This is significant. With POWER back in the game, and ARM server CPUs arriving, Intel will again have competition.
ARM is definitely taking market share from Intel on the low end, but AMD is just about the only viable competition intel has right now in the part of the market where they make the bulk of their income and margin.
For example I don't expect cloud providers to have a huge marked soon for non x86 architectures. Well there are JVM or other VM users which in theory could not care, as long as you don't need some native library.
In the past the battle with intel had to be played by providing an alternative implementation of the x86 instruction set for precisely the same reason: legacy.
The mobile market proved you can achieve good performance with ARM and especially better power per performance. I really can't wait to see some more fights in this arena.
Sure, it's doable, I have a few ppc at home, but I know first hand stories of small/medium companies just not wanting to risk that.
They just have higher costs at maintaining some dependencies, custom builds etc. You never know when you will get some new version of something, like jdk8. Then you have things like missing Go compiler (yes there is gccgo for ppc but still not everything works the same).
It's perfect for enthusiast, it's ok for companies with strong investment in IT infrastructure. I just wonder what is the best way to convince those small companies that there is no problem. Perhaps the tools/distros etc are starting to mature at the right point and this will soon no longer be a big practical problem.
Other languages with more OS agnostic libraries tend not to suffer that much from porting issues except from bit fiddling code. There is however the availability issue as you mentioned.
> nobody is working on it very seriously.
[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/sDV6ZfhG...
Porting an operating system is hard. Porting a compiler is hard. But most applications on top of those are fairly straightforward to port, if not completely trivial.
Anyone old enough to remember the early browsers - Mosaic and Netscape - will remember how every platform was supported, regardless of CPU (including MIPS, SPARC, Alpha etc.) and regardless of OS (IRIX, AIX, System whatever, VMS, Windows, etc.). Furthermore you didn't have to wait two years for the non-Windows version to be updated.
Only when Microsoft made NT Intel only did you get this arrangement where software was locked to a given architecture/OS. Thank goodness Linux came along.