OpenPOWER opens further
OpenPOWER opens further
Posted Aug 26, 2019 9:09 UTC (Mon) by mchouque (subscriber, #62087)In reply to: OpenPOWER opens further by ermo
Parent article: OpenPOWER opens further
Yeah, it's the question I guess: too little, too late?
Because it's hard to beat the x86 mammoth for so many reasons (on top of my head):
- huge market share in servers/workstations
- Intel has more resources than pretty much anyone else
- AMD is now back in the game and started a core/performance/price war with intel
- x86 is "cheap"
- market shares for "cheaper" stuff will probably be taken by ARM and RISC-V
- so much time was invested in optimizing compiler, code and so on for x86 because that's what everyone has
- the Torvalds argument which is to say developper "will happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better,". So as long as you don't have cheap Power workstations, it'll be a moot point. I remember working on AlphaPC and pretty much nothing was 64 bits clean back then, it was a huge mess. Now that part is solved but not everything else...
Because it's hard to beat the x86 mammoth for so many reasons (on top of my head):
- huge market share in servers/workstations
- Intel has more resources than pretty much anyone else
- AMD is now back in the game and started a core/performance/price war with intel
- x86 is "cheap"
- market shares for "cheaper" stuff will probably be taken by ARM and RISC-V
- so much time was invested in optimizing compiler, code and so on for x86 because that's what everyone has
- the Torvalds argument which is to say developper "will happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better,". So as long as you don't have cheap Power workstations, it'll be a moot point. I remember working on AlphaPC and pretty much nothing was 64 bits clean back then, it was a huge mess. Now that part is solved but not everything else...
I definitely get the appeal for the Googles of the world to challenge Intel and for niche (internal) products, and for myself because honestly I don't really need an intel compatible CPU but in the long run, I am not sure it'll go anywhere...