Re:Apple Silicon and losing our legacy
by lambda_obrien on Thursday November 19, 2020 @07:16PM
(#25156011)
I wish a research group would start from scratch and design the best PC and server hardware and software for today's world, not taking any backwards compatibility in mind, just pure, new stuff that's designed with all of today's advancements in mind.
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Didn't Intel try to do that with Itanium?
… Yeah that's not really relevant anymore. Turns out a lot of people like their old cruft to keep working.
Itanium tried to design the best possible processor for tomorrow's world, when compilers were going to be much smarter than they are now. Unfortunately that didn't happen.
Re:Apple Silicon and losing our legacy
by marcosdumay on Thursday November 19, 2020 @09:08PM
(#25156669)
Like the Mill?
There is a huge amount of problems to solve before a new architecture is usable. This may be not viable at all.
What's a Mill? A supposedly modernized CPU architecture that failed?
Re:Apple Silicon and losing our legacy
by marcosdumay on Friday November 20, 2020 @08:53PM
(#25167278)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture
It didn't actually fail, at least not yet. But it's not clear it can succeed either.
Isn't that pretty much what Apple did?
Re:Apple Silicon and losing our legacy
by guidoism on Thursday November 19, 2020 @09:30PM
(#25156804)
Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. Those are both from the 1980s.
Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware.
That got them started but Apple has written a ton of frameworks since 2000 when the first version of MacOS X shipped.
The point being made was that Apple didn't attempt to be backwards compatible with classic Mac OS.
The Mac didn't try to be backwards compatible with the Apple II that came before it.
The iPhone wasn't compatible with any of the phone platforms and standards in 2007.