[roninb]

I've been waiting to run across someone who may be able to scratch an itch that's been in the back of my head for a few months now and you seem like you might be able to help me out...

Would the developing J-Cores[0] being worked on by 0pf[1] be able to catch up (I'm thinking more along the lines of performance of recent mobile processors, not desktop processors)? I am under the impression that, while a monumental task is ahead of them, they have the boon of hindsight. Of a dozen processor architectures competing back then only a handful survived the decade and only 2 or 3 are being fabbed now (i386/amd64, ARMvX, and IBM?) and they can base decisions on the successes and failures of other chipsets, speeding up the development process. Is that fallacious thinking?

I know most of their goals are along the lines of getting custom fabs down to $20k and making the term "penny processor" a household term, but is there potential (read:hope) for a secure, performant (whatever that means to you) processor that we can use for daily computing without fear of a hardware-based backdoor?