[ Thanks to Jason
Perlow for this link. ]
“In November 2003, Linus Torvalds said:
“The reason Alpha died wasn’t technology. Alpha died because you
can’t afford to push an architecture that doesn’t have wide appeal.
This is why AMD64 and the POWER architectures are interesting, and
why Itanium eventually will die unless Intel starts seriously
changing their approach to it. AMD64 and POWER — in Opteron and
the 970 respectively — both have 64-bit architectures with a very
real, wide appeal.
“Opteron and the AMD64 platform have certainly gotten a lot of
coverage over the last year as the 64-bit mass market Linux
platform of choice. But what of POWER, the IBM platform of which
the Chief Penguin spoke so highly? Linux Magazine thought this
merited a closer look and decided to take the pSeries 615, IBM’s
first entry-level 64-bit POWER4 server, for a two-week spin…”