different types of computers (hardware)

[Siplus]

i use x86, but macs are common. i've heard of 'alpha' and a few others, but i don't know anything about them

some people say x86 are crap, but it's all i've ever used. could someone describe or give links to info about different computer architects?

[rtgwbmsr]

x86 (Athlon, Pentium): Complex instruction sets. Long, deep processing pipelines. Most popular type of processor (by sheer #'s).
What is the x? Glad you asked:
i386: 386, AMD's 386
i486: 486's, WinChip, Cyrix, etc
i586: Pentiums (MMX, PRO)!
i686: PII, P3, Early Athlon & Durons.
i786: The comparisons really stop here...Roughly speaking, Pentium 4, and Athlon (Palomino, XP, etc)

x86-64 (Opteron, Itanium): Same as x86, with 64 bit compatibility.
http://www.x86-64.org/

PowerPC (G3, G4): Reduced instruction sets. Short processing pipline. G4 has floating point co-processor called "Altivec" that speeds things up quite a bit. Can preform double precision calculations with no speed penalty.
http://www.apple.com/g4/

Alpha's: Incredibly fast for most processing jobs. 64 bit compatible.
www.hp.com
www.compaq.com

(Ultra)SparcX's: Primarily used in Sun machines. Made to scale to incredibly large #'s of processors.
http://www.sparc.com/faq.html
http://www.sun.com/processors/

Antiquated or rarely used architectures:
m68k (old macs)
SGI (graphics workstations?, servers?)
HP9000/834 (Servers)
IBM RS/6000 (?)
DECstation 5000 (?)

HTH...

[ February 21, 2003: Message edited by: The Muffin Man ]

[ February 21, 2003: Message edited by: The Muffin Man ]