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Let's say you've got something that needs to be computerised at a slightly higher level than an Arduino, with the computing part costing less than about $100-150, and ideally less than $50 (think Beaglebone, Odroid, PCEngine, Pi and clones, Pine, etc). It looks like the only choice is between ARM at the low end and x86 at the high end. Everything else has fallen by the wayside: The last MIPS-based product was the Ci20/Ci40 from 2015 and neither the hardware nor software have been updated since, PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it, Sparc is left with Fujitsu working on it for mainframes, and RISC-V is still a glint in everyone's eye - the few SBCs based on it cost more than a low-end server, and despite various enthusiastic press releases I can't see any timeline where I can get a $50 RISC-V device that performs the same as a $50 ARM-based one. And then there's the software support, once you leave the x86 world you've got, outside of various specialised RTOSes, Linux. A very few systems have one or two of the BSDs, often in a hit-and-miss manner, but that's it.
Has Linux + ARM/x86 killed everything else?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:44AM (3 children)
x86 also just works. It's not surprising that it's the platform that OSS OSes support first and foremost, it's got a (mostly) standard init and boot process and, barring oddball hardware settings, you can generally just drop a generic distro on an x86 system and it'll work, even if it doesn't necessarily use every exotic hardware feature out of the box. OTOH even with something as widespread as Arm you need custom builds for almost every single device and hardware config. An extreme example of this is the PI 3B+, which despite it's name was incompatible with the Pi 3B until they patched the kernel to handle it.
So x86 is never going to die, because "it just works" gets you a lot of support in the industry. I'm no great fan of x86 either, but it is annoying that if you need to run X, where X is some arbitrary OS or application, it's got a far greater chance of working on x86 than on anything else. Which was part of the motivation for my original post, why am I always pushed back onto x86 unless I want to spend a week with a kernel debugger trying to figure out why FooOS 12.7 hangs on boot on aarch64 system XYZ?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 20 2019, @02:58PM (2 children)
Perhaps not until the rise of the machines - when AI takes control they'll have no use for backwards compatibility with all the legacy crud, and they'll probably also want to "confuse the enemy (us)" with something like a simplified RISC architecture that just looks like patternless binary noise to meatbags...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday February 21 2019, @02:10AM (1 child)
Then we'll be back to 6502's [apl2bits.net].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:45PM
Fine by me... around about 1983 I was of the opinion that you could do just about anything that needed doing on a computer with a 6502 based system. They needed help with the graphics, and sound, and would also need a network co-processor to handle TCP/IP - ethernet today, but with those I could easily enough be posting this message to Soylent News from a 6502 based PC.
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