Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by xoa on Friday May 21, 2021 @06:18AM (#27232256)

I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction:

>The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture

ARM is in no way open, it's fully proprietary. Unlike x86 it is not vertically integrated and is available for anyone to license all the way to the architectural level, and that's huge. But said licenses certainly are not free either, nor Free.

There are promising actual open architectures, in particular OpenPOWER and RISC-V come to mind as interesting with a lot of solid work behind them. So that's one small remaining opening IMO, even if it's more work on the dev side I wouldn't mind having those stick around and get more competitive.

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Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by Pet_Ant on Friday May 21, 2021 @06:30AM (#27232329)

SPARC is open and not only that Sun shared some actual cores that were used in production. I don’t know why Power gets mentioned but SPARC doesn’t.

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Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by patrec on Friday May 21, 2021 @06:40AM (#27232399)

Probably because few would consider Sparc promising, since, unlike Power and certainly Risc-V, it's pretty much dead?

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Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by lizknope on Friday May 21, 2021 @08:56AM (#27233429)

Picking a CPU is not just about the CPU architecture. It is mainly about the ecosystem around that processor. ARM has a huge amount of IP, bus fabrics, compilers, operating systems, boot loaders, and people you can hire with knowledge of all of that. There are far more people out there with ARM experience than SPARC. I don't really see anybody interested in POWER outside of IBM and the chips they sell.

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