5 ms·

Silicon is going to be the most significant moat there is. You'll either have companies which master it and can adapt it to their stacks (mobile, laptops, serve

Silicon is going to be the most significant moat there is. You'll either have companies which master it and can adapt it to their stacks (mobile, laptops, servers) - or companies lagging behind feeding on the leftovers and racing to the bottom. This is the final frontier, in a way.

juancampa 6y ago
Wasn't this the case for IBM and then clones came out? What's different this time around?
- Someone 6y ago
  IBM didn’t have its own silicon in the PC; it picked bog-standard parts to get to market fast. Having commodity hardware meant anybody could buy a motherboard and parts to build a competitive computer. What is different now is that the big players try to de-commoditize the hardware. Result is that you can’t build a competitive hackintosh anymore, as you cannot buy the M1 chip (you can still build a x64 hackintosh, but even that is getting harder, with Macs having various custom chips) If enough other large companies go the same way, there might eventually not be enough market left to warrant development of competitive commodity parts.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Actually it was Compaq that did the trick, had their reverse engineering been considered illegal and there wouldn't be any clones to start with, regardless of being commodity hardware.
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    They de-commodotize because that’s the only way to remain competitive. Power efficient SoCs are the way forward as Apple shown with the M1. Likewise a Graviton with hardware acceleration specifically addressing AWS tasks can break through existing performance barriers.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  In those times, CPU compute power was the defining limitation. Nowadays, even dirt cheap chips offer enough grunt to get many things done, and the majority of the focus is on performance per watt. And this is where x86-derived designs are at a genuine disadvantage.
x87678r 6y ago
30 years ago there were loads of companies making CPUs, most of them have disappeared.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  That’s exactly what I thought about after writing my comment but I think this comparison is flawed. The battle of 30 years ago was a battle of ecosystems more than of individual architectures. The market went into consolidation around Wintel and later Linux on the server side. The market today is orders of magnitude larger and supports multiple ecosystems at different tiers - mobile, laptops, workstation, servers. Platforms which will not adopt complete vertical integration all the way into their hardware will lag behind. The other thing is that now, binary compatibility is pretty much preserved and lots of software parts are shared across these platforms. It’s not fragmentation like DEC vs IBM vs Sun vs SGI.

juancampa 6y ago

Wasn't this the case for IBM and then clones came out? What's different this time around?

Someone 6y ago
IBM didn’t have its own silicon in the PC; it picked bog-standard parts to get to market fast. Having commodity hardware meant anybody could buy a motherboard and parts to build a competitive computer. What is different now is that the big players try to de-commoditize the hardware. Result is that you can’t build a competitive hackintosh anymore, as you cannot buy the M1 chip (you can still build a x64 hackintosh, but even that is getting harder, with Macs having various custom chips) If enough other large companies go the same way, there might eventually not be enough market left to warrant development of competitive commodity parts.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Actually it was Compaq that did the trick, had their reverse engineering been considered illegal and there wouldn't be any clones to start with, regardless of being commodity hardware.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  They de-commodotize because that’s the only way to remain competitive. Power efficient SoCs are the way forward as Apple shown with the M1. Likewise a Graviton with hardware acceleration specifically addressing AWS tasks can break through existing performance barriers.
Baeocystin 6y ago
In those times, CPU compute power was the defining limitation. Nowadays, even dirt cheap chips offer enough grunt to get many things done, and the majority of the focus is on performance per watt. And this is where x86-derived designs are at a genuine disadvantage.

x87678r 6y ago

30 years ago there were loads of companies making CPUs, most of them have disappeared.

flyinglizard 6y ago
That’s exactly what I thought about after writing my comment but I think this comparison is flawed. The battle of 30 years ago was a battle of ecosystems more than of individual architectures. The market went into consolidation around Wintel and later Linux on the server side. The market today is orders of magnitude larger and supports multiple ecosystems at different tiers - mobile, laptops, workstation, servers. Platforms which will not adopt complete vertical integration all the way into their hardware will lag behind. The other thing is that now, binary compatibility is pretty much preserved and lots of software parts are shared across these platforms. It’s not fragmentation like DEC vs IBM vs Sun vs SGI.