Although it's true that we have been forced to use x86 for quite a while, and as a result have gotten quite good at using it, that doesn't mean that it is an optimal instruction set. amd64 is an ugly hack, as is PAE, and although they do work, they don't change the fact that x86 was never intended to handle 64-bit spaces.

Consider the various POWER arches, and the ridiculously powerful ARM arch. ARM, for example, has an SIMD extension called Neon, which makes audio decoding possible at something like 15 MHz. These are very cool and potentially powerful architectures that have never been fully explored due to Microsoft's monopoly in the nineties.

(To be fair, Microsoft couldn't have forced adoption of another arch even if they wanted to; they homogenized the market way too far.)

Right on. Besides, the mobile market is fueled by the further integration of peripherals into SOCs. Performance and power aside: if I were going to design a smartphone, I wouldn't want to go with a three-piece cpu and chipset, not to mention licensing and development for BIOS on a new platform. And that's before including special ASICs for functionality not built into the chipset (3D accel, radio interfaces, LCD & touch panel). And then I'd be stuck with one of the few vendors who make modern embedded x86 chips.

If I go with ARM instead, I get a wide choice of SOCs from which I can pick and choose the built-in features (including the ones mentioned above). Bootloaders are generally included as part of the BSP for any given embedded OS, and if I don't like that there's always redboot or uboot (probably more too, I haven't been in the embedded world in a few years). If I don't want to use vendor A's product on revision 2 of the product, then I choose from one of the many remaining products out there, and my code ports over cleanly.

These are very cool and potentially powerful architectures that have never been fully explored due to Microsoft's monopoly in the nineties.

How exactly is an ISA monoculture Microsoft's fault? Microsoft did make Windows for multiple CPU architectures. Guess which ones people bought? The x86 version because the hardware is a lot less expensive. If there's any entity to blame, it's IBM, HP, DEC, Sun etc for not bringing down the prices of their architectures.

Microsoft didn't homogenize anything; it was the hardware manufacturers who did. MS wrote DOS for the IBM PC and when other people copied the PC, they licensed DOS for it. MS wrote software for other personal computers (Apple being the best example), but it was the PC clones that took over the marketplace. Indeed, you could argue that if the market did not become homogenized, home computers would not be the ubiquitous devices they are today. Computers would instead be cheap toys for hobbyists or expensive tools for scientists and engineers.

Keep in mind that MS has had Windows available for i860 (codenamed N-Ten, the source of the NT moniker), MIPS, x86, Alpha, PPC, IA64, and x86-64. Also, Windows did not become popular until version 3.0, OS/2 never really took off, and Windows NT didn't become pervasive until XP. When you look at things this way, it is pretty clear that MS has almost no control over the market.

dom