>We need to break their grip on the desktop/server/laptop market.

I'm curious as to why you think this "needs" to happen?

I have my own reasons, for example, openness of ISA and IP from up top at the browser all the way down to the firmware on the chip; however, I'm curious to hear yours.

Not the GP, but I can think of a few reasons:

- A monoculture of HW leaves us more susceptible to security issues. See Spectre and Meltdown. While not eradicated by other hardware designs, the problem is generally mitigates. See relative difference in what Spectre and Meltdown affected as evidence.

- A monoculture of HW may lead us to local maxima of capability. As we approach theoretical maximums of the hardware in specific materials areas, we are presented with more and more complex architectures to eek out smaller and smaller gains. This makes the pursuit of alternative architectures more and more costly to invest in from a business standpoint, knowing that it may be years or decades before it starts to compete favorably with existing products. The more concurrent alternate architectures that can be pursued at the same time will allow for a much shorter time to market for alternatives, should a specific niche fit their capabilities well. (e.g. it's taken a decade, but Apple is making ARM competitive to the point it may be a viable laptop processor competitor, possibly even the better option at some point).

- Multiple avenues of research often yield benefits of cross-pollination. CISC/RISC in the past ended up converging somewhat in the middle as they adopted the best features of each other. The most lines of research we have (and used in the market, so they get sufficient funding and attention) the more likely we are to see benefits for all related hardware.

A slightly different framing than openness that is used from time to time is owner controllable. Older x86 systems were underdocumented, but at least there was the hope of reverse engineering to replace boot firmware, limit device firmware and develop libre device drivers. Not so on today's OEM systems, the CPUs are coming cryptographically fused to only accept the OEMs boot firmware and with locked down, privileged, security co-processors.

I don't want to live in a world where everything new is an iThing that says I can't help you Dave. That could turn retro-computing from a hobby to an essential life skill to preserve freedom!

> I don't want to live in a world where everything new is an iThing that says I can't help you Dave.

That sounds like the "war on general-purpose computing" that Cory Doctorow was talking about a few years back.

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

Those are pretty much my reasons as well (it's just icing on the cake that it's an architecture I have long familiarity with).

> I'm curious as to why you think this "needs" to happen?

I think Intel has been too dominant for too long. They've gotten complacent and sloppy, as shown by microcode-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown.

Also, I figure breaking Intel's dominance will further marginalize Microsoft. I still hold a grudge over how horrible an experience Windows 98 was.

> breaking Intel's dominance will further marginalize Microsoft

Microsoft is not stupid, Microsoft has ported everything to ARMv8 already, both for the Snapdragon laptops and the servers (which they only use internally for now, but I hope Amazon's Graviton is pushing them in the ARM-public-cloud direction)

And by everything… I mean not just Windows, but even SQL Server now: https://twitter.com/ASGConf/status/1173163007733616641

Huh, 98SE was the sweet spot in the 9x series.

Fwiw, the NT kernel was designed for portability from the ground up. During initial development they targeted x86 and the i680 and it has been ported to pretty much any CPU that had relevance over time. Itanium, Alpha, ARM and.... PowerPC. While that branch is probably not maintained currently it would be pretty easy for Microsoft to get that going again.

I'm still hoping they'll do the smart thing and fork FreeBSD. Why EEE Linux when there's a perfectly good Unix with a business-friendly license?

Because they don't have to EEE Linux

If you want to run Linux in the cloud, you've got a bunch of providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc)

Microsoft simply wants to be in that market, so they'll offer the same products their competition does. Anything they can do to make Linux better on Azure is considered a net gain for them

Author here. Counterpoint: my HiFive Unleashed (RISC-V) experience has been extremely positive.

I'm sorry to hear about the problems with your Blackbird. I was an early purchaser as well but my unit arrived rather earlier than yours and didn't have any hardware issues (and I had experience with the platform anyway from the Talos). Raptor support was very good in the early days but I haven't had cause to need it lately and I suspect the load is exceeding their capacity. That's a good problem to have in some respects but if your story is any indication, it could be a sign of looming trouble.

To ask an odder question, why be an early adopter to new machines as someone that also wrote https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/23/Why-I-use-old-hardware.ht... ?

I don't exclusively use old hardware. I own and regularly use a wide variety of hardware.

Kudos for that post! Exactly my way of thinking and working. My laptop isn't 11 years old since my last one died in 2014 but I specifically bought a slow Pentium as a replacement. On the up side I still get 6 hours of battery life today.

My former boss always said that all devs worldwide should get the fastest machine possible for development but should be forced to use their own software on a 386. :-)

> My former boss always said that all devs worldwide should get the fastest machine possible for development but should be forced to use their own software on a 386. :-)

I appreciate this thinking, and have always thought that web developers should be forced to test with lynx on 9600baud dialup. But I'm just a wee bit sadistic when it comes to web developers.

"No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering."

So... any chance of riscv support on sr.ht sometime in the mid-future? Especially if this undermines the plan to get POWER supported.

Hm, I have wanted to get RISC-V support on builds.sr.ht, but there are a couple of problems. The main blocker is that I still haven't got a good Alpine port finished for it, the main blocker for that being the lack of a good bootloader available that lets me load a kernel from the filesystem. uBoot is almost there but they need to add an mmc driver before it's ready. Once that's available (or after I have time to investigate it myself), I'll be rebuilding the Alpine port on top of a stable release, then I can start thinking about putting together support for builds.sr.ht.

Do you mind mentioning which RAM module you purchased? On the wiki it looks like some are officially supported and others have been added by users. Maybe if the issue is related to the RAM, others have experienced similar problems. Also, I am looking at the bundle, but don't see any RAM included with it. Was this something that had been offering in the past but since took down?

> Also, I am looking at the bundle, but don't see any RAM included with it. Was this something that had been offering in the past but since took down?

It's an add-on. Click "Add to cart" and then you'll have the option to add it on the next page.

> Do you mind mentioning which RAM module you purchased? On the wiki it looks like some are officially supported and others have been added by users. Maybe if the issue is related to the RAM, others have experienced similar problems.

Not interested in troubleshooting in HN comments, but thank you. There are some leads in the IRC channel that I'll follow up on when I have the chance.

I'm "going" to write a post about my experience with the SolidRun MACCHIATObin as a desktop… (spoiler: I wish it was faster but it's pretty dang awesome in general)