This has already happened with phones and tablets, after all. And Chromebooks. And Windows 365. And Windows S. And locked-down enterprise machines.
tsmc could easily decide “we’re not gonna fab your RISC-V design” at any moment and you’d be more or less SOL. I mean, you could fall back to a 150 nm process, but that kills a lot of opportunities.
And if things continue — if Apple, Amazon and Google move further in the direction of custom silicon — this will happen. Apple already has a pretty big advantage with their custom silicon — which they don’t sell for use in non-Apple products. Now just imagine if they brought tsmc in-house and had exclusive access to the most advanced fabs on the planet. Your ability to compete, and the room for people to build GPC would constrict MUCH further.
We have this enormous, all-pervasive stack built upon a foundation of like 3 companies, in the midst of massive consolidation. I honestly don’t understand how so many people who think about that are comfortable with it.
One of the chief things I hope that home-cloud operators get to, quickly, is multi-tenancy. Given how easy it is to take some Raspberry Pi's & build a home Kubernetes cluster (or to spend $1000 & build a radically better version), the next question is: how do we scale that impact?
I'd love for my work to scale to my friends! I used to spend so long trying to build ldap into the ftp, http, xmpp, &c self-hosted systems I made, thinking one day it might help friends too. And I still think that way, but now that vision is less about building super-tip-top services to serve everyone, and more about building a platform that my friends could run their own services on easily, in a reasonable way. #selfhosted, I hope, begins to federalize somewhat, that we can selfhost each other, via some common, well known platforms that support these endeavours to help us build together.
Personally I like to imagine grade school having a half dozen servers, and kids getting their own virtual clusters to operate as they might, to learn about & immerse themselves in computing. This kind of feels like a maker-space sort of idea: a collectively owned means of production, an availability of tools that is community owned & operated. Ideally in my school server model, the kids themselves get the experience (at some point) of bootstrapping their own clusters, get the end to end experience (take one machine out, format the drive, compile a linux kernel, install os, install cluster/platform software, join another hardware unit to it). Similar to a rep-rap producing another one, sort of; creating the chain of knowledge to reproduce & understand.
There's plenty of semi-interesting existing examples to cite with regard to collective hosting: the SDF cluster, tilde.club, &c. I guess I hope that we can virtualize a little more, give more people something closer to their own sovereign little spaces on computing hardware, where-as historically these have been operated more akin to singular shared spaces.
No, it's always a side-effect of using GPCs for other things. Even, or really, especially when it's inconvenient.
Anecdotally, it is indeed getting harder to hire good people. I don't know that we've reached 'peak programmer', but the count isn't growing as fast as it used to.
Which includes programmers.
If there is a new platform where this is the only kind of thing we can run on a walled garden device, then I'm not sure quite how general purpose you could call such a device.
Yes, but nobody has to program on them. FOSS is a thing.
Why not have general purpose computing? Computers are vastly powerful machines that could be useful over very very long amounts of time. By allowing closed, proprietary locked down applianceization of computing, we create expensive high-tech consumer devices which seem to quickly (within 5 years) become unsupported, obsolete, unmaintainable, & unrepairable.
Computers have nearly endless uses & applications, until we artificially restrict that. Society ought to try to keep computing general, because it allows for us to adapt & update systems along with the times. Nothing but general purpose computing seems to be renewable. Why should we have other forms of computing?
Joe soap is never going to do that or even want to do that. He doesn't even have a need for parts, after all he doesn't repair his stuff, he just throws it away and buys new stuff.
Perhaps he'll buy a 3D printer when he can go to Amazon and click "print" instead of "order". But we're a long way from there.
And just like for weapons, none of the iphone and chromebook users will understand what the fuss is all about, who would want to use one of these anyways.