5 ms·
PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long tim
by hx8 5mo ago
PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content.
I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.
- altcognito 5mo ago> While other platforms like Android and becoming less open ok.... > PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards ... I'm so confused by what you're trying to say here.
- fatal94 5mo agoThis will surely bring new energy into opening these platforms, as it did in days before
- johndhi 5mo agowhy? I'm interested to know, WHY is PC so open? what led to that?
- hvb2 5mo agoMany vendors, because that means you need specs and that in turn allows for interoperability
- ls612 5mo agoBecause Microsoft commodified their complement in the 1980s to break the back of IBM.
- treyd 5mo agoAgreement IBM had to make with the DoJ/etc in the 80s to open the PC platform to avoid antitrust prosecution. That was the key event.
- mikestew 5mo agoI would argue that the key event was Columbia Data Products’s clean room implementation of the BIOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products That, and I’m pretty sure the DOJ had ended the antitrust suit (which was about bundling) by the time the PC was released.
- dfxm12 5mo agoYou might be interested in the IBM PC compatible and Wintel wikipedia pages. This is a super high level timeline, but it is more interesting to get into the detail. At a high level, the IBM PC platform were very well documented & sold well, to the effect of producing tons of software and peripherals add-ons ("PC Compatibles"). This led some other computer companies to reverse engineer the proprietary IBM BIOS, allowing them to run the same software and use the same peripherals. Because these were clean room reimplementations, IBM didn't have a legal case to prevent their sale. Fast forward a bit, IBM's attempt at a new, closed platform, PS/2, flopped. People wanted their more open hardware. Windows became dominate enough that all the demand was for x86 based hardware that could run Windows. Microsoft was happy to work with many vendors. The PC is very open today, but Apple survived. Atari ST and Amiga probably survived longer than you think as well.
- xolve 5mo ago> PC is the last major open platform. In the whole history of computing PC is the only platform where buying a computer means crazy number of options and configuration mixes to choose from and expect it to work! And warranty would support it too! You can run any OS of your choice on it and that's also reasonable expectation. Any other platform (SUN, Be, Amiga, NeXT, Apple) it was always buying it from one company only from its list of products. And even running with a different version of OS means warranty doesn't cover it.
- hx8 5mo agoI came back to this comment 12+ hrs later hoping to find someone make a great argument for some platform in the 70s that I didn't know enough about, or maybe a modern open hardware movement that is building niche support. I guess it really is just the PC.
- craftkiller 5mo ago> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before shipping it off to a colo, I wrote scripts and had detailed plans of the things I needed to run so I could minimize the time it was making my ears bleed.
- varispeed 5mo agoThis. At one company we ran out of space in the server room, so the excess machine temporarily landed next to my desk. Dear god. Noise cancelling headphones couldn't cope with the noise.
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago> my 1U 1Us have the most compromised ventilation and compensate with loud fans running at high speeds.
- hvb2 5mo agoSure. But are there actual limits on how much noise they're allowed to make? This is all built to be put in a place where noise is not an issue
- craftkiller 5mo agoYeah, it certainly wasn't the quietest choice for form-factor, but the fact remains: all server grade hardware are not optimizing for noise. They are meant to be running in datacenters, not livingrooms, so noise was never a concern for them. A nice thing about consumer-grade hardware is they are optimizing for both sound and power consumption because those devices are designed to be around humans. So I certainly hope consumer-grade hardware survives.
- lambdasquirrel 5mo ago
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo agoAssuming this trend continues, I think people are going to start re-using older hardware rather than turning to server-grade hardware (which is often not convenient for the average residential situation). At least, that's what I hope happens. What will probably happen is people will continue to migrate away from the PC platform and towards closed platforms for the convenience, if history is any indication.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoThat's what I've been doing for years. I buy (or get for free) enterprise PCs coming off lifecycle at surplus sales. Nothing I do at home needs a cutting edge CPU. Unless you're a hard-core gamer or serious hobbiest/tinkerer a 5 year old or even older PC running linux is very adequate.
- MrDOS 5mo agoI think this is already happening, sort of. At least, people are hanging onto their older-but-not-yet-old components for much longer than they used to. I recently tried to build a NAS from eBay parts, and I was surprised to find that the newest stuff affordably available was 6th/7th generation Intel Core parts (retailed 2016/2017). I think people are trying to offload these CPUs in particular because they can't run an unmodified Windows 11 installation (no firmware TPM 2.0 implementation, and the corresponding consumer motherboards typically didn't have a discrete TPM module, either, if they had an LPC bus connector at all). Very little (reasonably-priced) availability of similar-aged Ryzen CPUs (which have firmware TPM support) or newer Intel CPUs.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoWhy would most people need a home server rack? That's a lot of noise, space, and electrical usage. For what most people would need a home "server" for a NUC PC or Mac Mini would do the job.
- hx8 5mo agoZiply Fiber is offering 50 gbps home internet connections in some US locations. You cannot utilize that type of speed with a Mac Mini. Even the modest 8-10gbps connections offered by T-Mobile and Google probably require more.
- wlesieutre 5mo agoDoesn't really answer the question though, why would someone be trying to utilize that much bandwidth out of their house? Is this for people trying to start the next netflix out of their garage before they have any money to put the servers in a colo?
- Diti 5mo agoVPNs. If you have a NAS and require high-speed access from/to your home files (dumping your Apple ProRes RAW rushes off your external SSD, so you can keep shooting your video, for instance), that kind of bandwidth cements your income.
- wlesieutre 5mo agoYou and 49 other people all simultaneously working from locations with gigabit uplinks
- zrm 5mo ago> You cannot utilize that type of speed with a Mac Mini. Mostly because the base Mini has Thunderbolt 4 which maxes out at 40Gbps. Anything with a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot will take a 100Gbps NIC. 100Gbps is around 10GBps (8 bits per byte plus encapsulation overhead). Desktop CPUs can do AES-GCM at 2.5GBps+ per core and have up to 16 cores and around 50GBps of memory bandwidth (dual channel DDR4-3200), so the NIC still seems like the bottleneck.
- arjie 5mo agoWouldn’t recommend a home server rack in an apartment. For high wife approval factor, you can put Epyc hardware with Noctuas in a bigger case. I’ve got one at home. Runs my blog and a bunch of other things. Home is at 32 dB right now. Realistically a Mac Mini will probably blow a lot of things out of the water on price / performance. Even an older one.
- qiine 5mo agoBuy steam deck, and steam box.
- TacticalCoder 5mo ago> ... or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. An actual rack with noisy 1U or 2U servers may be a bit overkill but on the plus side there's a guaranteed endless supply of such used servers. Now there's a happy middle ground: used workstations with ECC memory, that you then use as servers. People would be really wise to not underestimate what a 12 years old dual-Xeon, 14 cores each, 56 threads in total can do, for example. And such a complete workstation can basically be found for less than what it takes to fill my car's gas tank (granted it's got a big tank and it's fancy car whose manufacturer recommends to only use 98+ octane). A single Xeon workstation with shitload of memory in a tower form factor is basically silent. Mine is. Dead quiet, next to the vaccuum cleaner and the cat's foot in a tiny room. I use it as a headless server. And that's with the default PSU and fans. There are, of course, people modding these with adapters for regular consumer PSUs and then putting ultra-quiet PSUs in those. Same with Noctua fans etc. And as for the usual complain: "but a server that is on 24/7 consumes too much electricity"... I only turn on my servers at home when I begin to work: I don't need these to be on 24/7. So yeah: "Server CPU + ECC" doesn't imply noise. And "Server CPU + ECC" doesn't imply it has to be on 24/7 neither.
- disqard 5mo agoI recommend this too! I like my Dell Precision T7910 (dual-socket Xeon FTW) a lot. What are you using?
- QuiEgo 5mo agoFor most people, I’d recommend a NuC or a NAS with an unlocked bootloader (so you can put Linux on) for a home server. Most home users need a small amount of compute, and are sensitive to noise and power use.
- cesarb 5mo ago[dead]
- c7b 5mo agoContrary take: I believe we will see an expanded market for capable PCs that can be sanely put in a living space. By extension of the gaming PC niche to local AI. Both NVidia and AMD are developing product lines in that direction (DGX Spark, Ryzen AI Max). And Linux will be more prominent than ever, due to several independent reasons: MS dropping the ball hard on Windows, SteamOS making Linux attractive for gamers, 'digital sovereignty' as a trend, and Linux being the de facto standard for hosting AI (or anything really).
- hx8 5mo agoGreat take, but if the market is expanding for capable PCs why are motherboard sales decreasing?
- c7b 5mo agoWell, the two chips I mentioned (DGX Spark uses the GB-10) are both a SoC, so no motherboard needed there. I don't know if that's the full explanation, but it could be a factor. The SoC design with unified memory is generally well suited for residential use because it's quite energy-efficient, quiet and small (compared to traditional GPU-powered gaming rigs). Great performance-per-annoyance, so to say.
- justincormack 5mo agoMini PCs (NUC-ish form factor) are selling a lot now too, small, quiet, most people don't need expansion over what you can get from eg USB4.
- c7b 5mo agoYeah, the DGX Spark could qualify as a mini PC too. The AMD chip is sold as a laptop chip I believe, but I've mostly seen it in mini PCs. And the Framework Desktop. A brand that probably carries a lot of trust among the kind of tinkerers who would consider buying a barebone motherboard in the first place.
- stuartq 5mo ago
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoAnd flying pugs gonna fall from teh sky too.
- CrimsonCape 5mo agoThe problem with all those devices you listed is that they have lost the "general purpose" ability. I guess you could define "general" to mean "carefully curated"...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]