The PS/2 was not successful not because of technicalities but because IBM did not want it to be cloned. Third parties decided what the PC should be (mostly cont

The PS/2 was not successful not because of technicalities but because IBM did not want it to be cloned. Third parties decided what the PC should be (mostly continue to be, there was less differences between cloners and the original PC than with the PS/2), and IBM followed. In insight, the PS/2 could not win in this context, because IBM did not matter anymore very early on for the history of the PC, regardless of peripheral vendors. This market was never driven by peripherals anyway, especially not internal extension boards. You can use VFIO, yes it needs an IOMMU but that basically what you ask for: hardware support - and yeah, I would like IOMMU to be generalized, also because it is dangerous to have some external ports without one, nowadays (even without thinking about efficient access from userspace). And because of that you can not delegate the core of the thing to "peripheral" anymore, basically you need IOMMU and once you have it, well what else do you need? On the storage level, you can mmap on Optane on DDR4 without intermediate software copy I think. But that's merely an implementation detail anyway. When you think about the complexities of modern controllers and the diversity of options to implement them - and at the same time the most important latencies; well the only thing that matter is the end result, and obviously it can be better to not burn some CPU cycles in some cases (for some very specific workloads), but it is not trivial what to put in HW or SW to achieve that: RAM is already crazy slow, and the faster SSD is still even slower: so you will need to be smart in SW anyway to not be bitten by latencies. So in a sense; no! modern CPU are certainly not slow! I also think you misrepresent the common modern interfaces availables for (even interoperable) SSDs; they are certainly not "emulat[ing] rotating disks". I'd like that you give the following some thought to finish: 1/ HW backward compat is not a prime requirement anymore (because a/ smartphone dev model b/ even PC model has shifted enough so that it actually does not support complete backward compat anymore, mostly due to SoC integration). 2/ There is "sufficient" competition, where sufficient can be defined as effective to drive innovations because they can bring market advantages, and there are a non trivial number of competitors on the market (I'll mix a little but this is still relevant to what we are talking about: Intel, AMD, Arm, nVidia, Apple, Samsung, etc.) 3/ The designers working on those chips and systems are not stupid. What we have now is of course affected by technical history, but what we have now is already immensely different from what we had during the PS/2 era. Some of the historical impacts are possibly confined in less than a square millimeter on chips, and not only your PCI was not your ISA but your modern PCIe is also already quite different from your PCI... So the impact of peripheral vendors in the PS/2 era today for all of that: absolutely null, without a doubt.