• @frezik@midwest.social
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    11 year ago

    What I’m getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.

    There are three x86 companies, and there’s not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.

    This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.

    • @Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      While partially true, the biggest problem is software compatibility. Most software is compiled and optimized for X86 and it won’t run on ARM unless recompiled.

      How are we going to get everyone to jump ship? Apple had their magic emulation sauce but windows doesn’t seem to have that and especially not for Risc5

      • @frezik@midwest.social
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        11 year ago

        Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.

        People put far too much weight on games.