I heard this same stuff in the 90s about GPUs. “GPUs are too specialized and don’t have the flexibility of CPUs”.

Startups failing doesn’t prove anything. There are dozens of startups and there will only be 2-4 winners. Of course MOST are going to fail. Moving in too early before things have settled down or too late after your competitors are too established are both guaranteed ways to fail.

It’s relatively convenient to blame your failure due to being too smart too early instead of just facing the genuine lack of demand for your product.

C is considered fast, but did you know that it SUCKS for old CISC ISAs? They are too irregular and make a lot of assumptions that don’t mesh well with the compute model of C. C pls x86 is where things changed. x86 could be adapted to run C code well. C compilers then adapted to be fast on x86 then x86 adapted to run that compiled C code better then the loop goes round and round.

Nothing about modern x86 architectures constitutes any classic model of “CISC” under the hood, the silicon runs machine code and ops that for all intents and purposes can be abstracted to any ISA.

This is true for GPUs too. Apple’s M1/M2 GPU design isn’t fundamentally bad, but it is different from AMD/Nvidia, so the programmer’s hardware assumptions and normal optimizations aren’t effective. Same applies to some extent for Intel Xe where they’ve been spending huge amounts to “optimize” various games (most likely literally writing new code to replace the original game code with versions optimized for their ISA).

What?

Even if we accept the worst-case scenario and 2-4 approaches rise to the top and each requires a separate ASIC, the situation STILL favors the ASIC approach. We can support dozens of ISAs for dozens of purposes. We can certainly support 2-4 ISAs with 1-3 competitors for each.

Again, they all said that before you, and look where they are now. (hint hint: Nvidia)