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Intel seems to be going through some tough times and I wonder if this will have long-term effects in the tech industry. The x86 monopoly makes it difficult to f

Intel seems to be going through some tough times and I wonder if this will have long-term effects in the tech industry. The x86 monopoly makes it difficult to find a viable alternatives quickly, and I think a massive shift to ARM will likely cause similar problems in the future. How can we make software more interoperable with hardware? Is moving to open instruction sets like RISC-V advisable from an economic and innovation point of view?

libertine 6y ago
Somehow I can't feel sorry for Intel, because they put themselves in that position - in fact - they even prepared the ground to be in that position, so wasn't just "luck", was a strategy. Anti competitive practices that put AMD on a tight spot, that could have rolled over at any time. Milking their comfortable position with high margin products, due to a choked out competitor and marketing deals. They had it coming.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Well in one bright spot there are a lot more libraries and packages available or at least able to be compiled on arm64 or amd64 in the past year. Two is better than one.
Zigurd 6y ago
Almost all OSs run on all major architectures. Almost all apps run on managed language VMs, or in the browser. Some corporate environments are still captive to architecture, or there would not still be about 10,000 mainframes in use. X86 compatibility is transitioning to a similarly invisible need, obscured behind emulation and virtualization.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > Almost all apps run on managed language VMs, or in the browser. I'm curious if there's actually data backing that up. From what I've seen, a whole lot of application development is still being done with C++.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  It's not just about compatibility. It's about performance. Arm servers are seeing a similar problem trying to capture the x86 server market.
elihu 6y ago
> How can we make software more interoperable with hardware? Install-time and run-time recompilation. Stop using binaries as the standard distribution mechanism for software; ship LLVM intermediate representation or something like that instead, and let every platform recompile to make full use of the hardware capabilities of that platform. (Pre-compiled binaries can be made available too, but as an optimization.)

libertine 6y ago

Somehow I can't feel sorry for Intel, because they put themselves in that position - in fact - they even prepared the ground to be in that position, so wasn't just "luck", was a strategy. Anti competitive practices that put AMD on a tight spot, that could have rolled over at any time. Milking their comfortable position with high margin products, due to a choked out competitor and marketing deals. They had it coming.

geerlingguy 6y ago
Well in one bright spot there are a lot more libraries and packages available or at least able to be compiled on arm64 or amd64 in the past year. Two is better than one.

Zigurd 6y ago

Almost all OSs run on all major architectures. Almost all apps run on managed language VMs, or in the browser. Some corporate environments are still captive to architecture, or there would not still be about 10,000 mainframes in use. X86 compatibility is transitioning to a similarly invisible need, obscured behind emulation and virtualization.

catalogia 6y ago
> Almost all apps run on managed language VMs, or in the browser. I'm curious if there's actually data backing that up. From what I've seen, a whole lot of application development is still being done with C++.
blueblisters 6y ago
It's not just about compatibility. It's about performance. Arm servers are seeing a similar problem trying to capture the x86 server market.

elihu 6y ago

> How can we make software more interoperable with hardware? Install-time and run-time recompilation. Stop using binaries as the standard distribution mechanism for software; ship LLVM intermediate representation or something like that instead, and let every platform recompile to make full use of the hardware capabilities of that platform. (Pre-compiled binaries can be made available too, but as an optimization.)