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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Cpu architecture. X86 is just a lot easier to deal with compared to risc-v arm, or Apple.
I’m hopeful it will change though, and I’m rooting for risc-v.
If we're referring to battery life x86 doesn't win very often sadly. There's a reason most handheld devices on earth use ARM.
Well, originally it was largely because no x86 implementation implemented decent deep idle behavior. Even as there might be some x86 implementations now that could credibly serve handheld market, the ecosystem is built around ARM so no one has a reason to deviate from that recipe.
Really? I would have thought that by the easy-to-deal-with metric, anything RISC would win.
From a users perspective everything runs on x86.
Oh, I see.
It's not necessarily the instruction set, it's the platform architecture, the fact there's such a thing as a standard BIOS. You can run Windows, Linux, Haiku etc on practically any PC. There's Linux for ARM, why can't I run Raspberry Pi OS on my Galaxy S10e? It's because, though the instruction set is similar, the platforms very intentionally have nothing to do with each other.
Interesting. What do ARM platforms have? BIOS and friends, as important as they are, always kind of come across as a precarious tower of baked-in technical debt.
(I know a Galaxy in particular uses a locked-down SoC you can't really touch in the first place)
ARM platforms have whatever the developer of that system that day came up with, same as literally everything except x86.
Strangely enough, we do have Microsoft to thank for it. They didn't want to do the work to enable all that crap nor did they want to enable all the vendors to do their own thing, so they were adamant about standards and if you wanted Windows support, you had to follow standards.
Meanwhile on embedded every little vendor goes wild. In the server space. ARM has taken on a similar scope, but ARM embedded is a mess and ARM server chip makers keep changing as no one gets a foot hold.
Actually I think we have IBM and their laziness to thank for it.
The original 5150 PC was pretty much an afterthought by Big Blue's standards, they slapped it together from off the shelf parts and bought the OS from some pissant upstart company called Microsoft on a non-exclusive license. The only IP that IBM actually had in the machine was the BIOS. Compaq developing a non-infringing yet compatible BIOS made the x86 PC a multi-vendor platform, which made it more attractive to adopt than the likes of Commodore who made a series of incompatible computers even within their own ecosystem. Note how the only thing Microsoft has ever consistently done that was worth a damn was backwards compatibility...it's the only thing keeping them in business.
True, though after Compaq broke the weak exclusivity, Microsoft took over stewardship of all these things like ACPI standards and such. Intel certainly contributed but Microsoft really had the force to make vendors have to honor those standards and norms.