x86 is Beyond Redemption, We Need Lean Software and Hardware That We Can Understand
The Microsofters are busy pushing us like sheep (or some cattle) to x86, UEFI, and all sorts of other monstrosities. That's all they do these days. Seeing the crisis Microsoft is having, perhaps the old monopolies are seen as the last chance (before insolvency or bailouts, i.e. being rescued by taxpayers against their will/without their consent).
But we don't need x86 and UEFI. We know who needs these. We know who's served by their growing complexity. Not us. Since complexity is the enemy of security, expect more data breaches, not less, if greater complexity is embraced. Cost of securing things grows too.
x86 has a lot of issues, aside from the defects and severe security problems. x86 may have started small and simple; that hasn't been the case for decades, as the Moore-ists departed from simplicity and just doubled the number of gates (or shrank them some more to squeeze more of them per square milometer (instruments improved), irrespective of the resultant complexity, necessitated by the sheer scale). Silicon wafers did not grow, transistors are still used (ignore the hype and hypothetical nonsense), so we could have very tiny chips doing the same as before for a lot less energy. But that would be less profitable...
There are some AMD flaws [1, 2], an associate reminded us last week, in addition to the menagerie of Intel flaws, so "another post about how unsuited x86 is to real-world usage might be part of a RISC-V post."
"There is also the question the enormous amount of electricity wasted by x86."
"The RPi 2350 has RISC-V + Arm."
RISC-V made some headlines lately in relation to security, but such reports are rare. RISC-V isn't perfect - not even in the licensing sense - but it shows that some computing ("Lean Software") can be done on simple devices in 2024. I am using a RPi right now and our Web site uses about 100 times less resources than it did before the migration (away from WordPress, MediaWiki, and Drupal).
Almost nobody needs a "modern" x86 chip. The problem is the bloated software. We'll write more about this in the next article. █
