Microkernels are better [LWN.net]

Microkernels are better

Posted Feb 28, 2013 15:20 UTC (Thu) by deater (subscriber, #11746)
In reply to: Microkernels are better by khim
Parent article: MINIX 3.2.1 released

> Then why people are not doing it? Take a look on the list once more:

I did. Notice in the November 2012 list that Intel doesn't make the top 5 at all. Yet Power and SPARC do, both considered RISC chips by most people I think (although Power is debatable).

x86 got to the top just because of economies of scale and because it is good enough, relatively cheap. Being able to buy things off-the-shelf does help. Having spent some time in an HPC group I can tell you that x86 is used because it's there, not because it has any real benefits. How long has it taken them to get a fused multiply-add instruction?

(Log in to post comments)

Microkernels are better

Posted Mar 1, 2013 2:23 UTC (Fri) by ARealLWN (guest, #88901) [Link]

I believe that power (or powerpc) claims to be a performance optimized risc architecture (source would be Orielly publishing High Performance Computing, second edition). As I understand it that means that they say that they are risc based but will include additional instructions if it seems like they could improve the performance of software written for the architecture. I do appreciate that you have given backing to my initial statements and would like to thank you for doing so.