The trend has rather been the reverse, with specialized platforms being overtaken by commodity platforms which are better positioned to take advantage of economies of scale. Mostly that's been x86, but for low power applications it's largely been ARM. As power becomes a more important element, and with ARM relatively more performant, I think we'll see an increasing share of it in what would otherwise be x86 territory, but I don't think we'll see real heterogeneity, unless it's a better competitor to either of these.
I see an analogy between x86 and ARM and Porter's generic strategies. ARM is like the cost leadership, with x86 being the differentiation strategy - where the cost is the cost of energy. x86 is able to do a lot more things than ARM, but with higher energy costs. And then there is perhaps CUDA etc. for the segmentation strategy.
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The trend has rather been the reverse, with specialized platforms being overtaken by commodity platforms which are better positioned to take advantage of economies of scale. Mostly that's been x86, but for low power applications it's largely been ARM. As power becomes a more important element, and with ARM relatively more performant, I think we'll see an increasing share of it in what would otherwise be x86 territory, but I don't think we'll see real heterogeneity, unless it's a better competitor to either of these.
I see an analogy between x86 and ARM and Porter's generic strategies. ARM is like the cost leadership, with x86 being the differentiation strategy - where the cost is the cost of energy. x86 is able to do a lot more things than ARM, but with higher energy costs. And then there is perhaps CUDA etc. for the segmentation strategy.