[kwlug-disc] about silicon

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM jason.eckert <jason.eckert at gmail.com> wrote:

> The main takeaway here IMO is that now that Apple has demonstrated that a
> phone SoC can be beefed up to perform general-purposed computing well,
> we'll start seeing more of this hit the market in the workstation space.
> And when those fast SoC systems start running Linux, developers will flock
> to them and that will accelerate the adoption of ARM in the
> cloud/datacenter.
> ....
> If Apple allowed Linux to run natively on their M1 SoC, it would actually
> be a game-changer in this space. But that would require they release their
> SoC documentation to the open source community, as well as digitally sign
> Linux boot components im their secure enclave (neither of which is likely
> because Apple is as closed as Oracle's wallet ;-)
>
> What I'm most interested in seeing in the coming years is what Nvidia is
> planning for ARM (no matter what they say, they definitely have a plan in
> mind if they bought ARM).
>

What is different this time around is that there is no interest in making a
standard hardware interface for the various RISC SOCs. Remember why the
personal computer revolutionized the industry: standard bootloader,
standard hardware interface (BIOS), standard peripheral interfaces (ISA,
PCI, ATA, SATA, ...), and so on ...

This time around there is no movement to standardize all of this. Linux
will still work, but you must have a different image for each SOC, like
Odriod vs. RPi.

Mikalai also mentioned RISC-V, which is something that I am hoping will be
adopted at some point in the future. They are open by design from the very
beginning.

Maybe we will have a second revolution ... here is to hoping ...
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