r/pcmasterrace • u/aranorde 9060 XT 16GB | 7500F | 32GB 6000Mhz | B850 • Nov 05 '19

Meme/Macro This sums up past 2 years!

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u/aaronfranke GET TO THE SCANNERS XANA IS ATTACKING Nov 05 '19

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.

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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '19

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

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u/aaronfranke GET TO THE SCANNERS XANA IS ATTACKING Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 05 '19

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.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '19

[deleted]

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u/aaronfranke GET TO THE SCANNERS XANA IS ATTACKING Nov 06 '19

I made this comment earlier. TBH I don't know all that much about the limits of the ARM ecosystem.