"Opening up even small parts of the chipmaking process is anathema to many in the $400 billion industry. But if enough companies commit to an #OpenSource approach, that could create a shared pool of knowledge that may be hard for #Intel and #Arm to keep up with."
- #IanKing
techxplore.com/news/2020-01-in

Go #RiskV!

"#WesternDigital Corp., one of the largest makers of data-storage devices, plans to use the technology in some products and has open-sourced its designs. #Alibaba has announced a chip based on RISC#V and several universities have published open-source designs.

There are 200 #Chinese members of the #RISCvFoundation, a non-profit group created in 2015 to promote the use of the instruction set. An Indian project developed six processors using the technology."

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#ShowerThoughts we've pushed back against #SPOV (Single Points of Failure) in digital technology for years, and won:
* we defeated mainframes with personal computers and #InternetProtocols (TCP/IP)
* we defeated the #IBM monopoly on the PC with Windows-compatible generics
* we defeated #AOL and #Compuserve with the web protocols
* we defeated the #Windows monopoly with the #Linux kernel, which enabled OS diversity on user devices (#GNU, #Android, #Sailfish, and more)

#x86 processors are next.

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@strypey It's not all rosy though.

* Too much interest in "the cloud" by the majority of computer users.
* We're seeing more IM moving to platforms that use web-based clients rather than a stable protocol something like libpurple can easily clone and keep up with.
* Microsoft requiring locked-down Secure Boot on ARM-based devices to get Windows Logo certification and cheap OEM licenses (and, one would guess, any other non-x86 ISAs).
* etc.

@ssokolow it's a long and frustrating process and its not inevitable, but it's happening because thousands of people are putting in the work to make it happen.
* There's never been more interest in #federated and #P2P replacements for the #datafarms than there has been over the last year, nor more libre community-hosting services springing up.
* there is a #libPurple plugin for #Matrix: github.com/matrix-org/purple-m
* Breaking the chip monopoly breaks the remains of the x86/Windows monopoly

@strypey

1. True.

2. I was thinking more about how many people are on services like Discord, as opposed to services like ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN Messenger, etc., where they had to push an update to an offline client before they could change the protocol.

3. Not as much as one would hope. One of the big things that determines real-world adoption on the desktop is games, and it's a lot harder to kick x86 than to kick Windows, since you can't dual-boot/Wine/Proton the x86 vs. other ISA distinction.

@ssokolow
1. Indeed ;)

2. Good point. But most of these services have client apps too (eg FB MeSinger)

3. The lion's share of x86 PCs are not used for gaming, it's now a specialized subset served mainly by custom desktop rigs. Also, games target Windows because it's common, not because it's a good gaming OS. Once cheaper, better GNU/Linux/ Risk-V PCs become more common than Windows rubbish, gaming will migrate with everything else.

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@strypey

2. But, these days, those apps are very often specialized browsers, which make it trivial for the vendor to update compared to the old native clients.

3. However, the thing that has always allowed Windows to beat out its competitors was backward-compatibility with users' existing software... be it DOS software on a machine with Win16 or Win16 software on a Win32 machine. The whole rationale for Win9x's relationship with DOS was was legacy compatibility.

devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewt

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