[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.