The tragedy of all this is that a 2008 laptop should be more than enough for today's needs if web development wasn't greedy and was resource aware.
See performance benchmarks incomparison with AMD/Intel at: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t...
The Talos guys pop up in the comments on HN now and then and they're very pleasant.
That motherboard + cpu bundle costs $1732 (plus shipping, I guess).
I mean... Okay, it's super cool, but... I doubt that most people can affort that.
The ironic thing is that OP's posted article were news from 2009. Now, a decade later, we almost expect another total Intel CPU failure every year due to all the problems the architecture had while still promising sandboxed security.
But, as with all self-claimed "secure systems". If there's no audit, it cannot be seen as unsecure. Security through obscurity is pretty much the definition of how the hardware sector protects their IP these days.
And, of course, RISC V will be the solution. But honestly, I stopped believing in it years ago. As long as there's no computer system available in the same price range as the market leaders (aka Intel and AMD), you can forget about it.
Still, looking at the struggle ARM has had in spite of its ubiquity in even now fairly high performance devices, I will probably remain skeptical, for now, about such a transition. We have ARM NASes, routers, even competent servers! And yet... no real desktop towers. (At least a few exist, but I am thusfar unable to find any that are sold B2C retail or even second hand that look enticing.)