Comment by qmarchi
19 hours ago
Thanks kinda how Japan works. Inventing something new is hard, but taking something that's a cool idea and making it actually usable is well within their wheelhouse.
See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets
I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff invented in Japan, but that's really beside the point.
The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.
POWER is still holding on just barely but I do suspect that IBM are looking to sunset it in the next few years.
Given that IBM just announced a dual-ISA mainframe with support for both z/arch and ARM, they might indeed be looking to sunset POWER.
Powers not dead yet! IBM is still clinging to it and I can't blame them, it's a pretty good ISA
Yep, I have said it for a good 20 years now.
POWER/PowerPC is what happens when you take a brilliant design to execute it poorly. x86 is when you take a poor design and execute is brilliantly.
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UC Berkeley developed RISC-V, so no doubt their influence within the computer science academia sphere had something to do with it.
Dunno, I think Risc-V's simplicity gave it the initial popularity rush rather than being from a certain institution (the institution perhaps gave it visibility, but it does have own merits and no idea if other archs from the time had those?), don't remembere exactly but iirc it was possible to implement with a ridiculously small amount of FPGA gates. Conversly heard some rumblings that it had parts t hat were unsuitable for scaling up but it seems to have gained enough momentum for people to engineer past stuff like that.
The 1980s called, it wants its stereotypes back.
I had this idea that Fujitsu was one of those Japanese conglomerates that had operations in all kinds of markets, from electronics to heavy earth moving equipment to air conditioners to locomotives. But that doesn't appear to be the case so I'm wondering which company I'm confusing them with.
Edit I think I was thinking of Mitsubishi.
Fujitsu was a telco equipment spinoff from Fuji Electric, so Fujitsu do/did make a lot of things that would be in a phone exchange building over its history, from air conditioners to terminals to actual mainframes. Just not as everything as Mitsubishi, which was a do-all procurement company for the new government when the Tokugawa stepped down.
About 25 years back here in Australia they were advertising Fujitsu air-conditioners, they had the promise of some like "They will get the air down to 17c in all conditions."
About a month later there was a summer heat wave and I went to a friends house who had just bought one. It was wild walking in from a 45c day into, as advertised, a 17c house. Had to give it to them, they lived up to the claim.
That they come from the telecom/server space, it makes sense they had a good eye for aircon engineering.
Probably Panasonic. They're like the Apple of the B2B world. Except they also make everything
Fujitsu is basically the Japanese IBM.