Technology

I'm a computer scientist mainly but with a heavy focus/interest in computer architecture. My plan is to teach at a university at this point - but it seems to me like that would be a good place to create completely open standards technology from.^1Specifically because if the point isn't to make money, there's no reason to create walled gardens.

There's certainly enough interest from people who want to be able to build their own systems. What would actually worry me isn't the ability to make a new open standard or any of that. It's that AMD64 is very hard to compete with in this space, because the processors are just faster, and there is so much x86 software that people who build PCs usually want access to.

AMD64's performance is the result of years and years of optimizations and patenting new hardware techniques, followed by aggressively litigating people trying to compete. ARM performance is catching up but ARM prefers licensing their core IP over making their own systems, making it harder for them to break into the PC space even if they want to.

A new player would be in for a long, long time of unprofitable work just to compete with AMD64 - which most people are still happy with anyway.

^1 some others and I are actually working on some new ISA / open soft processors for it. However it is focused at an educational setting and unlikely to ever be used outside of embedded devices at most.