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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

PCIe is great, yes.

Sadly with the rise of laptops with soldered-in-everything, and the popularity of android/iphone/tablet devices, I share some of layer8's worries about the future of the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem.

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On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

You can't really build a PC with parts other than x86. The only other platform you can really build from parts is Arm, with the high end Ampere server chips. Most other platforms are usually pretty highly integrated, you can't just swap parts or work on it.

Why not? Ram is ram, storage is storage.

You can't just buy an ARM or POWER motherboard from one place, a CPU from another place, some RAM sticks from another place, a power supply, a heatsink/fan, some kind of hard drive (probably NVMe these days), a bunch of cables, and put them all together in your basement/living room and have a working system. With x86, this is pretty normal still. With other architectures, you're going to get a complete, all-in-one system that either 1) has no expandability whatsoever, at least by normal users, or 2) costs more than a house in NYC and requires having technicians from the vendor to fly to your location and stay in a hotel for a day or two to do service work on your system for you because you're not allowed to touch it.

But what prevents it from working? I've been building PCs from parts since I was a child.

What about the POWER9-based Talos II systems? Extraordinary niche, I know, but aren't they PC-ish?

Hacking on that level is very different from building and upgrading PCs, being able to mix and match components from a wide range of different manufacturers. You won’t or can’t build a serious NAS, Proxmox homelab, gaming PC, workstation, or GPU/compute farm from Raspberry Pis or FPGAs.

We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.

Today sure. If you want to custom make "serious" system then x86 is likely your best bet. But this isn't about today, you can have that system right now if you want, it's still there, so this is about the future.

All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.

Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.

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