I've been thinking about modern CPUs. Apart from x86 and SPARC, is there any other 'kind' of CPU used today in computers (not in playstation3, phones and similar)
Well, for starters, there is the IBM Power Architecture microprocessor family.
And Intel Itanium. And I'm sure there's still a lot of PA-RISCs in use.
Why exclude phones? They're certainly full-fledged computers now.
Non-x86 desktop PC boards are a specialty thing, expensive and hard to find, but still available for architectures like ARM and MIPS.
And for larger systems there's any kind you can imagine, up to and including imitation mainframe chips.
The chips on GPU are also in a league of their own, taking over many of the tasks from CPUs.
Yes and no. They certainly can't do everything. They're very specialized for processing large batches of data, with very long pipelines.
This means they don't perform well when they have to branch a lot. That limits the amount of data that can be processed at once.
