Thread: ISA does not matter
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Old August 24th 10, 06:32 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.intel,comp.arch
Brett Davis
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Default ISA does not matter
In article , wrote:

In article ,
Brett Davis wrote:

Ultimately this one innovation alone was not enough for PowerPC to
overcome all the disadvantages of competing against Intel, but it
did level the playing field for a decade.

Not really. Witness how many other companies showed an interest;
it wasn't even up to the level of SPARC or MIPS, though I accept
that there were other reasons than performance that dominated.

I call "bull****" on you.
SPARC and MIPS do not have the spare opcode space to implement the
AltiVec permute instructions, and then there is the little issue of
Apple owning the patents.

I was referring to the number of other companies that were interested
in licensing PowerPC, let alone PowerPC+Altivec. Far more pursued
SPARC and MIPS.

The car you drive probably has close to a dozen PowerPC chips in it.
MOT is a $20 billion a year electronics company, and most of those
chips have PowerPC hidden in them.
IBM sells the PowerPC chips in your Tivo/DVR and all three consoles.
(Playstation3, XBox360, and Wii.)

ARMH is a far distant second in sales at ~$600 million a year.
(Pre-iPhone I remember them being a ~$200 million a year company...)

MIPS has yearly sales of $70 million. Used to be twice that?
(Hard to fund a design teem and stay relevant/solvent at that size...)

SPARC as snot for sales outside of SUN/JAVA and Fujitsu.

AltiVec has clearly mattered in making PowerPC the dominate RISC chip.
MIPS used to be significant, the Playstation1 and 2 were MIPS based.

PowerPC has ~90% market share in the 32bit market, and ~99% of the
64bit embedded market. (Dollar share, not unit share.)
Up from zero a decade ago.

If PowerPC was just another RISC chip this could not have happened.
Being late to the market with a me-too product would not have worked.
PowerPC dominates because of AltiVec and the bitfield extract and
other cool useful instructions that give good performance and good
inner loop code density.

Programmers LIKE PowerPC, whereas MIPS and ARM are tolerated.
(This is a major reason PowerPC dominates, pity the fool manager
that picks MIPS and cant find good programmers to work for him.)

ISA does matter, just not the way you think it does.

Brett - Actually working on ARM code right now.