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I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction: >The fact that ARM, an open-source
by xoa 5y ago
I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction:
>The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture
ARM is in no way open, it's fully proprietary. Unlike x86 it is not vertically integrated and is available for anyone to license all the way to the architectural level, and that's huge. But said licenses certainly are not free either, nor Free.
There are promising actual open architectures, in particular OpenPOWER and RISC-V come to mind as interesting with a lot of solid work behind them. So that's one small remaining opening IMO, even if it's more work on the dev side I wouldn't mind having those stick around and get more competitive.
- Pet_Ant 5y agoSPARC is open and not only that Sun shared some actual cores that were used in production. I don’t know why Power gets mentioned but SPARC doesn’t.
- patrec 5y agoProbably because few would consider Sparc promising, since, unlike Power and certainly Risc-V, it's pretty much dead?
- lizknope 5y agoPicking a CPU is not just about the CPU architecture. It is mainly about the ecosystem around that processor. ARM has a huge amount of IP, bus fabrics, compilers, operating systems, boot loaders, and people you can hire with knowledge of all of that. There are far more people out there with ARM experience than SPARC. I don't really see anybody interested in POWER outside of IBM and the chips they sell.