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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

The capital requirements for the creation of a modern high-speed semiconductor fabrication facility, and the corresponding integrated circuit design make ‘open hardware’, or large number of interchangeable competitors unlikely.

How and why should software be decoupled from hardware when there are so few hardware suppliers?

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And the situation has only gotten worse since everyone and their coffee machine is running on x86. It is high time we created alternatives.

What are you talking about? ARM has overtaken x86 in volume I'm pretty sure, but certainly in edge type applications like coffee machines

Aren't coffee machines and other "dumb" appliances often MIPS? Even my internet router has a MIPS controller (Fritz!Box by AVM).

The answer is: it depends.

Some are ARM, some MIPS, some SH, some even are PPC.

I guess the availability of Android is making a lot of "dumb appliances" run on ARM even if they don't need a screen.

But for basic dumb appliances, PIC, MSP, Atmel processors (either the old 8051 or newer archs)

I think that was only true a few years ago. Everything now, from router, NAS to other appliance are moving towards ARM.

MIPS and PPC are still being used only because of cost ( vendors selling other chips ). The replacement cycles is very very slow, but the trend is pretty clear.

I work with (consumer) internet gateways and the like. In Broadcom's SoCs the main chip is ARM. They have been moving away from MIPS for a number of years.

I'm less familiar with other vendors but I briefly worked with a Qualcomm-based device a few years ago and that was also ARM.

There might be some dedicated cores in those SoCs or devices for e.g. accelerators or Wi-Fi handling. I've seen ARC there but I have the feeling these are also moving to ARM.

Could be, but I've been shocked by some of the products I've seen that have a full blown ARM in them these days. My friend bought a mouse with a full 32 ARM MCU in it.

> And the situation has only gotten worse since everyone and their coffee machine is running on x86. It is high time we created alternatives.

That is why a third semiconductor company (besides Intel and AMD) creating x86 chips has come into existence: Zhàoxīn (兆芯)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zhaoxin&oldid=949...

I think the only piece of software I use that’s tied to x86 is the discord native client (which is pretty dumb since it’s an electron app.) This is something I’m (hopefully) not using anymore after quarantine.

Personally I have plenty of arm machines. Part of the reason I switched from fvwm to cwm was because I couldn’t build fvwm on one machine and move it to the other.

In college they asked for x86 windows binaries for lots of the assignments and I always cross compiled from an arm machine (because that’s where I had the toolchain set up and didn’t feel like duplicating it on my x86 laptop.) If you feel stuck on x86 use more FOSS.

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