initramfs

Reminds me of the video chat in Metal Gear Solid 1 https://youtu.be/59ialBNj4lE?t=21

(I prefer 32-bit because most applications don't need more than 4GB RAM, but I guess 64-bit could be useful too)

Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago- it's when a novel feature gets prioritized that the fundamental stability of the design gets overlooked.

And yet, that's what linux did in 1991- they shared the code, lowering the cost of buying an operating system. I wouldn't say there is zero incentive, but it certainly lowers the incentive without a profitable complementary hardware implementation that can be sold for less than the proprietary isa when there is a royalty free license allows the manufacturer/fab designer "mask rights" to get a small margin within the difference of the foundry/ISA proprietary core competitor.

My point is that the commercial lawsuits between Qualcomm and ARM are just one part of a larger geopolitical issue- x86 lost the mobile market 20 years ago- the only reason Intel is surviving is national security- they could have been bankrupt had they not been propped up by a pre-emptive Defense Production Act. Consumers benefit because now they have the choice between more ARM software and x86 products, but I think that is just a short term benefit. Eventually the architecture cuts off support for old software, such as x86-32 bit, and now with X86S, they are only supporting 64 bit. So in the long term, it's better to have options. WINE was developed because of a fear of repeating the Irish Potato Famine ( a mono culture: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Importance-of-Wi...), in economic terms. In other words, just because Intel might not want to sell 32 bit chips anymore, doesn't mean others might not want/need to use some application that only exists on one platform (and all the engineers retired- with lost code/unported code).

There's an AI bubble: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-w... When a number of companies get investments and start to produce chips that add little extra value- slightly faster chips in lower power with 10 different architectures than run windows 11, then there is less justification to continue investing in companies that do not produce interesting new hardware because the end result is that they are being shaped by windows 11, rather than a unique feature- automotive efficiency for in car apps, sure, but laptops that run Oryon that are hard to boot linux aren't any more interesting than an x86S processor that can only boot linux 6.8 etc.

Is this your idea of "this is why we can't have nice things"?

The ATX motherboard form factor was developed in 1995 by Intel. Today motherboards are still made by AMD and Intel that meet that size. Previous attempts to make a modular cell phone by Google's Project Ara ended in 2017.

https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-femtotx-motherboard-s... If a system reuses even 10%, that still reduces the waste that goes into manufacturing a new replacement, such as a system fan or chassis.

"What is this processor? The SuperH processor is a Japanese design developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's. As a second generation hybrid RISC design it was easier for compilers to generate good code for than earlier RISC chips, and it recaptured much of the code density of earlier CISC designs by using fixed length 16 bit instructions (with 32 bit register size and address space), using microcoding to allow some instructions to perform multiple clock cycles of work. (Earlier pure risc designs used one instruction per clock cycle even when that served no purpose but to make the code bigger and exhaust the encoding space.)

Hitachi developed 4 generations of SuperH. SH2 made it to the United states in the Sega Saturn game console, and SH4 powered the Sega Dreamcast. They were also widely used in areas outside the US cosumer market, such as the japanese automative industry.

But during the height of SuperH's development, the 1997 asian economic crisis caused Hitachi to tighten its belt, eventually partnering with Mitsubishi to spin off its microprocessor division into a new company called "Renesas". This new company did not inherit the Hitachi engineers who had designed SuperH, and Renesas' own attempts at further development on SuperH didn't even interest enough customers for the result to go ito production. Eventually Renesas moved on to new designs it had developed entirely in-house, and SuperH receded in importance to them... until the patents expired."

The company’s self-declared mission is to use reversible computing to create near zero-energy chips for generative AI and always-on edge devices."

Also, Ambiq Micro has a 2MB MRAM (+2.75MB SRAM) processor https://www.top-electronics.com/en/apollo4-blue-plus-192-mhz... that can run on solar power (it uses ~5uA/MHz, Cortex M4) and Andreas Eriksen got LISP text editor to run on 384K RAM with the Apollo3 https://hackaday.io/project/184340-potatop and 4'4" Memory In Pixel Display.

I read that lithium-ion capacitors have much faster charging than regular li-on. https://www.tindie.com/products/jaspersikken/solar-harvestin... (and longer lifespan)

There are other processors, such as Ambiq Micro, but they are Cortex M4 and M55: https://www.top-electronics.com/en/apollo510-soc-250mhz-3-75...