (remember that? They refused to call
themselves a consortium). ACE was a testbed for Microsoft Windows NT
(then called OS/2 Release 3), and was the great hope for the MIPS
architecture to break into the mainstream.

Alas, ACE failed due to in-fighting and conflicting interests. One by
one, the founding members withdrew, leaving the founding members to
move on (Microsoft with NT, DEC riding on the back of MS from that
point on, SCO with Open Desktop, Compaq with its own business, and ...
Mips with its suddenly cul-de-sac'ed Rx000 chips).

Mips was soon acquired by Silicon Graphics, of course, but the
original Mips fabricators, including NEC, had to recoup a lot of
investement - embedded devices and games consoles in Mips' case.

The fact is that technical excellence does not secure success. Mips'
chips were sophisticated (the R4000 was the first general-purpose
64-bit chip), but the company didn't stand much chance entering a
market already pretty much sewn up by Wintel and Sun/IBM/HP. (The same
is true of the Motorola 88000 family, but that's a different story.)

>Intel is at a dead-end with the x86 chip.

Yes, that's why it signed an agreement with HP in 1993 to merge their
two chip architecures. The RISC-like Merced should be out by the end
of 1998.

> NEC just acquired Sega, and might be soon marketing a sweet little
> NC machine in the $100-200 range, running Java-OS.

Almost certainly, but they will have no presence on the OS/2 and
XyWrite-running desktop (is that what we're talking about? I've lost
the original post's thread slightly). The desktop market will finally
open out a little, but there will be no new chip vendors represented
there, only Intel/HP x86/Merced, Sun SPARC, IBM PowerPC and possibly
DEC Alpha.

Intel's chips have improved enormously over the last few years, but
most of us don't see the improvement as we're locked into the MS
Windows and Office upgrade helter skelter. I just hope my XyWrite 3.55
runs on Merced and beyond.

--
          _  
James Eibisch  ('v')  N : E : T : A : D : E : L : I : C : A
Reading, U.K.  (,_,)  -- http://www.revolver.demon.co.uk --
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