I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.
Probably two things:
Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn’t necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec’ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.
All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.
I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.
Probably two things:
All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.
I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.