I would love to see a CPU Renaissance like this. Back then we had tons of variety, 680x0, x86, Rx000, various lisp machines, Vector computers, VLIW and Multiflow, Sparc, VAX, early ARM, message passing machines, 1-bit multiprocessors, Hypercubes, WD CPUs, and later an explosion of interesting RISC architectures... It was really interesting and enjoyable era.
As someone who programmed at that time, it was also very hard to write even small production programs.
Today I do things in a half-an-hour with Python that would have taken me days - maybe weeks! - to accomplish in 1978.
Each little vendor had their own janky tooling. Compilers cost hundreds of 1970s dollars (until Borland's $49 Turbo Pascal, over $150 in today's money).
Don't get me wrong. I was very unhappy when Intel dominated everything. The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture, is now eating Intel's lunch makes me happy.
But I'd honestly be glad if everyone just settled on ARM and were done with it. It was fun messing with all these weird processors (my first team leader job was writing an operating system for a pocket computer running the 65816 processor!) but it meant that actually generating work was very slow.
I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction:
>The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture
ARM is in no way open, it's fully proprietary. Unlike x86 it is not vertically integrated and is available for anyone to license all the way to the architectural level, and that's huge. But said licenses certainly are not free either, nor Free.
There are promising actual open architectures, in particular OpenPOWER and RISC-V come to mind as interesting with a lot of solid work behind them. So that's one small remaining opening IMO, even if it's more work on the dev side I wouldn't mind having those stick around and get more competitive.
Picking a CPU is not just about the CPU architecture. It is mainly about the ecosystem around that processor. ARM has a huge amount of IP, bus fabrics, compilers, operating systems, boot loaders, and people you can hire with knowledge of all of that. There are far more people out there with ARM experience than SPARC. I don't really see anybody interested in POWER outside of IBM and the chips they sell.
