Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

> and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle

NVIDIA doesn't make good CPUs, even their SoCs are ... not exactly state of the art. No mass market adoption besides automotive who don't care about anything but long availability of (spare) parts and the Nintendo Switch which likely only still uses the same 2015-era Tegra chipset because even someone as big as Nintendo couldn't kick enough arses at NVIDIA to bring up a new design. ARM doesn't make generally available server CPUs (the ones that do exist all get gobbled up by cloud providers), and there are outside of the Mac world no viable ARM desktop or laptop CPUs because Qualcomm completely fucked up that market for likely years to come - I don't see any way of ARM adoption in that market unless ARM comes up with a competing solution to Rosetta and Qualcomm comes out of the mindset "if it works just barely, ship it" that may be acceptable to smartphone vendors but not the PC/desktop market.

That leaves AMD as the sole remaining threat to Intel, and AMD doesn't have the fab space to be enough of a threat to Intel's moat.

Yes, I may or may not be extremely frustrated at the state of competition in general computing.

crazy stuff

The 386 was released shortly before I bought my first computer as a teen. At the time, I saw both 286 and 386 PC's on the market, but the latter with a large price premium. I wasn't sure what the difference was at the time, so I bought the 286 system. Within a couple of years I had learned the difference and had large regret I didn't save my money and buy a 386. Shortly after that, I started writing low level assembler including the system bootstrap for a toy OS, which now could not use 32-bit protected mode. In addition, 386-only games started to be released at some point, and so I very much felt left out until I bought my first 486, but that wasn't until years later.

Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC.

In the Windows world, no one holds even closely to the capabilities required for a transition to ARM: Microsoft doesn't have a fat binary standard or the toolchains needed (that all went down the drain with the end of Microsoft Windows CE / Windows Phone and even then, it was a nightmare to develop for these), the third party developers - especially the enterprise tailor-made application market - have zero experience with ARM and a lot of stuff used in enterprise was made by companies that went defunct long ago, Microsoft doesn't have any hold over what the device vendors do in terms of drivers (unlike Apple, who famously cut ties with NVIDIA because NV didn't want Apple to write drivers for their GPUs), and neither Microsoft itself nor the conglomerate of hardware OEMs has the cash in hand to take all the stuff people use on x86 Windows and make it work on ARM Windows (as they infamously discovered with the early Windows Qualcomm stuff). Oh, and the ARM vendors can't be bothered to get something as basic as PCIe working on a fundamental level beyond "if it works in my very specific use case, ship it" - just look at the RPi 4's issues where people developed breakout boards for PCIe only to discover that crucial functionality was flat out broken [1]. And even with people complaining for years about PCIe issues on the Pi 4, turns out the Pi 5 still managed to fuck things up [2].

The only player in town able to make ARM work on anything but smartphones and servers is Apple, and they don't (and never will, assuming regulators don't finally wake up and force them) sell to third parties.

> The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks.

These things are and will be toys. The money is in getting corporate to switch over to ARM and until the problems above (especially backwards compatibility and standards conformance) are worked out, which I don't see happen any time soon because it's so hard to break through the chicken-egg scenario, there will be no threat to Intel. Especially not if even many years of development and complaining are not enough to arse Broadcom into fixing PCIe.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-...

[2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...

wouldn’t graphics and AI both pretty much reduce to mad matrix operations?