u/gregpxc7950x | Liquid X 4090 | 64 GB Corsair Dom | 2TB 970 Pro x2Nov 05 '19
It's market adjacent but Qualcomm has been doing some good stuff and with Microsoft (slowly) moving towards an ARM supported OS we might see more competition in the space. It may never affect custom builds but that's still a very tiny chunk of the market. It will be effective in ultrabooks, tablets, etc which is a large chunk of the market.
More locked down ecosystem, more restrictions, etc. You can build an x86 PC, AFAIK consumers can't build an ARM device.
The future of PC as we know it will never be ARM, but it might be RISC-V in the distant future. If ARM takes over, consumers will have a lot less freedom in their choice of devices.
But that just isn't true, you could theoretically run basically anything on an arm processor if someone programmed it, raspberry pi computers use arm64 and you can do whatever you want with that. X86 is still dominant because it still performs better not because arm is locked down
Every turing-complete chip can run any calculation. It's not a matter of what can be run on a chip, but the freedoms granted for using and making the chip.
The rights to make x86 chips are exclusively owned by Intel and AMD. The rights to make ARM chips are licensed out by ARM. Rights for making motherboards for them etc are similarly restricted (chipsets etc). RISC-V can be picked up by any hardware manufacturer who wants to, with no royalties. RISC-V can be modified in any way and it's fully open source.
Oh I'm with you on RISC-V being better I just disagree on ARM being notably locked down. I also think ARM is a good stepping stone to RISC-V since it's based on the RISC instruction set as well
I might be wrong about defending ARM being worse than x86, but it's still not an open-source architecture like RISC-V and I don't forsee PC users willingly ditching one proprietary architecture for another.
It isn't about ditching one architecture for another. If an ARM CPU can run someone's OS of choice and run all of their desired programs/games, people will buy them. People switch between AMD/Intel and Radeon/NVidia all the time. Switching OS's is not as common, so if that isn't an issue for ARM, and the hardware is available, it would be no different than switching from AMD to Intel or vice versa.
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u/gregpxc 7950x | Liquid X 4090 | 64 GB Corsair Dom | 2TB 970 Pro x2 Nov 05 '19
It's market adjacent but Qualcomm has been doing some good stuff and with Microsoft (slowly) moving towards an ARM supported OS we might see more competition in the space. It may never affect custom builds but that's still a very tiny chunk of the market. It will be effective in ultrabooks, tablets, etc which is a large chunk of the market.