anonymou5 (no.delete@this.spam.com) on March 14, 2021 5:31 pm wrote:
> One interesting nuance is the discrepancy between segmentation and paging
> when it comes to what is privileged versus what is not privileged.
>
> With segmentation, 0 is privileged, and 1...3 are not.
>
> With paging, 0...2 are privileged, and 3 is not.
>
> The mainstream software stacks may have stuck with just 0 and 3, but over
> the decades I have seen some interesting uses of that discrepancy.
>
> Anyway.
>
> I wonder what will eat the lunch of today's established ISAs in the coming
> years. Probably something machine-generated, not created by humans.

Define coming.

The gulf from recognizing a picture of a cat, guessing what ads a person might have a slightly better chance of clicking, and crashing automobiles when attempting to navigate non-trivial roads, to developing a machine code that is optimal for compiler generation and microarchitectural implementation is roughly as large as the gulf from not recognizing a picture of a cat and those other things. That is to say, vast and not really shrinking without breakthroughs of the form of things that the cool kids today do not call "AI".

50 years from now maybe (not because I think it's likely or I have an educated guess, just that it's enough time for sufficiently many non-linear breakthroughs that it would be foolish to discount anything). 10, 20 years from now? Very doubtful.