Microkernels are better

I was going to type a rebuttal stating how you are wrong and don't know what you're talking about. After carefully reading you're reply I must say that I don't think I expressed my statements clearly the first time and that I believe you are probably correct about Intel being faster. I was trying to state that Intel has not been faster or faster per money invested in the past, not currently. Currently if you want a fast general purpose processor Intel isn't a bad choice. If you want pure processing you can get a gpu but those don't work well as general processing and only work with certain workloads, much like a dsp in the past. I'm not sure if anyone ever made a processing system based on risc and dsp architecture but in the past someone developed a system based on a bunch of TI dsp with 2mb ram on a 72 simm modules (if memory serves) that had the best performance per dollar for it's time. In order to break DES the EFF developed a machine with custom chips which certainly weren't intel compatible but had much better performance. Building a computer with good performance depends as much on what applications you are running as what cpu you choose and which peripherals you put inside it. As far as your reference to the pentium 4 compared to an early alpha processor, I won't comment except to mention that alpha was dead by then as far as DEC was concerned and had been for a while. The engineers had moved to AMD or some other company and the Athlon was competing with that processor very favorably in SPEC benchmarks without needing a 6ghz alu.