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I’m speculating that Intel, remembering the IA-64 fiasco, went even harder on all its organizational pathologies with Edison. “Our mistake with IA-64 was insufficient bureaucracy; let’s have more oversight with Edison”. It’s an age-and-size sclerosis that is very common and is extremely difficult to defeat.

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Dig the article! Not that it's exactly related, but the dude over at The Chip Letter has a piece about how Intel's x86 moat became a prison - https://open.substack.com/pub/thechipletter/p/the-paradox-of-x86. It's apropos of very little, but it touches on some of Intel's missteps trying to compete outside the server/desktop space.

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Jun 20·edited Jun 20

> With it, died the small dream of having an expressive assembly language on embedded CPUs

I guess died for a while. I'm sure you've worked with them, but I recently started playing with the ESP32-C3, and it's fantastic, and is RISC-V. The Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 form factor is great for hacking around easily.

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Jun 20·edited Jun 20Author

Well, CISC x86 assembly is still far more expressive than RISC-V - although to be fair, it's not necessarily more readable by the time you get to some of the wackier mnemonics like VGF2P8AFFINEINVQB. Not that it matters a whole lot either way.

Plus, ESP32-C3 still isn't beefy enough for Linux, right? It seems to be an enduring gap. There were some smaller SBCs in the later years, but I don't recall seeing anything this tiny.

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