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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The death of the UNIX RISC vendors and also minicomputers creates an interesting situation where the server "middle class" is gone. We now have commodity servers where you hardly care about the vendor on one end, and hyper engineered mainframes on the other. Not much between.

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That's because, ultimately, mainframes and embedded computers are the only natural computer platforms. I expounded on this at length (yes, this is a self-plug).

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...

Long story, short: We will really have to watch out for our privacy because those two remaining platforms give The Management(tm) an irresistible temptation to stomp on us.

Interesting essay. Personally, I think AWS might be the new mainframe. You're guided to a specific set of proprietary services to build solutions, not terribly unlike the heyday of CICS, VSAM, JCL, MQ, RACF, etc. The playbook of Lambda, Fargate, AWS Batch, DynamoDB, IAM/Cognito, SQS, CloudFormation, etc, looks pretty similar.

AWS is absolutely the new mainframe. The big difference is that when you rent from Amazon instead of IBM they provide the building the mainframe lives in.

In the 1970s there were companies called “mainframe bureaus” that did exactly that

And that's mostly because our 'dial-up lines' are better than they used to be. IBM would have been happy to rent you the building as well.

Fyi your very first link out to the "Wheel of Reincarnation" is dead. Maybe it too needs to be reincarnated?

That's an interesting essay.

It seems to me if desktop general purpose computing becomes a distinctly minority need, then the future of hardware design will bend towards that article's view. Large scale design and manufacturer of hardware platforms will be (mostly) exclusively towards central servers and to specialized devices on the edge. I expect there's an awful lot of legacy desktop design that will disappear.

Like they say, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." And was it Santayana who said, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to recreate it in Javascript?"

Evidence of the demise of desktop computing abounds, but I do hope you're merely being alarmist, not prescient.

Great essay. Please write more.

Interesting take, though I don't fully agree with your conclusions. I take some heart that in the time since you wrote the piece, both normal people and non-geek politicians seem to have noticed that all is not well with the way things were going.

We're starting to see borderline-draconian privacy and data protection laws such as the GDPR in Europe, and while I question the implementation of that law and how effective it will be, the very fact that a group of politicians covering all of Europe managed to identify a risk and make actual law to try to deal with it is noteworthy in itself.

I suspect what will really make a difference in the near future though is that now social media and "fake news" and other consequences of the centralisation and commoditisation of online communications are messing with elections and our democratic systems. Politicians, even those who might otherwise give big businesses a pass on questionable ethical behaviour, do care about the systems that get them into positions of power, and they care very much about attempts to compromise those systems in ways that might remove them from power. If there's one thing in life that I have found quite reliable under all circumstances, it is the ability of a class of people in power to recognise threats and take steps to protect itself.

I also take some comfort in a few conversations I've had with non-techie friends in recent years, particularly those who are of the younger, digital native generations. It's become very clear to me that while my slightly older generation have sometimes been quite naive about the implications of new technologies, those behind us are much less so. Things like basic steps to stay safer online are taught in schools now. Social media accounts are ephemeral and kids switch to different networks in a way that would make it very difficult for the likes of Facebook to reach critical mass as it has with the older generations. The constant updates and sometimes breakages of software or access to multimedia content are getting old. And again, perhaps most heartening of all, while the younger generations consider these technologies an integral part of their lives and accept to some extent that there are compromises made in order to use them, that doesn't mean they like those compromises, and they will switch away if better options become available.

All of this is probably bad news for the long term prospects of businesses like Facebook and Google (and all the other big data hoarders we don't see because they run their marketplaces discreetly behind the scenes instead of with big public websites on the front). But it's probably good news for those of us hoping the centralised/distributed pendulum for computing is starting to swing back towards the distributed side again, in part driven by privacy, reliability and longevity concerns. The biggest weakness I saw in the article was quite a big jump to the conclusion that embedded and mainframe are the only two natural kinds of computing. I don't see why personal devices -- or rather, running substantial software and doing substantial data processing locally on those devices instead of just using them as essentially thin clients -- shouldn't be on that list as well. The form factors might change, but I don't see it as inevitable that personal computing will revert to being primarily a hobbyist's endeavour. There are some very good reasons it should not.

Additionally the mainstream adoption of high level languages, made the OS irrelevant outside some niche use cases like microcontrollers, Fintech and AAA games, for example.

If the language runtime supports the platform (even bare metal), the AOT/JIT does a good enough job even exploring some vectorization and the large majority of the standard library is available, then it is just an instance of cattle OS.

Which by way, has been the way that those hyper engineered mainframes from IBM (and Unisys) are designed, with their "language environments".

>Additionally the mainstream adoption of high level languages, made the OS irrelevant outside some niche use cases like microcontrollers, Fintech and AAA games, for example.

Has this really been the case though? Apps are still very much OS specific. Even Web Apps in Backend are also OS specific ( Linux Specfic ). I just don't see any "mainstream" adoption of high level languages that does this.

Java. We develop on Windows and deploy on Linux, BSD, OS X, mainframes, Amazon and Azure Java runtimes.

Even java has to deal with platform quirks. Serving files from NFS (ESTALE), hardlinks, unlinking files that are still mmaped and stuff like that.

With a large enough codebase you'll accumulate some unix-specific logic where it'll be less painful to just develop under linux rather than trying to keep it running on windows.

Of course those pain points are minor and you could write some fallback code for windows, but that code would only ever be exercised on developer machines.

Application servers take care of that.

All data should come from databases, which also don't matter on which OSes they're running on.

> Even Web Apps in Backend are also OS specific ( Linux Specfic ).

The web app may be OS specific, but does the OS really matter? Any unixy thing would probably work fine with at most mild effort for almost all backend apps.

FPGA can fill that middle path. sort of.

Microsoft (Azure) is investing heavily in FPGA based configurable cloud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_4Ap1bjwgs

Not sure why you were downvoted here. Specifically engineered systems with things like FPGA, GPU, TPU, Infiniband, Optane, "minion cores", etc, are probably the best candidates to re-establish something like a proprietary mid-range where you care who the vendor is.

I was eyeballing the Pico Computing boxen for this:

https://www.micron.com/products/advanced-solutions/advanced-...

One could get a lot of mileage in many areas out of a desktop with a good CPU, lots of RAM, a graphics card for general-purpose use, and one or more FPGA's w/ HLS tooling (or just buy the modules). Especially if the basic components were standardized like the PC with minimum requirements on cores, slices, etc on each version of the platform. An app ecosystem could be developed or emerge with capabilities regular desktops couldn't match.

I'm unfamiliar with the "minion cores" reference in your comment. Is this the same things as this RISCv architecture?

https://www.lowrisc.org/docs/minion-v0.4/overview/

That's what I was referring to. The PRUs in a TI AM335X (like the BeagleBone) are similar.

Basically real time capable microcontrollers that share memory with the mainstream CPU that is probably running Linux.

Allows for interesting use cases, like high speed data in or out to drive LED displays, sample signals, generate audio, etc.

Thanks, this is really interesting. Might you have any other links or resources on this you could share? Cheers.

The basics: http://www.righto.com/2016/08/pru-tips-understanding-beagleb...

Project that uses PRUs for audio: https://bela.io and how it works: https://hackaday.com/2016/04/13/bela-real-time-beaglebone-au...

Driving an LED matrix display: https://trmm.net/Category:LEDscape

Emulating an old Macintosh SE video board: https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video

Another sort of "minion core" in Allwinner ARM boards: http://linux-sunxi.org/AR100

Almost a month back there was a post on HN about company called Upmem which puts CPUs inside memory

Post:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766283

Tech use cases :- https://www.upmem.com/use-cases/

The OpenPOWER RISC systems fit nicely in the middle-tier niche.

Agree, though that's basically the last gasp of the UNIX RISC vendors. I wouldn't be surprised to see them shelved soon. Not that they aren't terrific products, but demand is what it is.

There's an opportunity for someone to sell "reasonably" secure hardware at this price point. Especially since Intel certainly isn't selling anything that fits this description.

I think AMD already has that covered with Epyc 2 (Rome) processors.

POWER is also known for being highly SMT, which could lead to them being even more prone to the issues that plagued Intel's implementation of hyperthreading. A single POWER9 core has 4 to 8 threads.

I would expect that it would actually be much harder to pull off such an attack, because you've got 4 threads fighting over the same resources instead of 2. These attacks essentially require statistical analysis, and the more noise there is the more difficult the attack would be. If you've got more than just the attacker and the victim threads running on a core than it's a noisier environment to pull off such an attack.

That’s a good point. Also imagine if the attacker controlled 7 out of the 8 threads on a core... maybe they would have even clearer statistics for analysis.

Or maybe POWER9 is completely secure.

My main point was that Epyc has already proven to be much more resistant to these attacks than Intel’s architecture, and it wouldn’t require dealing with porting your applications to run on a niche ISA, with very limited options to buy server hardware, and very few (if any) options to rent cloud instances on POWER9.

People who are troubled by security issues in Intel's Management Engine may also be suspicious of the firmware in AMD's roughly equivalent Platform Security Processor, which doesn't have a spotless record either. See, e.g., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/06/amd_cpu_psp_flaw/

I think we were talking about Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks. Not the PSP or IME, although those are concerning too.

Well, Spectre affected pretty much all processors except very slow ones (Cortex-A53) :)

It affected AMD's Zen architecture significantly less. A number of exploits that applied to Intel didn't apply at all to Zen, and the ones that did apply had less costly mitigations than Intel.

>"POWER is also known for being highly SMT, which could lead to them being even more prone to the issues that plagued Intel's implementation of hyperthreading."

Which SMT issues are you referring to here on Intels?

You’ve got an interesting point. I could see that middle ground being filled by customized silicon. It’s more possible now with things like customizable ARM chips.

More and more PAAS where you don't care if the server is a mainframe or a dell 1ru.

Nvidia dgx1?

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