MFW all of Western society is built on top of the premise of Microsoft Windows and Intel
Not all of it. Just personal consumer desktops.
But yeah mindshare wise Windows has become synonymous with PC which is just a shame.
I have high hopes. Apple out of the blue just dropped all amd64 computers and also blew their entire competition in the dust.
In 2018-19 this was unimaginable now it's accepted.
Of course RISC-V is the goal which has been progressing really well (you can run a desktop on RISC-V on Debian).
x86 32 bit cpus have their death clock set at 2038 so those will die on their own.
Stay hopeful!
Unless RISC-V widens the instruction set, it will never be used in high perf desktops. Like, there's RISC and then there's RISC-V.
Fuck I really hope so
Posting so I can remember to maybe come back and write a rant about PCs later after I get some sleep (if anyone wants to hear)
Death to Amerikkka, death to PCs
:intel-cool: :amd-cool:
It's weird that Intel hasn't announced any RISC-V project. They sponsor and support it I think. Maybe they've got a secret project working on it. Or maybe they want to transition to just running fabs. Who knows. It's ARM that's really going to be squeezed by RISC-V.
Bu my understanding is that the transition from x86_64 isn't ready yet because hardware designs (performance) and software aren't quite there yet.
Maybe. ARM has been getting a lot more popular in recent years. You see it in laptops (Apple's M-series chips are ARM) and in Datacenters (Graviton in AWS for example). NVIDIA has its Grace CPU that is also ARM. Not to mention almost every phone in existence.
ARM is a step up, but it's still just moving from feudalism to capitalism. Hopefully China can bring RISC-V to the world!
Show
truely baffling that the OG pentium from the 90s was the last true CISC x86 processor from intel. the pentium PRO and pentium2 onwards are risc cores under the hood
it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of x86_64
International Bummer Machines.(Now I want to see a comic that's just Kelly being a 80286 die-hard and implying being able to exit protected mode is satanic)
security vulnerabilities, not as energy efficient as other ISAs like ARM, bloated to support instructions that nobody uses anymore or maybe ever at all
15 years ago you used to be able to order the architecture manuals from Intel for free. It was a five volume set. The instruction set alone filled two >1" thick volumes, covering each instruction in roughly two pages.
CISC is bad. Billions and billions of transistors, and for what?
At least you can burn the manuals in the winter when the proxy war has made gas prohibitively expensive
LoongArch will win.
See: China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers
They don't link a source and I looked for one and couldn't find any public press releases or anything from official sources, but maybe it's because I'm searching with English search terms. If anyone is from China and knows anything about this I'd love to know more about it. I wouldn't doubt it being real though, they've been talking about doing it for a while now but I didn't expect them to to it this quickly. Let them cook, if there's one country that has the ability and will to pull off a move away from x86/x86_64, it's China.
Here is some LoongArch nerd material if anyone is interested: Are We Loong Yet? and the LoongArch Reference Manual
the fate of capitalism and x86_64 are intertwined, one cannot fail without the other. be the change you wanna see.
Will we ever get the ability to boot live media or OS installers on Arm and/or RISC-V boards/PCs? I really like being able to boot a repair or live OS from thumb drives and install from them. One of the big frustrations I have with my Pi boards is having to flash the OS to even just try one out. Stuff like Tails, Hiren's, and Rescuezilla are nice to have on x86, but Arm/RISC don't have that option. Which sucks since Apple has really shown that options other than x86 can do some heavy workloads.
You're just talking about most SoCs. The UEFI spec already supports ARM and RISC-V and I think there's already at least one RISC-V SoC that supports UEFI. If there are ever RISC-V laptops/desktops, I think it's likely that they'll support UEFI.
Here's some random thing I found on Google: https://forum.rvspace.org/t/unlocking-new-possibilities-starfive-visionfive-2-sbc-now-supports-tianocore-edk-ii-uefi/2779/3
That is at least good to see. I am just concerned that if a lot of companies just stay used to not having a user accessible UEFI/BIOS, it will be nothing but like we see on Android devices. They have a recovery that can be booted, but setup to lock out easily changing OS after the OEM ends support after a couple of years. And it doesn't help that all the major apps are coded to break if you have the gaul to extend the life of your device. Or for wanting to be able to fully access said device to remove or add what you want. Does it mean that ARM/RISC laptops or desktops are going to be treated the same? No, and I hope not. I just really hate how much we are starting to see how much Microsoft, Apple, and Google are going out of their way to hide shit on current releases. So OEMs and the big desktop OS makers locking us out seems very possible to me. Sorry for this rant.
