[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


Hardware

2 2021-01-29 19:39

I primarily use Thinkpads, and am typing this on a Lemote Yeeloong. I'd like to have nicer hardware, such as a Lisp Machine, Xerox Star, or another high-level architecture; machines existed decades ago which aren't susceptible to the flaws still haunting what we currently use, but the market chose them because the market doesn't care about producing value. Broken machines lead to broken software lead to more jobs.

There's absolutely nothing compelling about RISC-V. It's a RISC (Notice how just about everything is called RISC; this is because it's actually a cult.), and it's basically a cleaner C language machine than other RISC designs, but this isn't saying much. It's memory-inefficient, requires the hardware to combine operations (macro-ops) for efficiency, and is really just a bunch of academics masturbating over their clean design that means nothing. Urbit's Nock is also useless, but at least it's different.

More recently, I've been looking into non-von Neumann designs, and there's really no good sense in what we currently have. The future is smaller people beating the incumbents by using fundamentally more efficient designs that simply can't be beaten with conventional designs.

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