[h2odragon]

The fall of Intel.

For my entire life (born in 1972, same timescale) Intel has managed to keep a leash on what personal computers could be. The few times it's slipped have led to exciting advances, but they got them under control again quickly.

The explosion of held up potential that will happen when they shatter should (I hope) make the AT&T breakup look small.

[gremloni]

In my opinion, this would be terrible. All I envision is walled gardens and no American made chips. Intel fostered an era of truly personal computing where people owned their hardware.

[WhisperingShiba]

I didnt realize that people felt this way. In what way do you imagine personal computing would change if intel was broken up? I can't even imagine what vision you have in this regard.

[h2odragon]

If intel had been even just a little less rapacious, things like many alternative architectures might've existed for longer (Alpha was kewl!).

I can't do justice to the examples of bad faith marketing they've indulged in, anti-competitive acquisitions of promising companies that then are buried, architecture choices made for marketing gains that saddle programmers with years of boneheaded bullshit, delightful tricks like "optimized" compilers with "oopsie" slow code paths for non-intel cpus...

Perhaps there's a good intel bashing thread someone could reference?

As to how things will change, we're seeing some of it already; we've got multiple micro-controllers on the market and cheap single board computers that do everything a desktop needs. I'm expecting some backplane bus to take over soon and the definition of what a computer is to become even harder to nail down.

[WhisperingShiba]

Am I wrong in thinking alternative architectures could make it harder to develop software, and a lot of boneheadedness is a result of backwards compatibility? We already have ASICs for very specific processing applications, so I'm not sure society is suffering a huge opportunity cost. That said; I'm not a computer engineer or architect, or even anything close. Also the 'oopsies slow paths' thing is actually business horse shit, and I have heard that rumor substantiated by quite a number of people.

I'm down for open source architectures, but our manufacturing technology is not ready to support DIY processors yet, even at low speeds. Solving the manufacturing process could go a long way to spurring competitive processor architectures.

[sircastor]

I’m also interested in what kind of world you might imagine. If Intel were broken up, I imagine the processor group would remain in-tact. I don’t really feel like Intel really has any other major successful businesses (though I’m pretty ignorant in this space)