[tenebrisalietum]

So the whole reason we have general purpose CPUs is because in the 50's/60's they were hulking giant beasts both in size and power consumption - computing was only economical on these devices if shared.

Things shrunk and now everyone has a computer in their pocket - which in most cases is a window to the next generation of hulking giant beast - the "cloud".

So if I'm going to develop applications for the cloud instead of PCs or mainframes, it's going to need to be general purpose--because it's shared and rented by the minute/CPU cycle. Just like the mainframes of old. So some notion of general-purposeness will always be there.

Maybe hardware will support and fossilize around programming languages? One can argue that x86 is doing that and is essentially an "SOC" for C.

[PaulHoule]

It seems to me that "general purpose" was a big driver of PC's and phones.

PCs are good for word processing, games, scientific computing, tracking satellites, etc.

The appeal of a smartphone is that it replaces a dumb phone, a walkman, TV set, video game console, watch, and many other things.

[notTheAuth]

General purpose won as it was realized monolithic chips that did it all were infeasible due to manufacturing technology in the past.

Overtime the political story about market winners took over, and technology development became mired in MBA bean counting to extract wealth, as it became clear the public would happily consume what was fed them via PC screens like we did TV.

None of these textual objects or CPUs will mean anything in the future. Manufacturing technology will evolve to provide “end to end” computing gadgets, black boxes that need user interface code at most, to contextualizing outputs. We’re subsidizing a process of technical evolution at scale.

Describing this all through the words of contemporary political discourse is missing the point.