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In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed.

• aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed. In my opinion this statement only holds in times of massive performance growth in hardware. This held true at that time, but does not necessarily hold anymore. There is a reason why modern SoCs contain more and more specialized blocks, say, for video decoding/encoding, NPU, graphics processing (GPU), raytracing (modern GPUs), perhaps DSP, ...
• panick21_ 3y ago
  That ignores that the Unix and Mac ecosystems weren't so small. So I wouldn't call the RISC processors back then 'specialized'. We tend to look at the present and say 'this is the only way it could have been' but that just isn't necessarily the case. Companies have been in good positions before and fumbled and other companies could have competed differently.