[Info-vax] "x86 has only a few years left in the market place" (was: Re: Free Pascal for VMS ?)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-05-12 14:57:53 +0000, seasoned_geek said:


> ...You are a limited sized team with a limited amount of money. The x86 
> has only a few years left in the market place with ARM being the new 
> bottom and aggressively consuming all of the low hanging fruit in its 
> upward journey, just like the x86 did.

Nobody likes x86-64.  Not even the folks at Intel, judging by the 
number of times they've tried to replace it.    But x86-64 is the 
volume desktop and server design at present, and it'll be around and 
available for the foreseeable future.   And it's what the vast majority 
of server customers and hosting providers have consolidated on, 
directly and via virtual machine guests.   Many didn't really like that 
Alpha and Itanium were different or different enough from the ProLiant 
or Dell or SuperMicro servers they were running.

The costs and support and software to adopt and adapt to a bespoke 
hardware platform is one more impediment on continued use and new 
adoption for any closed-source commercial operating system package.

x86-64 has a few years left in the market?  Nope.  The ~billion x86 
systems in present use and with uncountable numbers of applications and 
dependencies and users, and a morass of the current scale does not get 
ported in less than a human generation or two.  And there'll be 
stragglers through the rest of the century.  Which means servers and 
products will remain available.

As for options and alternatives?   The folks at VSI are pretty savvy.  
They looked around.   They were already looking around back before VSI 
became public in 2014, too.

As for POWER?   It's too expensive and too high-end and with no obvious 
path toward vastly larger production volumes in the next decade if 
ever.   It's not a replacement for x86-64.  It's also not at all clear 
that IBM will continue to pour buckets of money down the same bespoke 
processor effort.  That's a risky bet for a third-party software vendor 
such as VSI, at best.  IBM and POWER haven't looked like a particularly 
robust business over the past several years, either.   IBM did just 
recently have a pair of revenue-positive quarters, after their recent 
multiple-years-long revenue declines.  Whether those recent 
revenue-positive quarters were due to exchange rates or fundamental 
changes at IBM remains to be determined.  Consolidation and all...

As for Arm and maybe RISC-V, they're in a vastly better market position 
than is IBM and POWER.   But Arm doesn't build processors.   Other 
folks create the processors, some generic and some bespoke.  Arm 
servers were not in a tenable position when the OpenVMS port started 
back in 2014, and the folks making Arm servers and software just 
starting to have server configuration and toolchains and related.  And 
back in 2014, Arm servers were a whole lot less obvious, and important 
details such as AArch64 and SBSA — SBSA provides consistent processor 
and system designs for servers, a very important detail for 
cross-platform operating system software — and 64-bit addressing were 
just firming up back in 2014, and the open source tool chains 
themselves , when the key decisions were to be made.

Yeah, you routinely rage about open source, but no vendor can create 
and maintain completely bespoke and competitive software systems and 
remain economically viable.  Not even Microsoft.  
https://open.microsoft.com  DEC couldn't manage that back in the 
previous millennium, and VSI is a whole lot smaller than DEC in most 
any dimension measured.

VSI is well aware of Arm and indicated such back when that whole 
porting show got started in 2014.  As a potential future porting target.

Any suggestion of shifting to a different platform years into the port 
and right around first boot borders on a decision to kill VSI and 
OpenVMS.  Arm may well overrun the server market in the next decades, 
but it'll take a decade before Arm servers become widespread at best, 
and the x86-64 servers are going to continue to be available in vast 
numbers and myriad models for the foreseeable future.  And Intel will 
have more competition than they might prefer for their pricing.

OpenVMS on alternative platforms?   Sure.  Maybe.   Call back in five 
or ten years, once the OpenVMS x86-64 port is available and robust, and 
once Arm servers or RISC-V — or who knows, maybe even POWER — become 
far more available and far more ubiquitous and acceptable server 
hardware platform alternative for a small software-only company.  
Adding additional supported platforms makes more work and more 
complexity for VSI and ISVs and end-user customers, and there needs to 
be a good reason for that cost and that porting effort and those 
hardware and software support costs.  And marketing both x86-64 and Arm 
or whatever else makes for more complex marketing for VSI, too.  
Replacing platforms?  Arm and POWER and RISC-V are not viable 
replacements for x86-64 servers.  Not yet.

x86-64 is what VSI is depending on, and there'll be increasing 
dependencies on open source and extending well beyond LLVM.  Where we 
are once the x86-64 port is settled?  We shall see.  I'd not be 
immediately looking for another port either, as there's a whole lot of 
work necessary to bring the OpenVMS platform forward and to broaden 
peripheral and hardware and software support, and a platform port — at 
the scale of VSI — freezes most of that very necessary work.



-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC