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I haven't kept up, but competition from AMD, ARM and RISC-V all probably fit that need now.
The whole architecture is niche since then.
Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers.
Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you like Apple), perhaps some SBCs (usually arm, perhaps some mips), and some IOT (often esps, so xtensa / risc-v) plus some router/wifi device (arm).
RISC-V is scaling up on that axis. It is killing other ecosystems for embedded/iot. It's becoming useful for SBCs and low end desktop boards are on the horizon.
That's the scaling path that works. You are $20 away from trying it out. And it can scale all the way to an affordable desktop soon (Milk-V).
It's IMHO not "a lot of energy on RISC-V", it's a quickly growing user base. OpenPOWER lost that.
One very interesting project built on OpenPOWER, but with unique vector extensions, is LibreSOC, https://libre-soc.org/ . It promises to be fully open hardware as well.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
The project updates (last one in 2020) are painful to read.
A competent outfit such as Pine64 or Sipeed can knock a project like this out in 6 months. They could have been subcontracted given the $234k raised.
It's crazy expensive, Raptor torched their own roadmap, and no one actually needs what they're selling. (People say they do, but 99% of those people haven't actually bought it.)
I don't think that's a fair summary; Raptor has a very specific product, more or less the selling point of which is 100% open and auditable systems, so when IBM came out with POWER10 that bakes blobs into the system they're stuck with completely switching course. That's not torching anything, it's them being forced to correct for external factors.
Hardware Decimal floating point is very useful, both for legacy and new financial systems and some numerical problems you need improved stability on.
OpenPOWER happened a few years after Apple finished the transition to Intel. The whole architecture is niche since then. Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers. Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you l…
Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
OpenPOWER happened a few years after Apple finished the transition to Intel. The whole architecture is niche since then. Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers. Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you l…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqUtGk0DHbQ
And that's a genuine $9, as in you can buy 10 or 1000 if you want, unlike the "$5" Pi Zero which was one per order, plus shipping. (It has a genuine, higher, price recently, and the Pi Zero 2 is a great deal if you want a low end Arm board).
And yes, the Oasis looks very promising, hopefully this year.
OpenPOWER happened a few years after Apple finished the transition to Intel. The whole architecture is niche since then. Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers. Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you l…
Today we deploy to the cloud and work on Arm/x86 Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
Newer languages are even easier. Rust and Go almost always port with zero issues. Obviously the same goes for scripting and VM based languages like Java.
The architecture matters less than it used to.