Ya, what is crazy is that we were “serving” web pages over those kinds of lines.

As you say, the trade-off is developer productivity vs resources.

If resources are limited, that changes the calculus. But it can still make sense to spend a lot on hardware instead of development.

Ya, but that means no high-res GUI. And pretty annoying limits on data set size.

Half my Linux machines are Macs “retired” for exactly this reason.

The really cool thing about RISC-V is that you can design your own core and get full access to a massive software ecosystem.

All you need is RV32I.

The problem is they go from being at the center of everything outside x86-64 to just another RISC-V provider. And there will be dozens. And the market will not care so much as they succeed and fail as the ecosystem will not depend on the suppliers specifically. How does ARM stay at the top of that dog fight? It is a much bigger challenge than they have faced so far.

The problem for ARM is that there are a dozen RISC-V companies implementing their business model.

You license ARM cores because you want a “custom” chip but do not want to start from scratch. You especially do not want to have to bootstrap a software ecosystem. When ARM had no competition, it is just a question of which ARM core you want.

Now, you can get the same thing from any RISC-V design house. Which means having real choice over the features you want. If ARM is just one of those RISC-V shops, how does ARM compete? By being the best? Not likely.

And, in the past, you could not totally outgrow ARM as they own the ISA. The Qualcomm lawsuit was an attempt to maintain tight control over this. With RISC-V, you can pack up and move your whole ecosystem elsewhere including taking it entirely in-house. This includes the ISA to an extent since anybody can add extensions.

Today, we are seeing RISC-V succeed where this flexibility matters most: in microcontrollers and in AI.

But as performance equalizes, volumes go up and costs come down, the use cases where ARM makes more sense dwindle.

That makes backwards compatibility the last real reason to use ARM. But does this matter on mobile where devices download the apps that match their arch? Not really. Does it matter in most embedded cases? Not really. Does it even matter in the server? More, but even there not as much as it used to. Does it matter for anything mostly GPU or NPU driven? No. So that leaves desktop and laptop. And, outside of Apple, ARM has not really built up anything to stay compatible with. RISC-V may have time to grow into that niche before being blocked.

We are going to exit 2026 with RISC-V chips that are fast enough. How fast will the costs come down? Perhaps a year or two?

What markets is ARM well positioned to continue its dominance in?

I do not mind retro computing stuff. The most interesting part was installing up-to-date OpenBSD. But of course it can serve a static website.

Would have loved to see how it holds up with some load via FastCGI and CGI (via slowcgi(8)), since httpd(8) can be used with both of them.

Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then?

And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

> And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.

But this wingnut YouTube “journal”ist told me that this was going to be a total disaster.

How could he have been so wrong?