@FailurePersonified

> Why do you think that is?

Part rent-seeking and part attempting to preserve some means of control, and the proportions (as well as what they're attempting to control) vary by organization.

> will be "super effective", unless the only target is the normal population. Which they themselves don't seem to be all that interested in running their own infra anyway.

I don't know who the fuck Ebin Moglen has working for him, but the Freedom Box has taken maybe 15 or 20 years and there's still no turnkey infra for normies and you'd think that, at worst, it should take a year of full-time effort by about two guys. yunohost grew out of the effort (I *think*), which would make yunohost the Linux to the Freedom Box's HURD. I think people would be glad to have something like that if they could just pick it up, but I also think that they are somewhat unaware and the vendors deliberately obscure the implications of "someone else's computer". I mean, people were delighted to have home computers that they could use to compute rather than just dialing into some other machine.

> though I question it's effectiveness.

Well, look at mail servers: you run your own mail server and GMail will fuck with you and if GMail won't deliver your mail, that can hose you.

> If we found a sustainable way to increase cache sizes, it would be a band-aid, but a damn good one.

I don't know; I think cache infrastructure in a CPU is too complicated nowadays. It's reliable but it's bulky. I don't see a way around it without slowing down memory (e.g., widen the bus more, better throughput and worse RA in the RAM).

Intel was working on something interesting: embedding small SIMD CPUs in the RAM, so you send a little code across the memory bus and the transformations are done in-place rather than making the data cross the bus, get changed, and cross the bus the other way again. (Joe Armstrong famously noted something that should have been obvious: the program is smaller than the data it operates on, so it's cheaper to send the program to where the data is than vice versa.)

> Rust in the kernel.

It was over as soon as they shoved their CoC down his throat.

> "redundant checks" slowing perf.

You'd think their much-touted compile-time checks would obviate the need for runtime checks.

> I think it's gonna be sick (still not trying to over-hype myself tho)

In times like this, opportunities abound for people to become the person creating the sickness.

> Though that's interesting, what do you think was the primary drive for "x86 to eat the world" if industry was kinda expecting MIPS/SPARC to keep on going?

The same reason Unix ate the world, the same reason ARM ate the world, etc. Wide availability and it was good enough. Early 90s, getting Unix to run on one of those chips was kind of an achievement, but once it did, you had an environment like on the big machines. Not just Unix, but anything: there were not very many capabilities that were available on workstations or big iron but not available on commodity desktops, and those all happened to run x86. You take something people want, you make the 80% solution easy to get, and then once in a while someone will drop off another 1-2%, and the niche occupied by high-end workstations shrinks. Then along comes a company like Google that says "We don't even need cases, we just tape disks to the motherboard and shove it into a rack and it's cheap enough that if something fails, we replace it instead of fixing it."

> it's not like PowerPC is really difficult to support.

It's a bigger effort than you might think. If Apple doesn't own the chipfab plant and doesn't employ the chip designers, and they're shelling out to IBM, then they're kind of beholden. Not just that, but the switch was announced around the time multi-core x86-64 chips were announced. They have these two big G5s and the performance was not quite as nice as two big Xeons. Intel's got AMD to cope with, they have to support a broad range of applications, so there was external pressure for Intel and Apple didn't have to negotiate as hard. IBM keeps making PowerPC chips whether or not Apple keeps buying them, so Apple couldn't apply pressure to get what they want; with Intel, they didn't have to apply as much pressure because Intel was already making something closer to what they wanted, and it's easier for a big manufacturer to apply pressure. It's also easier for a big manufacturer to get other big manufacturers on board when there *are* other big manufacturers: the only PowerPC users were IBM, Apple, and Sony. If Apple wants something from Xeons that they're not getting, they can threaten to switch to AMD, they can get other OEMs to help apply pressure, they can plausibly affect Intel's bottom line. Now they've licensed ARM's ISA, they're back to controlling the manufacture of their own chips. Maybe Samsung or TSMC is actually fabricating it, but it's their own design, they hire the manufacturer rather than depending on a chip that is designed by someone else.

But is there a reason to support it? Like, what does it get you besides good feels by PowerPC fans? (Not to discount that: I have bought chips because of the feels, otherwise I wouldn't be constantly jazzed about ARM devices or this RISC-V CPU. But we're a niche, and a business niche can be large but a consumer niche is never lucrative enough.)

> it's nice to see they still utilize PowerPC.

I mean, it's their chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA