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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a gamer but I would guess it depends on the graphics settings. At lower resolutions, and with less lighting features, etc. one can probably turn a GPU bound game into a CPU bound game.
It's interesting to ponder if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The knee jerk reaction is this is all very unhealthy but I wonder if it is really. Imagine we were talking about back-up quarterbacks in the NFL. That individual is probably one heck of a quarterback and athlete, and they did excellent in lesser teams which is what got them into the NFL in the first place. But, they are a back-up quarter back in the NFL, not a starter. If they continue to remain a back-up quarterback, should they be PIP'ed or not?
In an NBA reference, the fallen elite athletes from US teams would venture to Europe or Asia and play there. They’re still getting paid, and the European teams are better because of it.
There are 1000’s of accounts where these solutions architects would be better than the existing architects. Instead of sending them down into the minor leagues, we are firing them. Seems short sighted, and a waste of talent.
You only ever have one quarterback playing for a team at once. no matter how successful the team becomes. presumably with a company, you are constantly growing and should need to grow your talent pool constantly. And how do I know that next year's new recruits are going to be as good as this year's pip'ed employees?
I think the trouble is that most teams don’t need this level of performance. They don’t need the top .0001%. Those teams are the edge cases not even worth talking about.
And more importantly, not the ones you want to model your team after.
Yes Congressman, we agree to take over Intel fabs if you agree to drop this antitrust nonsense. And we would like our $20B from Google back too.