Re: Super Serial Card Question?

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> By all rights, we should be entering an age of "virtual architectures",
> where both new and legacy code files are translated for execution on
> the fly, and dynamically optimized to the host architecture, whatever
> it is.  This would mark the end of architecture dominions, and the
> true merging of instruction set architecture and microarchitecture.

I agree. The last 5 years in particular have seen massive uptake of
both Java and .NET as the two 'competing' platforms. These systems are
essentially the virtual architectures you mention, but at a software
level, like the P-Code machines of the 70's and 80's.

Unfortunately, while one gives you operating system independence, one
doesn't, and both are owned by large corporations with a vested
interest in 'controlling' the platform.

That coupled with the massive uptake of Open Source within the industry
has removed the architecture and OS binding we had just a few short
years ago. In my line of work, we can freely mix and match SPARC gear
and x86 gear, whichever makes the most sense from a price/performance
perspective. x86 gear almost always wins this fight, unless you need
massive parallelism. And Sun have just come along with UltraSPARC T1, a
processor that runs at a modest 1Ghz, but provided 4 cores each capable
of 8 independant threads, and it's really cheap These things make
beautiful web servers ;-)

While this can happen at the hardware level ala Transmeta, I think it's
unlikely. Open systems + VM's have removed the hassles of running old
binaries on new platforms.

What it basically means, is that instruction set archictectures are now
irrelevant. x86 might be one of the ugliest, but as long as it
continues to win the price/performance war it'll remain dominant, just
ask Apple.

> Apparently this future will have to wait for manufacturers, who are
> greatly aided by the unrelenting inertia of the installed codebase, to
> lose the battle to newer implementations.  (And Transmeta clearly
> isn't that newer implementation. ;-)

The only real mainstay of installed codebase is Win32 on x86. Even
Microsoft are trying to break this tie, through .NET, as they want
desperately to leverage the x86-64 architecture, but require backwards
compatibility. At this point in time, the inertia provided by their
installed base is looking more and more like an achilles heel than an
advantage.

My feeling is that the eventual winners will be the vendors that truly
allow cross architecture portability. The only system at the moment
that gets anywhere remotely close to this, is Linux, running either
open source applications, or Java applications if there's a need for
them to be proprietary.

Matt