Originally posted by skeevy420
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Even more so given that Intel lost the ARM game already by selling out XScale at the wrong time.
Originally posted by juarezr
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On the other hand, by now both Android and iOS ecosystems are married to ARM. There's way too much legacy prioprietary blobs for a switch to a different arch to be interesting. (Basically Android and Apple have painted themselves in the same corner where Microsoft got stuff with way too much legacy x86 code that people depend upon on Windows for any of the other architectures (several historical ports of WinNT/2000 to various RISC) to have survived).
Linux by being opensource is much more nimble, so a Linux-running, Intel RISC-V powered smartphone is technically feasible.
But not as much marketable as it will be missing the large app ecosystem.
(See the success of Ubuntu Touch which still doesn't have out-of-the-box anbox, Windows whose WSL1 ancestror didn't manage to get apps running, or HP/Palm webOS who bet on the wrong horse (they put efforts into legacy PalmOS app support, which made sense when the initial effort started, but by the time the Pre started shipping, the world had shifted its focus to Android instead. Android app support came too late)
(Contrast with stuff like Jolla's Sailfish OS which even if it has only a small niche following is still alive and going, because is offers access to the wide app ecosystem).
It's funny though because back when Intel exited the PDA and Smartphone market, the hardware hadn't settled yet on an arch.
Even if on the PDA front, m68k has been mostly replaced by ARM, Phones were meanwhile still powered by a diverse zoo of RISC (ARM yes, but also MIPS and PowerPC). There's a reason why Java had popularity on featurephones, and why Android initially looked very close to Java.
Originally posted by KesZerda
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On the other hand they hold several significant markets.
They are making a killing in scientific clusters (Threadrippers are making a killing in HPC, and they have regularily come under the spotlight in the past)
And they are kind in the console market (Nintendo Switch is Nvidia's fief dom. Everything else is powered by AMD),
which could be a trigger for them resuming their ARM efforts (or other RISC efforts. RISC-V is open, afterall) depending on where the next generation of console hardware is heading.
So I wouldn't count them out.
Originally posted by PublicNuisance
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Originally posted by skeevy420
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But please remember that Intel had also had several attempt at RISC very early on. These just never caugh up the same way x86 did.
Originally posted by skeevy420
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