The ISA isn’t the biggest problem. The memory model (do I need to use memory fences here? How many different kinds of those are there?) can introduce hard to reproduce bugs.
Also, relative strengths of the OS (if thread creation is relatively slow, it may not be worthwhile to multi-thread a short code fragment; one OS might have three kinds of spin locks, another only two; if there are many registers, you may need larger stacks per thread, and may want to limit the number of threads in memory-constrained devices) are bigger ones.
Interop relies on a single standard as a benchmark and history tells us that people are incapable of being content with a standard that isn't exactly how they imagined it and would rather fragment and live and die on their own hill than play nice.
> Interop relies on a single standard as a benchmark
Not so! Imagine that each processor is made by their own company (to simplify it) and has its own ISA. Thus, processor A can emulate processors B and C, B can emulate A and C, and C can emulate A and B.
I'm just amazed how we have two clipboards when I use Linux. Like we can't decide something so stupidly simple.
The two different clipboards are fantastic! Select then middle click is one of the things I miss most on Windows, and it's really convenient that that preserves the copy-paste clipboard.
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/
I am so glad to hear they are fixing this in wayland and there will be only one clipboard by default going forward.
Re:Is it time for open processors?
by andrew3726 on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:44AM
(#16184913)
Well, that's been fixed with Wayland, right?
How?
You just have one.
I'm running on Wayland at this moment (Gnome 3 on Fedora), and just tested on the terminal. It has two: I can copy something with Ctrl-Shift-C, then select something else, then paste with Ctrl-Shift-V, then paste with middle-click; the selection didn't override what I had copied, and middle-click pasted what was selected.
So you still have two, at least with Gnome 3 on Wayland.
Except wait, maybe this is just my cynicism talking, but I have a feeling intel has the resources to just plough forward with x86 and prevent any competition from gaining a foothold in the markets where they hold dominance (laptop, desktop, server). ARM continues to dominate mobile and perhaps some small portion of servers. POWER and SPARC stay in their little niches. Perhaps RISC-V makes its way into a couple of embedded appliances. And that's it, for the foreseeable future.