With the Rise of GNU/Linux the x86 Era Might Become Footnote/Blight of History
5 days ago: x86 Drowning in Competition, Bug Doors, Complexity, and Bloat
Circulating in the news this week: Linus Torvalds Rants About Defective x86 Designs and "AI" Being Just a Marketing Scam
EARLIER this month the leaders of AMD and Intel did photo ops, having decided to make a sort of "alliance of the zombies" in (life) support of x86.
That won't work.
Paying off Linus Torvalds won't work either because he's getting fed up with speculative executions and other ways of "cheating" in benchmarks (at security's expense).
Days ago Astra-based GNU/Linux desktops were introduced and promoted by System76.
"There are a lot of political forces and covert politics shoehorning the world into Wintel," an associate explains. "The System76 Astra is a bold break away, if it can pull it off. There used to be Sparc, Alpha, PPC, MIPS, and others."
"Now it is mostly ARM in general and a little MIPS in the embedded space, if you don't count hard core embedded devices like ESP32," the associate adds.
"The world is more than ready to leave Spectre and Meltdown behind [those can kill activists], not to mention general power inefficiency. The price of the Thelio Astra is going to limit the market to businesses, almost exclusively. Yet, there are so many Arm systems in use and development that it is very likely to hit the spot."
The so-called "journal of record" has just published (literally hours ago) a piece about White House bailouts for Intel backfiring as we predicted more than half a year ago that they would. If the "logic" here is that keeping Intel alive is a matter of "national security", how about actually tackling the inherent insecurity of x86? That cannot be fixed overnight and even if that did get fixed, eventually, they would still have to recall and replace literally billions of products in circulation. Taking the processor from motherboards of laptops (or even servers) isn't something the average home can do. We basically shot our own "national security" foot with the Wintel monopoly. █