Server hardware had (still has somewhere): SPARC from Sun, PowerPC from IBM, HPPA from HP, etc... See for example list of supported architectures for Debian4: https://www.debian.org/releases/etch/hppa/ch02s01.html.en
But it feels like amd64 is winning today. Don't you think that eventually one of these architectures you're talking about (Google's, Apple's, Samsung's, CCP's) will win over others, one way or another?
x86_64 didn’t win on technical superiority alone.
it's called "ARMada" for a reason
Now, the fact that vertical integration usually implies closed doors is relevant, yeah; but I don't think anyone is denying credit anywhere, and I think it's important to acknowledge upsides.
Does the recent removal of apps [1] from russian appstore ring some bells?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...
Only sometimes. Have you ever tried unlocking a Pixelbook to run a different OS?
It needs a custom cable and significant RE efforts by the community.
For the average consumer — everything.
I'm kind of torn between the two opinions. I wish my iPhone would be able to run anything I want to run. I also recognize that nobody forced me to buy this iPhone.
Mobile phones are mandated to have emergency calling functionality. Maybe in the future we'll have some "general purpose computing as a human right" law.
> I'm kind of torn between the two opinions.
I am not torn. Because of us two, apparently only one lives in an authoritarian country. When your computing device blocks you from accessing anything not praising the current regime, it kinda devalues the user-friendly interface and manufacturing quality. Shiny chains are still chains.
I also welcome tech companies trying to extract every tiny bit of performance from the silicon that powers computing today. It may lead to developing something incompatible with existing solutions, but surely no regime on this planet is to blame here.
From my perspective Apple just made it so non Apple hardware couldn't get fast CPU's for another year.
M1 is a 5nm CPU that is faster than 7nm low power CPU's, and uses less power than 7nm high power CPU's, but to me it isn't obvious that it will perform significantly better than others 5nm low power CPU's when those hits the market. Others 5nm will hit the market once Apples contracts to use all 5nm fabs runs out, but before then we are stuck with only Apple having that tech.
You might think that this situation sounds great, but it doesn't look that great to me. I'd prefer if Apple didn't work to lock in hardware components and tech as they do.
Yes without Apple’s money TSMC would have still built 5nm, but likely a few years later.
ex. https://wccftech.com/apple-secures-3nm-tsmc-chip-production/
Because humanity and every company now has access to 5nm infrastructure? Because Apple created the greatest marketing campaign TSMC ever benefited from? Because Apple proved that custom silicon design is no longer fools gold and can be profitable and competitive? Because Apple showcased that more instruction parallelism, heterogeneous core types, co-processors, etc are all beneficial design choices and every competing company can take advantage of them? Because Intel is now competing with TSMC? Because AMD and Intel might lose the monopoly on x86 and need to compete? Because Rosetta 2 and universal binaries pave the way for Apple to invest and eventually transition to RISC-5 or …?
Do you not see any of these points as great? If not, why not? I’ll use your reasons to try to come up with better examples.
I guess that spareparts are harder to get and third party repairing will be almost non existent. It'll also make new competitors with good concepts harder to come into industry (steam deck, framework laptop).
Imagine if every car vendor (bmw, mercedes, toyota, etc) start making a very specific tire that can only be used by their own model.
In a world where all device manufacturers design (or even fab) their own CPUs and make their own software/cloud services (we're already there in some ways, sadly), any newcomer would have to start with transistors and work their way up to a long-term cloud ecosystem. That probably won't happen any time soon, standalone chip designers will continue to be competitive or at least good enough, but you can see how proprietary chips can actually make competition harder in some ways.
Of all the things he said, I found that simple idea to be the most surprising. The internet is already being dominated by a handful of cloud providers, few domain registers and select social media.
It is damn difficult to go against the tide and even though we are falling off a cliff.
Isn't it already like this? We already have to make our apps in Obj C / Swift for iOS and Java/Kotlin for Android. You can use C/C++ libraries but you typically need to recompile them anyways. So if iOS or Android switch to different CPU architectures what's the problem? We will have to change our build processes, but the platforms are already fragmented.
All of them will be 100% compatible with SaaS over the internet offerings, no end user will notice.
Once you are deep in a vendor lock-in, you are trapped to use whatever he allows you to.
No, not in any useful form it can’t.
And any architectural changes could require another lengthy reverse engineering process rendering these devices unbootable with non-Apple OSes until then.
I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay.
I make this distinction because this is precisely the issue being discussed.
> No, not in any useful form it can’t.
Yes, it can? Ex. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-debian-linux - you're welcome to point out that drivers for the rest of the system are a WIP, but the CPU is fine and the rest is coming along.
Progress is being made by REs such as marcan and others but it’s not useful, yet. And I speculate that by the time it is solid, the M1X/M2 machines will be out and a bunch of additional REing will be done.
This talk is about the PS4, similar in concept https://youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA
And yet you can't run alternate OSes on iPhones and iPads because of Apple's efforts to make sure that you can't.
We're relying on the goodwill of companies that have all the financial incentives in the world to lock users out of the hardware they own, and those are the same companies that already lock users out of their mobile devices.
Can it run native Windows?
Alternate OSes can't access all hardware functions.
We already have that problem with Linux support for battery life and hibernate.
It doesn't work in the vast majority of laptops, while with Windows it does.
It also happens with Smartphones, to the point that alternate OSes for Smartphones have trouble doing the most basic functions, like making calls and using GPS.
Just because it can be installed, it doesn't mean that everything will magically work.
> It doesn't work in the vast majority of laptops, while with Windows it does.
That's kind of my point. The status quo is already not ideal, this doesn't seem necessarily worse than the status quo, as long as Apple and Google aren't overly restrictive in preventing alternate OSes (which of course is a big if).