[prongletown]

>We need to break their grip on the desktop/server/laptop market.

I'm curious as to why you think this "needs" to happen?

I have my own reasons, for example, openness of ISA and IP from up top at the browser all the way down to the firmware on the chip; however, I'm curious to hear yours.

[kbenson]

Not the GP, but I can think of a few reasons:

- A monoculture of HW leaves us more susceptible to security issues. See Spectre and Meltdown. While not eradicated by other hardware designs, the problem is generally mitigates. See relative difference in what Spectre and Meltdown affected as evidence.

- A monoculture of HW may lead us to local maxima of capability. As we approach theoretical maximums of the hardware in specific materials areas, we are presented with more and more complex architectures to eek out smaller and smaller gains. This makes the pursuit of alternative architectures more and more costly to invest in from a business standpoint, knowing that it may be years or decades before it starts to compete favorably with existing products. The more concurrent alternate architectures that can be pursued at the same time will allow for a much shorter time to market for alternatives, should a specific niche fit their capabilities well. (e.g. it's taken a decade, but Apple is making ARM competitive to the point it may be a viable laptop processor competitor, possibly even the better option at some point).

- Multiple avenues of research often yield benefits of cross-pollination. CISC/RISC in the past ended up converging somewhat in the middle as they adopted the best features of each other. The most lines of research we have (and used in the market, so they get sufficient funding and attention) the more likely we are to see benefits for all related hardware.

[markjenkinswpg]

A slightly different framing than openness that is used from time to time is owner controllable. Older x86 systems were underdocumented, but at least there was the hope of reverse engineering to replace boot firmware, limit device firmware and develop libre device drivers. Not so on today's OEM systems, the CPUs are coming cryptographically fused to only accept the OEMs boot firmware and with locked down, privileged, security co-processors.

I don't want to live in a world where everything new is an iThing that says I can't help you Dave. That could turn retro-computing from a hobby to an essential life skill to preserve freedom!

[Porthos9K]

> I don't want to live in a world where everything new is an iThing that says I can't help you Dave.

That sounds like the "war on general-purpose computing" that Cory Doctorow was talking about a few years back.

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

[classichasclass]

Those are pretty much my reasons as well (it's just icing on the cake that it's an architecture I have long familiarity with).

[Porthos9K]

> I'm curious as to why you think this "needs" to happen?

I think Intel has been too dominant for too long. They've gotten complacent and sloppy, as shown by microcode-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown.

Also, I figure breaking Intel's dominance will further marginalize Microsoft. I still hold a grudge over how horrible an experience Windows 98 was.

[floatboth]

> breaking Intel's dominance will further marginalize Microsoft

Microsoft is not stupid, Microsoft has ported everything to ARMv8 already, both for the Snapdragon laptops and the servers (which they only use internally for now, but I hope Amazon's Graviton is pushing them in the ARM-public-cloud direction)

And by everything… I mean not just Windows, but even SQL Server now: https://twitter.com/ASGConf/status/1173163007733616641

[iforgotpassword]

Huh, 98SE was the sweet spot in the 9x series.

Fwiw, the NT kernel was designed for portability from the ground up. During initial development they targeted x86 and the i680 and it has been ported to pretty much any CPU that had relevance over time. Itanium, Alpha, ARM and.... PowerPC. While that branch is probably not maintained currently it would be pretty easy for Microsoft to get that going again.