After a decade of being assured that the short support window for Android devices had a root cause in the lack of support device makers received from Qualcomm, they are the last company that I want to see buy Intel.
Meanwhile x86 has maintained backwards compat for (checks calendar) yeah decades. Literally decades. With standards up the wazoo to avoid the disaster that is the Arm ecosystem without UEFI or something like it.
Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.
Historically this backwards compatibility was a competitive moat for intel – having a large supply of weird instructions with some undocumented behaviour thrown in makes it more expensive to make competing chips.
To be clear, I wasn’t claiming anything about operating systems. Merely that adding many weird instructions was a strategy intel used to try to make the jobs of amd and centaur and suchlike harder.
Some ARM systems (mainly servers) do support ACPI; allowing for one image to run on multiple processors and devices.
However… ACPI is apparently a pretty awful thing to implement. When it doesn’t work, or mistakes are made (looking at my own 13th gen HP laptop right now - borked ACPI tables means unpatchable broken sleep on Linux), then it’s pure frustration.
Device trees on the other hand are much more binary. Either everything generally works or it doesn’t at all. It’s a valid approach.
Flawed implementations of open specs can be worked around with things like quirk tables. A spec held hostage by a non-cooperating vendor cannot. In the world of ARM SoCs, bad vendors won't even provide a device tree, just a binary image compiled from a patched kernel.
nobody is a saint on this matter. both parties act the way they do to support their business position.
short-term support helps qualcomm sell more because their customers want to sell more phones to the same users. on the other hand, for the industrial partners there is an "LTS" model of support given (side effect being fairphone 5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320800).
long-term support through backwards compatibility helps intel because they can sell new chips with the assurance that the ancient, unmaintained industrial software continues to run in a shinier box.
Intel squandered its dominance on the CPU market for decades. Qalcomm sucking the remaining life of it would be a fitting end for a player that lost its way.
Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.
Qualcomm should buy capacity from Intel, Intel can wind down x86 slowly as it shifts to foundry (implementation of the how is Intel’s core engineering product this whole time)
Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.