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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:13:21 +0200
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On 03/10/2024 02:07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 10:12 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:
> 
>> [Windows NT on MIPS] was a commercial failure, because MIPS
>> didn't keep up with the performance growth of x86.
> 
> It was NT that was the commercial failure, not MIPS. MIPS found a niche in
> the embedded world, and went on to outsell x86 by a factor of 3:1 or so.
> 

The key markets for MIPS were network devices (managed switches, 
routers, small Wifi/NAT routers, etc.) and multimedia devices (smart 
TVs, Bluray players, set-top boxes, etc.).

These have mostly been overtaken by ARM these days.

> We know this because a lot of those embedded devices ran Linux.

Most of these ran Linux, a few had RTOS's.

> 
>> PowerPC did for a while, but the company interested in NT on PowerPC was
>> IBM, and their hardware prices were a /lot/ higher than x86 prices. They
>> didn't see that as a problem, but all the potential customers did.
> 
> PowerPC got rolled back into POWER, near as I can tell. And that continues
> to sell today -- you see some POWER machines not far from the top of the
> current Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. That
> shows there is a viable market for the products.
> 
> And of course they, too, run Linux.

PowerPC also moved into the embedded world, especially in the automotive 
industry and networking, as a replacement for m68k and Coldfire for 
Motorola (then Freescale, now part of NXP).  PowerPC-based 
microcontrollers are still a big part of NXP's high reliability and 
safety oriented lineups for things like engine control.  Those things, 
of course, do /not/ run Linux.  (But they most certainly don't run 
Windows :-) )