That's how Arm already works! The customers help to set the roadmap.

There's also prior art in RISC-V

Is that a consortium? I work at a big tech company and our customers also request features of which we are the final arbiter. Does that make us a consortium?

I inferred your argument as being that consortia are bad because of what they do (pet features), not what they are.

Without a central arbiter who takes responsibility for producing a consistent and coherent design, you would likely end up with a mish mash of pet features.

If a customer asks for a feature, you can say no if it is a bad choice. You have less leverage to do so when that 'customer' is really a paying member of a consortium.

Everytime I see someone recommend a special interest group or consortium… I think of Bluetooth and it’s literally thousands of pages spec.

Then when they have the chance to almost completely start over… the make BLE with approximately 1/2 of what people want and spend years bloating the spec on that too.

I’ll take a talented lunatic with autonomy over 20 different voices in a bureaucratic community every time.

And how many PCI-E cards do you think this comment took to reach my screen?

so your argument against consortiums (bluetooth) is that they work?… but at a higher cost (lengthy specs)?

the historic alternative is a slightly lower cost (most of BT complexity is of the plumbing type, not the PhD type) and much more significant market risks (due to incompatibilities: smaller addressable market and less ability to pivot from one market to a different one).

from the engineer PoV, i agree with you: i’d love for these specifications to be simplified. from the business PoV, i don’t think it actually matters that much.

A consortium of nations interested in maintaining access to reliable compute and innovation might be interesting. As in not bought out explicitly but some kind of direct and regular investment