Unlike some of the affected open source software that is listed on CNet, EasyBCD does not use a copyleft license that lets companies and individuals do whatever they want with EasyBCD and repackage it in whichever manner they choose. In fact, in the past whenever we were asked why one of the most popular freeware products available online was not open source, we have repeatedly insisted that the ability to maintain control over the distribution and packing of EasyBCD to ensure an ongoing comfortable and friendly user experience has been our number one reason.

CNet is of course not the only download site using these so-called “downloaders” to bundle unwanted software that unsuspecting users would normally not install. They are, however, one of the largest and prior to this, also one of the more respected download entities. As of today, we shall be contacting any and all companies and sites that use custom “installers” to download/install EasyBCD as this is in direct violation of the EasyBCD license.

While this could not come at a less opportune time, with EasyBCD currently being the 11th most popular download in the System Utilities category on Download.com, we feel that maintaining a fluid and smooth end user experience, uncluttered by various intrusive softwares, is a tradeoff well worth making in order to never be associated with an unsavory experience in the minds of our users.

NeoSmart Technologies would be thrilled to maintain our listings for EasyBCD and other NeoSmart products on Download.com, and we have historically directed many users there to get their downloads. As such, our offer is simply as follows:

• If CNET and other download companies wish to continue, as they did at one point, hosting EasyBCD on their own servers, then it must be in unaltered, unmodified, and non-bundled form.
• If CNET and other download sites do not wish to host the setup package themselves, then they should hotlink the latest version of EasyBCD directly from our servers. The direct download links provided in our PAD files always permit the hotlinking of the latest version of our software, providing direct access to the downloads in question.
• If CNET and other download companies are not willing to refrain from bundling EasyBCD with any other package, installer, downloader, or other non-authorized bundleware nor willing to link to EasyBCD off of our official download servers, then we must unfortunately and with much regret demand the the immediate delisting of all NeoSmart products being provided in anything other than their virgin installer package as it was originally created.

The latest versions of the EasyBCD installer, as well as those of our other popular software and products, are all digitally signed by NeoSmart Technologies. In short, any download for a NeoSmart product must make available the untampered, digitally signed installer as it was originally released by ourselves. Authentic NeoSmart setup packages can be recognized by means of the following digital signature when viewing the file properties:

We are sorry to have to be making these demands, but are left with no other choice as we have always and forever prided ourselves in providing top-notch quality products and a wonderful user experience. We constantly turn down very lucrative and alluring offers to bundle EasyBCD with other “unwanted products” in exchange for rather princely sums of money. Fortunately, our custom, non-GPL/non-opensource license for these softwares allows us to stipulate and demand that download partners conform to our distribution policies. We look forward to updating this post soon with the good news that CNet and others (currently Softonic) have complied with our terms of distribution. A copy of this request has been filed with Upload.com support under case number 111205-000208.

In the meantime, anyone looking to obtain EasyBCD and other freeware or shareware from a download catalog should look at Softpedia (our EasyBCD listing there) and FileHippo (not currently hosting EasyBCD) as good alternatives. In fact, both have text on their site indicating that they pride themselves in providing clean and non-intrusive downloads to original and unmodified packages. We also advise any other freeware authors and developers hosting their files with Download.com to double-check and make sure that their users are not being taken advantage of unawares, and to follow suit if necessary.

Update (11:05 AM CST): We have just received an email from CNet informing us that they are no longer using what’s officially called “CNET-Installer” for our products. As such, we have no problem linking to the EasyBCD listing on Download.com once again.

The New Windows 8 Bootloader

Literally the very first thing you notice when installing and testing Windows 8 Developer Preview is the new boot screen. I personally find it to be very cluttered and unorganized, and generally aesthetically unappealing. However, compared to the decades of text-based boot selection menus that people are accustomed to, reviewers are seeing this as a dramatic improvement.

Some of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the new Windows 8 bootloader:

1. The new look
2. Completely new process of loading an OS
3. Integration of repair tools into the bootloader itself

New Look

Hopefully the designers at Microsoft can get their hands on the new boot screen before Windows 8 goes RTM. That said, Microsoft has explained the rationale behind the redesign as being purely function over form – the new boot screen is part of the general overhaul of Windows to use the touch-friendly Metro UI. Microsoft is claiming that the new boot menu is intended to be a more touch-friendly interface – and you can’t really disagree with that, as the appallingly-oversized buttons and labels make it very hard to miss-click “miss-press” with one’s fingers. However, just how many people will be dual-booting on a PC with a touch-only input device, ummm, remains to be seen.

That out of the way, the new boot menu is more than just a visual overhaul, it’s virtually a complete rewrite of the BOOTMGR/BCD bootloader that was first revealed during the Windows Longhorn/Vista beta program. Some of the changes are a little subtle, but the Windows 8 DP builds have introduced some very tricky concepts, evolving the bootloader from just a selection menu to something rather more complicated.

New Boot Sequence

For reasons we have not yet been able to discover, though we are confident they will be revealed in time, Microsoft has chosen to completely change the manner in which operating systems are loaded once selected from the boot menu. The usual boot process that just about any bootloader goes through is something like this:

With Windows 8, this boot process has been changed completely, and now something more along these lines takes place:

It’s a subtle change as the boot menu is not shown the second time around, but the PC actually reboots after making the selection. We’re not clear on why Microsoft is doing this, but if I’d had to hazard a really wild guess, I’d say it’s to clean up the environment that’s been altered/modified/corrupted by the new boot menu. Basically, it seems that the new boot menu interface has become it’s own mini-OS, and is possibly running in protected mode (vs the traditional real-mode bootloader), and as such, needs to reboot to bring the system back into a real-mode that the Windows 8 kernel can initialize from and bring the system from real to protected mode itself. In short: the new boot menu is more of an OS and less of a boot menu than ever before.

Repair Tools Integration

If you were still in any doubt as to just how different the new bootloader was, and how much more of a complete and standalone OS it has turned into, you need look no further than the new repair tools integration. Windows Vista introduced the recovery center, a WinPE-based environment with some tools for both automated and manual repair, on the setup DVD, Windows 7 (in some SKUs and as of certain revisions) copied the recovery center image to the local hard drive and could, if the bootloader itself has not been wiped out, automatically provide an option of loading the recovery center from disk. With Windows 8, Microsoft has gone a step further, integrating the repair tools into the Windows 8 boot menu itself.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the bootloader no longer contains an entry/link to the repair center WIM image, the bootloader and the repair center have instead been merged together. Still, the same problem with the Windows 7 implementation remains: if the bootloader itself has been wiped (which is the most common problem), the recovery center cannot be accessed. In fact, we see no benefits for this implementation over the Windows 7 method, and can only see the drawbacks of enormously-increased complexity and longer load times.

EasyBCD and Windows 8 Developer Preview

Now for what you’ve all been asking: how does EasyBCD play with the Windows 8 Developer Preview? The short answer is, EasyBCD supports Windows 8 DP. The long answer is rather more complicated.

It seems that out-of-the-box, the Windows 8 “pretty” (and we use that word very loosely) boot screen supports only Vista and up. It will not show Windows XP, Linux, or other OS entries (in preparation for Secure Boot? Perhaps). EasyBCD can be installed on Windows 8 (though it will attempt to download the .NET Framework if you haven’t manually activated it, because Microsoft has done a 180 and biting the hand of the developers that powers it, has disabled .NET 1.0 – 3.5 compatibility out-of-the-box in Windows 8), and can be used to add, remove, rename, configure, and generally do whatever you want with entries and the Windows 8 boot menu.

The catch is that as soon as you use EasyBCD, Windows 8 will detect something along the lines of unsupported changes to the bootloader and cease to use the new boot menu / boot screen. It will revert to the Windows 7-style boot menu, including the text-based interface and the original boot sequence. Now, while we personally prefer the older menu, we realize that the majority of Windows 8 DP users are rather anxious to both keep the Windows 8 touch-enabled boot screen and retain usage of EasyBCD’s wonderful goodiness, having apparently never heard of the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” ;-)

Now we’re not sure how/why the Windows 8 boot menu reverts to the Windows 7 menu, because in fact, it is possible to force the Windows 8 boot menu to add unsupported entries if you use only very particular bcdedit commands; but as even something as minor and unimportant as changing the order of boot menu entries in EasyBCD causes Windows to use the old boot menu, it seems we’re missing something. Rest assured, this will all be taken care of in due time, though at the moment it seems rather folly to waste time trying to implement support for what is clearly the alpha stages of the new boot menu and the appropriate course of action would appear to be waiting for the next Windows 8 beta build (rumored to be sometime around February 2012).

EasyBCD, when used from within Windows XP – 7, can be used to add a Windows 8 entry to the bootloader in the same manner that you would a Windows Vista/7 entry. So, in short, EasyBCD supports Windows 8, but Windows 8 does not support EasyBCD :)

Some of the changes include nicer icons for all the albums (verses a mosaic of contents), links to full-size images on our extensive collection of tech-related wallpapers, fixing of overall alignment, and a few other cosmetic issues. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or feedback, please do share because we’re (as always) all ears.

For lovers of beautiful backgrounds, we have two “new” collections to share: the official Windows 8 wallpapers to date, and the OS X Lion wallpapers bundle. We’ll be updating the Windows 8 backgrounds with each released build, so check back often! Some samples after the jump.

While each of these fine web browsers has its own way doing things, ranging from keyboard shortcuts to tab management and process handling, they all more or less pull these off a bit nicer than Internet Explorer ever code. But the one Internet Explorer feature I can honestly say I miss when using Google Chrome is the ability to submit the form being currently modified/filled-in with a keyboard shortcut, especially if it works even if there are multiple forms on the screen.

Searching about for a cross-platform solution to this problem, perhaps a previously unknown keyboard shortcut or else some method of assigning a keyboard shortcut that would let Google Chrome intelligently submit the current form via a keyboard shortcut on both Mac and Windows, it became clear that this feature just doesn’t exist for Chrome. Well, as of yesterday, at any rate…

As of today, this feature does exist and it can be yours by just installing Chrome Form QuickSubmit, a Google Chrome extension that will add the keyboard shortcut alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on Mac to your Chrome, letting you easily and quickly submit the form you’re filling in without needing to resort to tabs, or gasp the mouse:

Google Chrome QuickSubmit 0.2

Again, the keyboard shortcuts are alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on OS X. These shortcuts do not, to the best of my knowledge, conflict with any others and there aren’t any known issues with this extension. So go ahead, click the link above, authorize the extension, refresh this page, and test it out in the box below!

What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

Come again? Really? To us, this seems like a rather mean and dishonest approach to dealing with the shortcomings of the web browser. While it is true that at this moment in time, Internet Explorer is more prone to crashes and hangs than it would be in the final (RTM) release of Windows 8, this does not in any way give Microsoft the right to assume that in the future any hangs or crashes in IE are to be blamed on the designers/coders of the website being visited.

In fact, no code even if purposely meant to crash the browser should succeed in doing so, and certainly should not be held to blame. If Microsoft cannot make a crash-proof browser, that does not mean that they should dishonestly deflect and redirect the blame towards and innocent third party.

Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

There’s some mixed good and bad news, however. The good news is that all downloads will be direct HTTP links, so no need to learn how to use a torrent client or fiddle around with open network ports: just plain, standard, direct, and very fast HTTP downloads for all our ISO images. We’ve also taken this opportunity to update the repair CDs and add a virus scanner (powered by ClamWin) as well as some command-line tools and utilities that were missing from some of the images.

The bad news is that there will now be a nine dollar download charge for each CD. There was no way for us to avoid charging this, as we now pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in exchange for making these CDs available, and also pay per download to outsource the high-speed web hosting for these large CD images (150 to 200 MiB, each) to an outside service.

We look forward to updating these repair and recovery CDs over time and adding more tools and utilities to help you save your PCs from the brink of death. We thank you for your patience with us over the past few months during which the downloads were suspended, and truly appreciate your understanding of the situation.

Download Links

Windows Vista Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Windows 7 Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

My first post on Google+ was a questioning

I’m not sure I like Google Plus?

to which Google+ obliged with

Nice post!

Need I say more?

The cellular network you are using is not encrypted. This call can be intercepted by unauthorized listeners.

Thank you, Zain Jordan. I truly feel safe now, especially in a country where saying something the government doesn’t like will land you a lovely prison cell with a nice view of an endless desert.

UPDATE: iOS 5 Beta 2 and up!

Gevey unlock (and other turbo-sims/interceptors) do not work on iOS 5 beta 2 and above, including the final iOS 5 release!

Yesterday at WWDC 2011, Apple announced (amongst many other things) iOS 5, the upcoming version of iOS that’s to be released with the iPhone 5 later this year. iOS Developers and certain tech bloggers have been given access to this build, and we’re sure one of the biggest question the hordes of iPhone users around the world are asking is: Will my Gevey-3G unlock SIM interposer work???

With iOS 5 beta (build 9A5220p), the modem firmware has been upgraded to baseband 04.11.04 and cannot be downgraded to earlier versions, meaning the only possible SIM unlock would be a turbo sim/interposer (currently either Gevey-3G or Rebel SIM); hence the worried and nervous questions going around the online iPhone community.

And the answer? A relieving yes. At least for now, for iOS 5 beta 1, it does. The process remains unchanged — just insert the interposer, restart your device, accept the welcome message, dial 112, and toggle the Airplane Mode feature a few times. The Gevey SIM will still work to unlock iOS 5.0 beta.

However, in order to install iOS 5 you’ll need (in addition to access to the iOS 5 9A5220p IPSW firmware upgrade and the iTunes 10.5b27 build) access to a real SIM from whatever manufacturer your phone originally shipped with (probably AT&T) for the activation to go through. And you’ll of course need to have your phone registered as a developer device on the iOS Developer Center website. We tested this ourselves on an AT&T iPhone 4 that was previously running 4.3.3 with the Gevey unlock.

Enjoy your interposer-unlocked iOS 5 and let us know how it goes!

I’ve bought my fair share of domains via 1and1, and to be honest, on the few times in the past when I’ve needed the domain name ASAP, generally got the domain I bought within 24 hours. But now it’s been 4 days and 1and1 still hasn’t handed over the domain name that I bought and paid for. Instead, the domain shows up in the list of purchases with the status “The domain has been requested” – as if I care! I just want my domain name, and I want it now! The clients are waiting!

Just for the record, we’re not the only ones with this problem. If you’re looking for a good site to buy domains from, I can’t recommend LunarPages enough for their quality service and excellent turn-around times. 1and1, never again!

Update (March 29th, 7:45 PM UTC):

A quick call to the sales department gave me a most-helpful young man from the States who confirmed what I knew “the domain name *is* registered, but something’s clearly wrong with our system! Let me transfer you to support…” in India. The Indian support was far less than helpful “yeahhhhhhh… there’s something wrong.” When I expressed my, ahem, displeasure, he went further “yeaaaaaah…. 1and1 has a problem with our system holding up all domain name registrations. Aha.. Yeah, a problem”

Great!

Update (March 31st, 2:44 PM UTC):

Just received an email from 1and1 letting me know that the problem has been resolved and the domain name is finally functional. All’s well that ends well?

Google Chrome has a new logo, and it wants to make sure everyone knows.

Those of you updating to the latest Chrome builds (in this case, 11.0.696.12 dev, running on Mac OS X 10.7) will find that the new version comes with a bold new icon. We’re not sure if we like it just yet, because it definitely takes some getting used to.

The new icon is at the top-right of this post. For comparison, here’s the old one:

The new one is distinctly more 2d, less shiny, and far more abstract. They say that’s the natural progression of logos, but Chrome and its logo certainly haven’t been around since the 60s for us to be discussing that.

Us? We can’t stop seeing a big, colorful ’9′ whenever we glance at the icon.

And (after the jump), here’s the new Chrome logo in super-size. [Click it on it to load the image itself at full resolution]

Follow us on Twitter @neosmart or on Facebook at http://facebook.com/NeoSmart

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been officially released for 3 months now (to the day), and to be pedantic, it has also been available in beta form since October 2008. Its bugs not withstanding, Visual Studio 2010 been a pretty successful hit. Besides the huge improvements to the .NET language and platform, big on the list of features for C++ developers is basic support for C++0x (the next standard version of C++, with lots of new & revolutionary features) and plenty of IDE enhancements. Intel’s C++ Compiler is the industry-standard with regards to performance and optimizations, still doesn’t support Visual Studio 2010 or C++0x.

As numerous postings on the Intel forums indicate, a plethora of users are in pressing need of an update to the Intel C++ Compiler. Questions on the matter are brushed-off, with short and rather-useless replies such as:

“This question has been discussed several times recently. The first such integration would come in a beta version of icc 12.0, which hasn’t yet been announced.”

No one has seen neither hair nor hide of Intel Compiler 12, not in private form or anything else. There is no information on the Intel site to even indicate that such a release is forthcoming. And until that time, developers will have to either resort to using the built-in MSVC++ compiler or hold off on migrating to Visual Studio 2010 and C++0x. Despite the information floating around on the net, the Intel C++ Compiler in its latest incarnation still does not support certain integral parts of C++0x such as r-value references (N2118) such that even if you were to attempt to manually compile your VS2010 project from the command-line by modifying the Intel compiler command-prompt to use the VC10 toolkit (as we’ve tried to do), you’ll find that it doesn’t even support the STL library headers that ship with VS2010. And linking to/against the VC9 headers results in DLL-hell with no way out.

The bottom-line of it all is that Intel still, almost a year after Microsoft made available development builds of VS2010 to corporate partners and TAP members, does not yet have anything that C++ Developers can use to build their solutions using features proposed and adopted for the next C++ standard years ago. And, perhaps even worse, there has been no corporate response to indicate when or even if such a possibility will happen. Intel’s customer support have been extremely vague on the matter of VS2010 support, have issued no official public statements on the matter, and are going out of their way to make their customers unhappy. Thank you, Intel. We really appreciate it.

Perhaps even more shocking than that link is where it takes you. One would expect it to show a nice selection of pre-prepared background designs showing taste and style. Perhaps some swirls, some modern art, some crazy tie-dye… Certainly not letting you choose and upload any photo of your liking to serve as your new Google background! Even more, the feature is directly connected to Picassa, letting you browse your own albums, the public Picassa uploads of other users, and more.

Update: This appears to be working only on Windows, at the moment. Looks like Google is taking this for a test-drive.

A November 2009 post on the Visual C++ Team Blog by Raman Sharma delved into the improvements Visual Studio 2010 was purported to have made to the “Find All References” feature of Visual Studio. This feature is a must-have for any developer in almost any language. As a project grows in size and complexity, it becomes a real chore to remember and locate exactly where a particular variable was defined – which is something that’s quite useful to know.

According to the VC++ blog post, VS2010 now uses a “speed-mode” by default to locate these references. It’s a bit less accurate in that it generates a lot of false positives, searching by name rather than by usage, but that this reduced accuracy comes with greater speed. And the option remains to further filter out results by having the compiler and the intellisense databases resolve the actual results and determine whether or not they indeed reference the search term.

Except that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In truth, that’s not what happens:

1) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” of Find All References is slower than it was in Visual Studio 2005.

2) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” not only generates extraneous false positives, it also fails to show items that do match the search term.

On any project of considerable size, “Find All References” will cause a hang of the Visual Studio 2010 user interface for up to a minute as it does nothing more than plain-text search for the selected variable or function. It blocks the main user thread, it hangs the UI, and it takes forever. Much longer than Visual Studio 2005/2008 did with its more accurate compiler-based variable references search.

And as for point 2, the time-lapse screenshot below (to show both the selection, the menu, and the resulting dialog) should speak louder and clearer than a thousand words.

(Click the image for a full-size screenshot)

Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 seems to be exemplifying the ongoing trend at Microsoft of slowly giving less and less attention to C++ developers as they continue to push .NET (now at version 4.0 and growing strongly) at the cost of everything else… while still refusing to embrace the .NET platform for their own technologies, leaving their once-content developer-base fighting against their own IDEs for life.

This is the first of several posts about Visual Studio 2010, it’s advantages, and its shortcomings. We love Visual Studio and despite everything else, its still the best IDE out there and a damn good one at that. But some things just need to be said in hopes that they will be addressed at some point in the future.

Those keeping track of Apple’s purchases will remember that, almost exactly 2 years ago to the day, Apple bought California-based CPU designer PA Semiconductors. However, PA Semi specializes in PowerPC-based designs – a platform that Apple abandoned almost 5 years ago now. But Apple’s most recent acquisition is directly applicable to its current needs in the hardware market, and in particular, its forays into the ARM market. In the official iPad video, Apple engineers and executives discuss their need for a custom CPU in order to let them dictate where the ooomph and power will go, and to what purposes the transistors will be biased.

With all these buyouts and different chipsets in question, it’s easy to get confused. So what is the difference between the ARM, the PPC, and the x86, and where does it matter?

The world of CPUs is a dark, deadly, and dangerous place. After all, the CPU is said to be the literal “heart” of the PC – and as such, it’s the single most-heavily engineered component. Billions of dollars and manhours have gone into the design of these various chipsets and they’ve all been researched, optimized, fabricated, and sold in order to make your computer… better.

The biggest difference between these platforms is the design dogma they follow. The x86 is a CISC architecture: Complex Instruction Set Computer. The other two (PPC and ARM) are RISC-based designs: Reduced Instruction Set Computers. What does that mean? Well, to the end user, mostly nothing. But to the CPU designers and developers, it makes a world of a difference.

CISC architectures can have up to thousands of individual commands supported by the processor that can be used in machine code. Each of these assembly commands can range from a single operation to several hundred or more in length. On the other hand, RISC-based CPUs understand only a handful of different instructions, the minimum necessary to get the job done.

However, this in no way means that CISC is more powerful or that RISC is limited. The difference in the amount of supported instructions is easily explained away by two factors: supported modes, and wrapper operations. All the data dealt with in any computer program is stored in the memory. But in order for the CPU to actually use any of it, it needs to place variables in super-fast (but small and limited) memory locations built into the CPU itself, called registers.

Imagine trying to run the following line of code:

z = x + y

Each of the three variables in the above example is located in the memory. But in order to carry out the operation, x and y will need to be copied from the memory to the CPU, the addition instruction carried out, and the result then copied from the CPU to the location of z in the memory.

A CISC-based CPU like the x86 would have a single instruction that – when given the address of X, Y, and Z in the memory – would do just that. But in a RISC-based CPU, the assembly code would have to explicitly spell out the individual steps: first copy x to a register, then copy y to a register, then add them together, and finally copy the result back into the memory.

At first blush, it would seem that CISC is a much better option. After all, one instruction and the entire line of code is done. But it’s not about operations, it’s about time. Sure, a RISC-based program will need to carry out four distinct operations in order to do the same, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take any longer. In fact, RISC CPUs are consistently faster than their CISC counterparts.

If CPUs were day laborers, it would make sense that CISC is more efficient. After all, a single instruction gets the job done. But, thankfully, CPUs aren’t underpaid interns, they’re over-engineered miracles. The simpler design of the RISC CPU allows it to more efficiently optimize and carry out long sequences of code. The way things are broken down into short, simple, and clear instructions lets it carry out multiple operations at the same time (pipelining) and with less effort.

In fact, it’s now a universally accepted truth that RISC is better than CISC! Actually, because of how much more efficient RISC machines are than their CISC counterparts, most CISC CPUs convert their CISC instructions into RISC instructions internally, then run them!

So why are we still using x86? That’s mainly because of business matters. Intel had x86, Intel had money, and CISC won out. Today, with the optimizations and internal RISC conversions that take place, CISC vs RISC isn’t really about the performance any more. It’s about the business, the politics… and the power consumption.

The complexity of the CISC datapath and pipeline mean that it takes more power to get things done. Intel has worked some incredible miracles and accomplished some amazing things to get the power consumption down, ranging from dynamic scaling of the CPU clock to shutting-down parts of the CPU core when they’re not in use. But x86 remains a power hog. Intel’s Atom platform was an attempt at re-engineering the x86 to make it fit for mobile devices, but at the cost of performance.

There’s no reason that RISC can’t be used for the desktop. ARM or no ARM, there’s a plethora of RISC-based CPUs out there that can be easily adapted for desktop use. But the problem isn’t with the hardware: it’s with the software. Programs written for x86 aren’t compatible with anything else, even other CISC CPUs. That has prevented just about the entire world from trying any other platforms, mainly because Windows only supports x86 on the desktop. The last copy of Windows to support different CPU architectures was Windows NT, which shipped with versions for Intel’s x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC.

For anyone not on the Windows platform though, there’s nothing really binding them to the x86 platform. Apple chose x86 because, with PowerPC out of the running, x86 was the only viable option back in 2005. Keep in mind, just because ARM can run on the desktop, that doesn’t mean that ARM will run on the desktop: optimizations in the CPU world are always a compromise between performance and power consumption. And the current generation of ARM and other RISC-based CPUs is meant for portable equipment.

It would take some work to create a high-performance ARM CPU meant for the desktop, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. With Apple’s just-declared purchase of Intrinsity, it’s clear that it’s a possibility. With the tight grip Apple has over its platform and the strong hardware-software bond, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the switch to yet another platform – after all, they did it 5 years ago and things worked out. But will they? Most likely not, it’s not exactly in their customers best interest and x86 really is a decent platform. But for the myriad of mobile devices that Apple is getting itself into, x86 isn’t the key. So look forward to more ARM goodiness for your iPad and iPhone in the years to come, but your MacBook is safe in Intel’s loving hands.