Subj : Re: Operating Systems
To   : Digital Man
From : tenser
Date : Fri Apr 12 2024 12:12 am

On 10 Apr 2024 at 10:47p, Digital Man pondered and said...
 
 DM>   Re: Re: Operating Systems
 DM>   By: tenser to Nightfox on Thu Apr 11 2024 06:23 am
 DM> 
 DM>  > Microsoft is not stupid.  They see the trend and will react
 DM>  > accordingly, for as long as they intend to keep Windows as a going
 DM>  > concern (likely forever, but probably in a somewhat diminished
 DM>  > form, perhaps moving in favor of Linux over time).
 DM> 
 DM> Microsoft also has created versions of Windows NT for MIPS, Alpha, i860,
 DM> PowerPC and Itanium. So their ability to "see the trend and react
 DM> accordingly" isn't fool proof. :-)

Ah, i860....  I needed that belly laugh.  They made a lot of margin
dollars on that Alpha port, though.  And of course, everyone thought
that Itanium was going to be the future; can't really fault 'em
there.

 DM>  > What you see _now_ has nothing to do with what you'll see in 2038.
 DM> 
 DM> 14 years will go by pretty quick. 2010 wasn't so long ago now. I started
 DM> working on ARM devices and hearing about how ARM was going to take over
 DM> everything in 1999 (25 years ago, about). Maybe RISC-V and ARM will take
 DM> over everything, maybe not. I could easily imagine 14 years now being
 DM> very similar in balance of processor architectures and market share to
 DM> what we see now. <shrug>

I some sense, ARM did kinda take over everything.  Consider all
the places that you used to stick a 68k or a Dragonball or 8085;
what's in those now?  Mostly Cortex-M, and RISC-V is coming up
in the uCtlr space (those WDC chips look pretty nice, and I saw
something the other day that looked like it'd give an M7-class
chip a run for its money).  On the high-end, ARM's making serious
inroads with the hyperscalers, China's bowing out of the x86
world, and Intel keeps tripping over it's own feet; the big wild
card in my mind is AMD, which stumbled back from the dead with
Zen.  But even there, the PSP is an ARM core, not x86, so.... :-D

Of course it's impossible to predict the future, and I could be
wrong.  But I just don't see x86 retaining its dominant position
for that long.

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 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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