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If such efforts are not curbstomped early, we'll end up with fully closed computing devices architecture, belonging to different vendors who provide whole verti
by Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
If such efforts are not curbstomped early, we'll end up with fully closed computing devices architecture, belonging to different vendors who provide whole vertical from bare metal to OS. There will be Google's processors/OS/software, Apple's, Samsung's, plus some shit CCP will come up with, like, TikToks, and all of them will be mutually incompatible, with own programming languages and data formats. The future looks bleak.
- wmf 5y agoChrombooks are pretty open, although totally non-standard.
- spankalee 5y agoWhat's non-standard about them, and compared to what exactly?
- wmf 5y agoThey don't use UEFI/ACPI like every other PC.
- surajrmal 5y agoThey use ACPI. Not using UEFI was a perfectly reasonable choice. The bootloader is fully open source, led to improvements in boot speed and security. Booting non-chromeos images is possible and reasonably well documented. A standard bootloader may seem nice from an interoperability standpoint, but I'm not sure UEFI is a great place to land.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoA bunch of them don't even have Delete keys, which is fucking stupid.
- jb1991 5y agoHow bad is that, though? The success and impressive performance, battery life, temperature of the Apple M1 suggests that this kind of integration can have outstanding results. So there are tradeoffs, at least.
- beckman466 5y agoApple M1 didn't come out of nowhere, they learned from everything that came before. Your comment sort of implies that the innovations came solely from being developed behind closed doors (or in some kind of vacuum), which denies credit to workers who made the thousands of incremental breakthroughs that landed in the commons and which has helped us to arrive in the place we are now.
- ketzo 5y agoNo, GP made a pretty specific point: that vertical integration can clearly provide some serious benefits in the realm of computer hardware. Now, the fact that vertical integration usually implies closed doors is relevant, yeah; but I don't think anyone is denying credit anywhere, and I think it's important to acknowledge upsides.
- 8note 5y agoI think there's a stronger argument that breaking backwards compatibility allows for big increases in performance
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoWhat good are performance and battery life if you don't get to decide which apps you are permitted to run on this device? Does the recent removal of apps [1] from russian appstore ring some bells? [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...
- jb1991 5y ago
- 5faulker 5y agoMaybe we should start with universal cable format first. Seems easier to implement.
- zucker42 5y agoIs it that much of a problem as long as alternate OSes can be installed by the user? For example, the M1 chip can run Linux. I don't see how Apple and Google producing their own chips is much different as a consumer than the Windows/x86 monoculture that's existed for a long time.
- retrac 5y agoThe M1 can run Linux after an extensive reverse-engineering effort. And Apple didn't take particular active measures to prevent running your own OS on it; they just didn't offer any help. Many Android device manufacturers actively try to prevent that. Apple actively tries to prevent it on iOS devices. Some early Chromebooks actively tried to prevent it, too. (Though not Google's own flagship developer devices.)
- runjake 5y ago> For example, the M1 chip can run Linux. No, not in any useful form it can’t. And any architectural changes could require another lengthy reverse engineering process rendering these devices unbootable with non-Apple OSes until then. I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay. I make this distinction because this is precisely the issue being discussed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago>> For example, the M1 chip can run Linux. > No, not in any useful form it can’t. Yes, it can? Ex. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-debian-linux https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-debian-linux - you're welcome to point out that drivers for the rest of the system are a WIP, but the CPU is fine and the rest is coming along.
- ducktective 5y agoIn other news, Nvidia's support for Linux is "coming along™" and Lenovo says drivers for fingerprint auth for thinkpads is just-around-the-corner®
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoDEC, Sun, IBM, and many others did this. The world still survived.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAnd for the most part, they did not.
- oblio 5y agoThe new corps learned from the old corps. I'm not sure <<we>>'re going to survive them.
- Lex-2008 5y ago> all of them will be mutually incompatible, with own programming languages and data formats. The future looks bleak. Server hardware had (still has somewhere): SPARC from Sun, PowerPC from IBM, HPPA from HP, etc... See for example list of supported architectures for Debian4: https://www.debian.org/releases/etch/hppa/ch02s01.html.en https://www.debian.org/releases/etch/hppa/ch02s01.html.en But it feels like amd64 is winning today. Don't you think that eventually one of these architectures you're talking about (Google's, Apple's, Samsung's, CCP's) will win over others, one way or another?
- mattnewton 5y agoOnly if they have an incentive to sell it as a commodity. x86_64 didn’t win on technical superiority alone.
- shepherdjerred 5y agoamd64 is going to lose to arm64. arm64 is significantly cheaper in a server context.
- NavinF 5y agoIs it though? I can't find any new ARM server CPUs for sale anywhere. I can assure you that "request a quote" pricing is anything but cheap.
- hansel_der 5y agoi'd guess there are about an order of magnitude more arm devices on the planet than intel/amd64. it's called "ARMada" for a reason
- heavyset_go 5y agoIf you're developer, it's guaranteed that these companies will attempt to capture 15% to 30% of all of your revenue on these platforms, too. They already do it with phones and tablets.
- capitalsigma 5y agoThis is literally what competition looks like, the opposite of a monopoly. Isn't that what we all want?
- dvdkon 5y agoYes, it's certainly better than a Qualcomm monoculture would be. But ideally competition on CPUs would happen in the CPU market, instead of in the target product market with lots of vertical integration. In a world where all device manufacturers design (or even fab) their own CPUs and make their own software/cloud services (we're already there in some ways, sadly), any newcomer would have to start with transistors and work their way up to a long-term cloud ecosystem. That probably won't happen any time soon, standalone chip designers will continue to be competitive or at least good enough, but you can see how proprietary chips can actually make competition harder in some ways.
- dehrmann 5y agoI'd prefer a handful of architectures driven by industry groups. A competition free-for-all optimizes for architecture advancements and better software from vertically integrated players, but limits software from smaller players.
- fendy3002 5y agoIf it's vendor locked, then it'll be vendor-scoped monopoly rather than global-scoped monopoly. If Microsoft start manufacturing their own CPU and locking the OS for their model only, it can be said that Microsoft monopolize the windows hardware market.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- haberman 5y agoThe people reverse engineering the M1 found that it uses an architecture that will likely make it easier (not harder) for Linux to support new generations of Apple hardware as it is released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28183176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28183176
- VLM 5y ago> and all of them will be mutually incompatible, with own programming languages and data formats All of them will be 100% compatible with SaaS over the internet offerings, no end user will notice.
- oblio 5y agoYeah? How are progressive web apps working on iOS?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoUnless the internet will be fractured into 'google's net', 'Apple space', 'TikTok realm', 'Microsoft fief'. If you think that this will never ever happen, think again. Not so long ago some SaaS internet offerings worked only on one operating system and on one infamous browser. Once you are deep in a vendor lock-in, you are trapped to use whatever he allows you to.
- vbezhenar 5y agoIt might happen, but so far all most of the tech giants did not enforce their position despite being able to do so. I can browse porn from iPhone Safari, what a scandal. Surely they had an idea of building a curated whitelist which would satisfy a majority of users, but they did not follow that idea so far.
- user-the-name 5y agoThis is what computing used to be. It wasn't bleak, and I would say it was a lot more interesting. Most of the retro computers that people remember with great fondness were like this.
- wffurr 5y agoYou should watch the scene from American History X before you use the word "curbstomp" again.
- unknownOrigin 5y agoHow about no. How about people use curbstomp whenever they damn please. I'm very well aware of what you're implying and what you're trying to do here. Poison the well, police the conversation. Just like the OK sign just means "ok", curbstomp just means curbstomp. The fact that someone somewere used these things in a racist context means nothing, as these words/signs are not racist at all. Racists also use toilet paper, are we going to ban it? How about air or water. No, all of these attempts to police and cancel speech need to go to hell.
- wffurr 5y agoIt literally means a horrible violent act which has no place in a conversation about computer chips in any way shape or form.
- rgarrett88 5y agoGP didn't even call it racist just mentioned a movie. Racist rant just came out of no where...
- colordrops 5y agoThere was a clear implication, let's be honest here. Extreme violence is a normal part of our culture - young kids watch hulk smash violently in marvel movies and no one bats an eye. The reason strong offense is being taken here is because of the racist context of the violence in the movie.
- crikeym8 5y agoKilling is a horrible violent act but we use it all the time when talking about computers. Or should we rename SIGKILL to something a little more child friendly? You're being pretty dramatic about a complete non issue.
- yellow_lead 5y ago> all of them will be mutually incompatible, with own programming languages and data formats. The future looks bleak. Isn't it already like this? We already have to make our apps in Obj C / Swift for iOS and Java/Kotlin for Android. You can use C/C++ libraries but you typically need to recompile them anyways. So if iOS or Android switch to different CPU architectures what's the problem? We will have to change our build processes, but the platforms are already fragmented.
- kovek 5y agoWill it be possible to one day make custom orders to the fabs for custom designs at very low volume?
- anyfactor 5y agoI was watching a podcast interview of one of the founders of Wikipedia. He was describing the effects of creeping control over Wikipedia and the definitive ideological narrative being set on the internet through Wikipedia. It is a very interesting interview but the thing that most surprised me is that he talks about how he has a personal server to host his website. Of all the things he said, I found that simple idea to be the most surprising. The internet is already being dominated by a handful of cloud providers, few domain registers and select social media. It is damn difficult to go against the tide and even though we are falling off a cliff.