Anandtech has an interesting article out about how it might be time to move forward on standardizing the x86 instruction set – both Intel and AMD have had proprietary instructions included in their CPUs. On the desktop, these proprietary instructions aren’t annoying – in the worst case scenario, a program would take advantage of a “shortcut” on one processor that wasn’t available on another – but what has changed for IT users is that increasingly, x86 chips are being emulated in virtualization, which increases hardware requirements and slows systems down – cutting the benefits which have traditionally driven virtualization.
“Much worse is that this unstandarized x86 extention mess has made it a lot harder for datacenters to make the step towards a really dynamic environment where you can load balance VMs and thus move applications from one server to another on the fly. It is impossible to move (vmotion, live migrate) a VM from Intel to AMD servers, from newer to (some) older ones, and you need to fiddle with CPU masks in some situations just to make it work (and read complex tech documents).”
One of the more interesting riddles about the IT industry and computer development in general is the idea of standardization.
Innovation often occurs due to non-standard protocols and unique innovations. Some open source projects are forked and become a jumbled mess of programmers working at cross-purposes; but others are forked and create new innovations that merge their way back into the main stream of program development, and become a new standard.
And even though sometimes it seems like every vendor has a new way of doing the same old thing, the competition between technologies gives motivation and ability for improvement.
On the other hand, it can also get in the way of doing stuff you really want to do! Windows has become a “de facto” standard for operating systems – and even among Linux, Ubuntu is leading as a clear desktop standard. The entire internet was built on TCP/IP – and it is indeed ONE internet, not a collection of “data services,” like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy; nor is it a large collection of BBSes.
Standardization leads to efficiency – but competition can lead to innovation. Multiple solutions spring up to a problem, and the best (or surviving) one becomes a standard which is then made more efficient, which opens up new solutions to new problems, and the cycle repeats.
Kinda like the Hegelian dialectical method, if you don’t think about it too hard.
Now, if all the computer technology in the world was developed by one company – standards first, innovation second – computer technology would stagnate. Yet, still, before “standards,” interoperability and integration provides a middle ground that allows for better technology to come onto the field without overly burdening the end-user with tons of configuration problems – which is why it’s such a high priority when choosing among enterprise networking vendors.
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