People have tried a lot of special purpose processing devices over the years and, with the exceptions of graphics units and arguably floating point units, general purpose processors have always won out in the end.
More Quotes from Gordon Haff:
Obviously, Virtual Iron is a startup in a space where a lot of people are playing. I'm not about to predict that they're going to take the market by storm. On the other hand, they have some unique capabilities that they can build into a broader market.Gordon Haff
Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else. Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.
Gordon Haff
Sun has to keep up with the other guys. IBM is going to be coming out with the Power5 soon. The reality is in this industry you have to put a lot of energy into running to stay in place. What happens if you don't make these kinds of advances is you fall behind. So this upgrade is in some respects about maintaining parity with the competition.
Gordon Haff
Software patents are a mess, ... Even if you don't believe in abolishing them entirely, there have been far too many examples of patents being granted even in light of overwhelming evidence of prior art and of dusty old patents on their third owner suddenly being used for a form of blackmail.
Gordon Haff
It's probably not possible to be head and shoulders above the competition in the x86 space. There just isn't that much opportunity for being compellingly different. That said, they're nice boxes.
Gordon Haff
The fact that Itanium didn't take off as expected is really because it is only in certain types of applications such as databases that there was a driving need to go beyond 32-bit to the larger memory you see in RISC servers today. But 64-bit extensions to x86 are here, and there is no penalty to having a server that is capable of supporting 64-bit, whether you need it or not. That's the nice thing about the x64 approach.
Gordon Haff
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Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.
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