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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’ve seen worse. A group at the university was using the IBM mainframe for basically everything from their terminals. To reduce load on the mainframe, the university spent a load of money to buy a cluster of workstations with crazy specs and software, each one more expensive than a big new car back then.

    I visited them shortly after they got those killer machines. For comparison: in our university department, we had green serial terminals connected to an old VAX 11/780. They had those shiny new workstations with GUI on high-resolution (for that time) color monitors. My friend there logged in - and his autostart just opened two terminal sessions on the IBM mainframe, where he did all his work just like before. He was happy that he had the terminals in a windowed environment, though, so he could easily open and handle several sessions on the machine at the same time.



  • This is a sign of ARM approaching the “enough” level. I remember the times when it was actually important to buy the latest PC at least every other year to have enough power to run a basic office suite or similar programs with acceptable speed.

    Nowadays, you can staff offices with about any PC off the shelf - it is powerful and big enough to fulfill the needs of the majority of users. Of course there are servers, there are power users, engineers running simulations, and of course gamers who need more power, and who still fuel the cutting edge of PC building. But the masses don’t need to be cutting edge anymore. A rather basic machine is enough.

    Here comes the ARM: For many years, ARM-based chips were used as SOCs, running anything from washing machines to mobile phones. But they have grown bigger and faster, and I can see them approaching the point that they can cover the basic needs of the average office and home user - which would be a damn big chunk of the market. It would be enough for those needs, but it would be cheaper and in many aspects less troublesome than Intel and AMD. Take for example power consumption in relation to computational power, where ARM is way better than the old and crusty x86 architecture. And less power leads to less cooling requirements, making the machines smaller, more energy efficient, and less noisy.

    I can see ARM-based systems approaching this enough level, and I can see that Intel and ARM are deadly afraid of that scenario.