Alternate ISA Thread -

[Octane]

Inspired by /g/'s general on this, I decided to make one on the farms.

This is a thread for the discussion of alternate Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs), aka pretty much anything besides x86 and ARM. Some of these include, but are not limited to:

• MIPS
• SPARC
• PowerPC
• Alpha
• Itanium
• RISC-V

What do you use these niche machines for? Have you ever contributed to projects like NetBSD in the effort to port? What are some things you like and dislike about them?

 

[cjöcker]

Fuck CISC, all my homies hate CISC.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Alpha still exists? I remember getting a techboner about that shit in the 90s when it was already on the way out.

Moto 68k is where the real business is at. And now I miss my Amiga again...

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I worked at a place that used Itanium to run the emulators for the DEC Alphas that ran the emulators for some old ass IBM mainframes. The whole thing was critical national infrastructure and the entire setup reminded me of the emperor of mankind.

 

[awoo]

I used MIPS when learning assembly by myself and it's pretty good for that because it's pretty simple.
Out of all alternate ISAs, RISC V is the most interesting and I and many others are watching the next few years to see if it can take market share from x86 and arm.

 

[Never Scored]

I think Risc-V will eventually replace arm in all single board computers like Raspberry Pi. Give it a decade or so. The audience for those boards are going to demand it. Beagle is already working on one.