Well then the Chinese maybe is using the Talos™ II ""Secure"" Workstation, better than x86 at least.
The software for x86 (i.e. Windows) is not re-addressed to POWER9, this makes Federal Agencies happy, and they do no use Talos™ II (Talos™ II is a reduced version), they use more advanced POWER9 workstations and servers.
These machines are exclusively requested by DARPA to IBM, as the main funding source to develop the architecture, and - they say - it's an important exclusive point for computing performances, especially for their crypto-stuff
Is fanatism a requirement? For what? I dont understand what you mean! Im also on a backdored x86.
A lot of fanatic guys (e.g. guys at Nekochan) on the internet claim they use {
PowerPC, POWER9, HPPA, MIPS, Alpha, SuperHitachi, SPARC, ARM, Itanium, ... } ... non-x86 computers because they believe they are "better than x86".
When you ask to define "better", they answer tons of bullshit, and they don't know absolutely nothing about the ISA, neither they program in assembly, rather they use non-x86 machines simply because -
oh, ah uh! it looks cool This means being fanatic, especially when you are not able to support opensource, and you don't have software to do something useful with your computer
My new pocket calculator is made by CASIO, and it has a SuperHitachi SH3 chip on it. I am not happy/unhappy to know the CPU is an SH3 chip. I am happy to know that there is an SDK released by CASIO, and I can develop some good app for it.
I might "hate" x86 only if I have to program it in assembly (it rarely happens), or if I have to implement it in FPGA ( in this case I will refuse to do it, there is too much complexity), otherwise (for the user point of view) Linux on x86 is exactly equal to Linux to { PowerPC, POWER9, HPPA, MIPS, Alpha, SuperHitachi, SPARC, ARM, Itanium, ... }
yet another Linux box, except that:
- out of the area of interest (that nowadays is mainly around x86 and arm), there is less support for everything, for the Linux/kernel and for the userland might have more unfixed bugs (HPPA has already shown that it's a problem)
- there might be no bootstrappers (e.g. there is Ada bootstrapper(1) only for { x86, arm })
- a lot of PCI/ePCI cards (e.g. SATA controllers, VGA cards) do need a BIOS initialization, and during this process, they inject x86 code, thus can't they work on a non-x86 machine unless you put an x86 emulator into the Linux kernel, or into the userland, that is crazy
- a good point about non x-86 machines is that the PCI doesn't come with all the legacy stuff that x86 computer must have in order to support old and deprecated peripherical, such as old VGA cards used in 386 and 486 computer. This stuff, if you read the Linux source, is a mess of irritating and annoying layers of crap that only make the BAR's code confusing and bugged Non-x86 machines don't need it, thus their source code is neat
Anyway, I don't care about Federal Agencies unless they want to pay me to help at supporting Linux on POWER9. It will never happen, I have a VISA permission to work in the USA, but I am and will ever be a stranger ... might be I will be paid to support Talos™ II's Linux stuff .. mumble ... and in the meanwhile -> x86 is, and it will be, a good choice for me because it's largely diffused and used, it has brilliant performances, it runs all the software I need (including Windows Xp, Altium, Dina, and these x86-apps), and doesn't cost too much.
(1) Ada bootstrapper, a short story
Since paid by a couple of customers to do that, I worked hard to cross-compile an Ada compiler for HPPA, and it took several months of effort. In the end, I used an old Gnat compiler released for HPUX v10.20, from which I cross-compiled for Linux/HPPA, and then I recompiled the compiler natively.
PowerPC has already removed the support for modern Gnat compilers, and on HPPA it looked like a horror story. Now Gnat works on Linux/HPPA, but the funny point is that for x86 Gnat has always been ready out of the box and the effort you have to invest to get Gnat working is equal to zero
That's life