[mdlug] Intel GMA500 No Love f/Linux

[Michael Rudas]

--- Aaron Kulkis wrote:

> I remember seeing some data books for product offering by
> Intel and AMD back in the mid-80's.  Advanced Micro-Devices
> certainly live up to their audacious name compared to Intel's
> run-of-the-mill slop.

Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, was one of the
"Traitorous 8" that William Shockley hired to create the Shockley
Transistor Company in the mid-'50s (the single act that created
Silicon Valley).  After they left Fairchild Semiconductor as a group
to form Intelligent Electronics (later Intel), Sanders had a falling
out with the others and formed AMD as much to spite the others as
anything else.  This is one reason why the relationship between the
two companies has been so rancorous at times.

> It's too bad the Motorola 68x00 series died a premature death
> due to not inferior hardware, but due to the criminal actions of
> Microsoft, and MS-DOS and MS-Windows running only on Intel CPUs.

Ummmm, no.  The 680x0 series died because it wasn't scalable. Due to
architectural limitations (mostly timing issues), chips wouldn't run
with a clock speed faster than about 50MHz or so.  The follow-on 880x0
RISC series failed in the marketplace, but when pieces of it were
combined with IBM's RISC technology, it became the PowerPC series of
CPUs.

I'm just glad that Linux is scalable and flexible enough to run on
almost anything.

~~ Michael Rudas
   My home page: http://MRudas.2Ya.com
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