| I disagree. Its a totally different situation. With Unix you had lots of companies pushing Unix but not actually that much software. We are in totally different world. For almost all compute task there are large amount of existing products, both open and closed. And all of them already target specific profiles. If you develop something that is not in a standard profile you have a huge amount of work ahead of you to maintain a gigantic amount of software in forked state. Any many of those projects will simply not accept any proposals to up stream. And with the commercial software its worse because unless you achieve huge market dominance, those companies simply wont make a release for you. RISC-V is in the process of standardizing pretty much everything that is commonly used. And any company pushing an alternative to those standards is pretty much dead in the water. The waste majority of software in the world is already fine with what's standard now. And over the next 1-2 years lots of stuff that some software needs will be standard. Beyond that we are getting into highly specialized extensions. In those there will be competition and balkanization. But this simply wont effect the waste majority of users. Those things will be mostly about proprietary AI acceleration functions, special data types and so on. This has already happened but its simply not relevant to the waste majority of software in the world. But all those companies understand that if their thing isn't gone be standard, they will have issues in the long run. So in reality what we are seeing is that all these companies are involved in the standards discussion and try to find one standard. They don't want to fight each other when Nvidia, Intel, AMD are much better targets. |