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Comment by SpecialistK | Hacker News Reader

I suspect IBM opened up the ISA (and some hardware designs) because they were quickly losing market relevance. Apple and gaming have moved on, new projects will use Arm or RISC-V, so the only markets I can think of are:

* automotive and other legacy embedded applications

* data centers with existing POWER applications

* niche workstations like the Talos

I do enjoy alternative ISAs, so I'd love to be wrong on this.

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Gaming still may be interested if there's compelling enough options to get a leg up over the competition. The PS4/XBONE and PS5/XSX were both identical hardware, but that's starting to drift away with the PS5 Pro and the recently leaked portable Xbox. Who knows, x86 performance may hit another dead end for a while like it did the early 2010s and ARM may not fit their performance profile. I would mention Nintendo but sadly I don't see them making another non-portable console.

I won't deny that it's possible, but I think it's unlikely. The introduction of AMD SoCs like the Steam Deck and Z1 suggest that a portable Xbox is possible with much less overhead than switching ISA (again)

I'm not even sure if the performance race is going to endure - Sony continues to hold the home console crown, Nintendo prints money with their hugely outdated Switch, and Microsoft appear to be pivoting to publishing more than a console exclusivity race they will probably never win ("going Sega")

As you said, the future of x86 isn't guaranteed, but if I were calling shots I'd look at Arm designs with embedded graphics like Exynos and Snapdragon before trying to build a fully custom design based on POWER and graphics from elsewhere (probably still AMD, and that single-source has been compelling enough to adopt even while the CPU performance was lackluster)

I think a relatively substantial issue with swapping ISA is the software library, which is what's kept Intel in business all these years. Older/retro games is a large part of gaming, and being able to play 15+ year old PC games easily with a single download and no kajoogling is a major 1-up for the Steam Deck, especially when some games have better compatibility under Wine than Windows 11.

The Xbox Series consoles are capable of playing a select portion OG Xbox and Xbox 360 games almost natively, while presumably playing Xbox 360 games via an emulator, but they stopped adding new games to their backwards compatibility program for some god unknown reason despite the fact they were some of the best selling on the platform, but to me it seems like Microsoft wants to shift literally everything to the cloud, starting from Xbox and eventually getting to Windows somewhere down the line, which scares me honestly. Sun said the network is the computer, but I'm sure they meant a network you controlled, not goddamn Microsoft.

I believe the issue with backwards compatibility was licensing, especially for games like JSRF that Phil Spencer explicitly wanted to add.

The 360 games I've played BC on a Bone have downloaded the whole game onto disk, even with the original DVD in the drive so I'm not sure how much they're changing behind the scenes.

Regardless, I share the sentiment that running everything on Microsoft's infrastructure is a troubling trend. I like xCloud for managing JRPG inventory on the bus, or demoing a game before I commit to the full download, but it's no replacement for local gaming and it shouldn't be pushed as such.

Iirc OpenPOWER predates RISC-V by two years

The OpenPOWER Consortium was created in August 2013, more than three years after the RISC-V design effort started, but yes two years before the RISC-V Foundation was created and the then current ISA draft was widely publicised.

As far as I understand, at that point your only freedom was to license IBMs core or chip designs.

IBM released their first open source POWER core, the "Microwatt", in August 2019, a month after the base RISC-V 32/64 IMAFDC ISA was ratified (frozen forever and published)

The cores used in the highest performance RISC-V SoCs currently available were announced in October 2018 (SiFive U74) and July 2019 (THead C910).

I think OpenPOWER had some initial patent grant or license issues that wasn't ready until a few years after, after RISC-V came out. By then it was a little too late.

May be blame it on IBM again. Personally I quite like OpenPOWER.

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