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by prongletown
2456 days ago
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>We need to break their grip on the desktop/server/laptop market. I'm curious as to why you think this "needs" to happen? I have my own reasons, for example, openness of ISA and IP from up top at the browser all the way down to the firmware on the chip; however, I'm curious to hear yours. |
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- A monoculture of HW leaves us more susceptible to security issues. See Spectre and Meltdown. While not eradicated by other hardware designs, the problem is generally mitigates. See relative difference in what Spectre and Meltdown affected as evidence.
- A monoculture of HW may lead us to local maxima of capability. As we approach theoretical maximums of the hardware in specific materials areas, we are presented with more and more complex architectures to eek out smaller and smaller gains. This makes the pursuit of alternative architectures more and more costly to invest in from a business standpoint, knowing that it may be years or decades before it starts to compete favorably with existing products. The more concurrent alternate architectures that can be pursued at the same time will allow for a much shorter time to market for alternatives, should a specific niche fit their capabilities well. (e.g. it's taken a decade, but Apple is making ARM competitive to the point it may be a viable laptop processor competitor, possibly even the better option at some point).
- Multiple avenues of research often yield benefits of cross-pollination. CISC/RISC in the past ended up converging somewhat in the middle as they adopted the best features of each other. The most lines of research we have (and used in the market, so they get sufficient funding and attention) the more likely we are to see benefits for all related hardware.