i say, without Intel inside, our computer may be much quicker.
Admittedly, once Intel had played a crucial role in the Computer History, its inexpensive and high cost-performance processors had caused a revolution and led to the PC epoch, together with IBM and Microsoft. But now, Intel has become a critical factor why we could not obtain the highest performance according to today's computer technology. In fact, Desktop and much of server market, are totally beyond of the sight of computer scientists. Let see it in detail:
80X86 is an architecture that no one but Intel would like, it looks really strange as others today, It seems to be the only surviving CISC, since DEC dropped VAX and turned to Alpha. As everyone nowadays know, RISC performs much better than CISC, esp in Streaming and pipeline, which is the direction with a certainty. In 1980s, VAX designer had taken an comparison between RISC and CISC(VAX), and led to a result that, though CISC's codesize is about half of the RISC's, but its running time is as many as six times than RISC's, led to a poor overall performance. After that, VAX faded out quickly. But why intel's 80X86 survive? is it really a CISC? maybe much to your astonishment, no! in the bottom layer of 80X86 architecture, it is a RISC-like processor actually. It offers a delusion to programers that it is a CISC architecture but translates the CISC instruction to RISC instruction with hardware on the chip! we can image how costly penalty to the processor with this translation, almost every instruction we write would be checked and translated or not, rather than executed directly.
Some programmer would believe CISC is more PROGRAMMER-FRIENDLY, e.g. it allow most instructions with operands can directly refer the main memory, rather than an additional load/store instruction. It has two key points on the contrary, first, this friendliness leads our programmer to a way beyond the major road of Computer Science evolvement, while all processors are RISC-like but we have so many CISC-programmers; second, with today's high-level language, we should not care too much about the difficulty in assembly programming. In effect, RISC or CISC, does not influence much about the convention of programming, but much about the running performance of our program.
Also, Intel claims it must take account of the compatibility with binary code on earlier intel machine, but it seems that its real intent is to monopolize the PC (and the Server )market, while now it hlods about 85% shares of PC. It . Alas, so many people have paid for this additional and redundant part of the processor! Alas, so good a processor, Alpha, which has the best performance, is used scarcely. Dwell on it, and say "intel outside", though it is just a unpractical wish in recent years.
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