I do think few grasp that the latest Intel processors are simply a long evolution of the old 4004 design for calculators. Motorola did well with a clean break from the 6800 to the 68000 with a simple 32 bit design, but that is essentially history now. The Raptor may indeed be a good machine, but being built on the POWER9 does not make it a Windows PC and closes a lot of the market. For the Linux world, it looks great, but a bit pricey. It is also mind boggling that the POWER9 has over 100MBytes of cache on chip. We are not in the days of being impressed to have a full 1MByte with only 8 chips on the motherboard. When I had my first computer with only 256 bytes of memory, no one really cared. But they were indeed “good times.” Today what people care about is how well it plays a movie or does it look cool. In reality, the real engineering crowd, the serious geeks, have always been a minority. |