Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!feeder.news-service.com!cyclone02.ams2.highwinds-media.com!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!spln!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!news4 From: Michael Wojcik Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Android?Why Dalvik? Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:51:22 -0400 Organization: Micro Focus Lines: 39 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: p3813454179c932ceb1b43cde607c2149a16e3981e8917451.newsdawg.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090812 Thunderbird/2.0.0.23 Mnenhy/0.7.5.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:5104 Steve Sobol wrote: > In article , Michael Wojcik says... >> Steve Sobol wrote: >>> CPU architectures aren't really a major issue anymore. >> All the world's a VAX. >> >> Ah, well. More work for those of us who pay attention. > > yeah, yeah, nice ad-hominem. Since you're going to be obnoxious, kindly > tell me how many different architectures are in *wide* use today? In wide use? 8-bitters were still in the majority, according to the last reliable statistics I saw. Circa 2003, they represented ninety-some percent of all CPUs sold. There are still healthy markets for 16-bitters, DSPs, FPGAs, etc, too, in the embedded space. IBM sells about a billion dollars worth of z-architecture CPUs each financial quarter. They sell lots of POWER chips, both on the high end (p and i systems) and embedded. ARM outsells x86. SPARC and ia64 still have some market share. GPUs and CPU-GPU hybrids are growing fast as general-purpose systems. There are 50 million Cell-powered PS3s. 75 million Wiis with POWER CPUs. 54 million or so XBox 360s; its Xenon CPU is either a POWER derivative or a Cell derivative or both, depending on your interpretation. And that's a significant software market. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University