zlacker

>>Dyslex+(OP)
Classic Theo:

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes."

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582

>>jstewa+B6
I so wish x86 would die. But that seems so improbably these days that will likely never happen.

>>openpl+v7
ARM has gotten very competitive recently--especially some of Apple's SoCs. I think Google is even eying it for some of their data centers.

Unless the physicists find some way to breathe new life into Moore's law, I suspect we will gradually move back to the mainframe approach of implementing more and more of the low-level stuff directly in hardware.

>>jstewa+O7
ARM isn't going to displace Intel, or more correctly, x86, any time soon. My rationale is simple, in that there are many different ARM vendors, with many different (yes) ABIs and toolchains, no real industry/market push behind any of them specifically in this space. There is no consensus ARM ABI/chip/arch to replace x86. There are a few vendors fighting, hoping to do something. But no one whom is winning this war. So x86 remains, and IMO will remain, unchallenged.

Power series is a possible contender, but then you see the glory that is IBM behind it, and you know that no one wants to deal with that on the larger time scale (swap Intel for IBM? Why do this?)

Sparc is all but dead. MIPS is effectively dead. I've heard good things on RISC-V, though the question is, who will want to produce a non-differentiated CPU, when others can do this as well ... that is, you can't really extend RISC-V unless you break the ISA.

Then there are the toolchain issues.

Having experienced the Calxeda failure as a partner, realizing that the ARM marketing claims of low power Intel replacement were complete nonsense[1], I am not all that interested in climbing back on that particular heavily hyped horse.

[1] https://scalability.org/2013/12/the-evolving-market-for-hpc-... search for ARM.

>>hpcjoe+No
Why do you need one vendor? IMHO the Intel/AMD oligopoly (heavily tilted toward Intel) is one of the major problems with X86/X64.

ARM32 has "ARM hell" with multiple extensions but they've mostly fixed this in ARM64. You can definitely have compatible ABIs at the level users care about, namely application binaries.

Multiple vendors means price competition too.

IMHO the major stumbling block for ARM64 vs. X64 is that X64 has so much existing market share. Installed user-base is very powerful and everyone knows X64 will work so why take the chance? Hardware is cheaper than IT person-hours.

If someone fielded an X64-competitive ARM64 multi-core chip at a competitive price point it would probably get some traction.