[TUHS] the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

[ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>]

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The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking:

What I'm seeing is reversing the rotation of the wheel of reincarnation.
Instead of pulling the task (e.g. graphics) from a special purpose device
back into the general purpose domain, the general purpose computing domain
is pushed into the special purpose device.

I first saw this almost 10 years ago with a WLAN modem chip that ran linux
on its 4 core cpu, all of it in a tiny package. It was faster, better, and
cheaper than its traditional embedded predecessor -- because the software
stack was less dedicated and single-company-created. Take Linux, add some
stuff, voila! WLAN modem.

Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several
independent SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a
recent remote code exploit on, ... an LCD panel.

Any of these little devices, with the better part of a 1G flash and a large
part of 1G DRAM, dwarfs anything Unix ever ran on. And there are more and
more of them, all over the little PCB in a laptop.

The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed
systems continues. The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or
sideways?

I'm no longer sure the whole idea of the wheel or reincarnation is even
applicable.

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