I'm really not sure I see this. Enterprise devices are more portable than they used to be, not less. Gone are the days of science relying almost exclusively on supercomputers that could only run specific proprietary Unixes and basically required proprietary compilers. Connection hubs and DSPs doing signal translation from various industrial devices and military and space communications networks to IP networks have gone from almost exclusively ASICs manufactured by one of two companies to FPGAs, fully reprogrammable blank slates you can do pretty much anything with. Phones and tablets are certainly less general purpose than desktop and laptop PCs, but much more general purpose than earlier incarnations of phones and tablet-like devices such as Palm Pilots, digital address books, graphing calculators, flip phones, land lines, things that could only do one thing and couldn't have any type of extension application installed at all from anyone, whether it was part of a walled garden or not. If the average American teenager today has nothing but an iPad and iPhone, that isn't completely general purpose, but it's a huge improvement on when I was a teenager 25 years ago and the closest thing my family had to a computer at all was a word processor, not a software suite like Word or Lotus but a specialized typewriter with some proprietary embedded firmware and no writable memory at all.
You make good points: the barriers to entry have dramatically decreased across a huge portion of the stack. With one notable exception: the cost and complexity of modern fabs increases every year while the companies involved consolidate or die out.
tsmc could easily decide “we’re not gonna fab your RISC-V design” at any moment and you’d be more or less SOL. I mean, you could fall back to a 150 nm process, but that kills a lot of opportunities.
And if things continue — if Apple, Amazon and Google move further in the direction of custom silicon — this will happen. Apple already has a pretty big advantage with their custom silicon — which they don’t sell for use in non-Apple products. Now just imagine if they brought tsmc in-house and had exclusive access to the most advanced fabs on the planet. Your ability to compete, and the room for people to build GPC would constrict MUCH further.
We have this enormous, all-pervasive stack built upon a foundation of like 3 companies, in the midst of massive consolidation. I honestly don’t understand how so many people who think about that are comfortable with it.
