8 ms·

Some comments miss the point. I don't think it's a suggestion that x86 has too much documentation or too much transistors. It just gives a picture in to how the

by dpc_pw 10y ago

Some comments miss the point. I don't think it's a suggestion that x86 has too much documentation or too much transistors. It just gives a picture in to how the hardware exploded in capacity, complexity and so on. Which is great (though obviously comes with a cost).

Taek 10y ago
I disagree that it's great. The immense complexity associated with creating a competitve x86 processor gives Intel a huge competitive moat. You can't make a competing processor without billions of dollars of R&D. As a result Intel is able to deploy highly unfavorable features like the Management Engine and consumers don't feel like they have an alternative. A reasonable alternative like Talos costs $3700. If startups could reasonably compete with traditional volumes of funding, we'd probably have better hardware.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  It seems to me more and more that Intel has relied way too much on x86 to shut out competition in the last 10-15 years. The world is currently moving onto greener pastures (lower power / higher performance per watt) and Intel is loosing more and more of their market at the bottom and top ends. Xeon Phi and their failed x86 mobile adventures to me are the prime indications that they bet too much on one horse.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Is the x86 architecture itself limited in its adaptability compared to others such as ARM? If yes, why and if no, why are Intel's mobile/low-power attempts failing?
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      The way I understand it, x86 does quite a lot in hardware what could be done in Software (compiler) just as well. That includes backwards compatibility to a whole host of instruction sets / extensions. All this seems closely linked to the IBM PC standard and Microsofts software strategy. All of this costs power. The result is that you can either have a mobile x86 that's competitive on power or on performance, but not both.
      - richardwhiuk 10y ago
        Hmm, I don't believe that's true. The power budget of the backwards compatibility is very small. Intel's problem is a case of optimization I think - their design teams have been optimizing towards producing a processor with an effective power budget of whatever the cooler could dissipate, rather than optimizing for low power, and that's a very different task. There's no one processor that will fit all workloads.
        m_mueller 10y ago
        I think compatibility to IBM PC has lots of hidden costs. One is that it seems to make Intel much less nimble at producing SoCs with features that are specific for each usecase. It's not just the ISA, it's basically the whole ecosystem around PC that's not well adapted. That's why we don't have Dell, HP and Intel phones and hardly any Microsoft ones today. x86 may not be the only reason, but from what I can see it's at least one of the major ones.
  - Double_Cast 10y ago
    Nah. Intel tried several times to quit the x86. They couldn't because the market rejected anything that wasn't backwards compatible.
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      well, did they try it for the mobile or the HPC market?
      - hobo_mark 10y ago
        You mean with XScale and Itanium? Yes they tried.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      The market rejected it for desktops and servers. But not in other markets. Which is why Intel is still selling in the hundreds of millions of CPUs, while ARM licensees are selling in the billions, and MIPS and PPC licensees are also selling in the hundreds of millions (but reap far less revenue than Intel, as more of are low price units going into embedded systems).
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      I have a feeling that the market rejected it because rewriting a ton of software didn't make sense for a negligible performance "upgrade", not because it wasn't backwards compatible. There were also emulators available to run x86 code. > When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. - Wikipedia
      - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
        I think the backwards compatibility problem wasn't that it lacked backwards compatibility, but rather that the proposition was to pay more to run your existing binaries slower. I recall Pentium Pro having a similar problem with 16-bit code.
  - robochat42 10y ago
    From what I've read, it seems that the Itanium was Intel's attempt to get away from x86 but it didn't work out as they had hoped. It seems to me that it is market-forces that have kept x86 as the incumbent instruction set.
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      People keep bringing this up when talking about Intel's botched mobile strategy, but IMO it just doesn't apply. Itanium was marketed based on features for servers that frankly weren't really popular. People always wanted one of the following things: * performance per dollar * performance per watt * highest single threaded performance * lowest possible power draw Itanium AFAIK improved neither of these, or it did so only for very narrow usecases. What Intel needed was either (a) an ARM competitor and/or (b) a processor with large vectors and a SIMT-like parallelisation model (i.e. a Tesla competitor). In both of these cases they didn't think twice before just throwing x86 at the problem until the pain goes away... which it never did.
      - robochat42 10y ago
        Just because the Itanium was a failure doesn't change the fact that Intel have tried several times to get away from x86. So it's unfair to claim that Intel have relied purely on x86 in order to shut out competition. Of course, they're not going to quit x86 until another instruction set has been proven more popular to the market and they have made attempts to create that instruction set.
        minipci1321 10y ago
        Agreed, some people just don't realize how many arches were tried at Intel, i432, i860, i960 etc...
        m_mueller 10y ago
        Still missing the point. Which non-x86 architectures targeted at low power or HPC - if you count computer graphics as a subset the main growth markets - were tried in the last 15 years? Why trying to win people over on compatibility if they have to rewrite their software anyways for other reasons, especially after ARM took the largest market share in mobile?
- nine_k 10y ago
  The catch is in the economy of scale. You can't make a Power8 cost comparably to an i7 unless you also produce it in huge numbers. ARM chips are cheap not (only) because the R&D is excessively cheap but because the chips are produced in hundreds of millions. Were it not for the explosion of mobile phones, they'd stay in the "nice but expensive for the performance" niche.
  - Taek 10y ago
    Economies of scale are governed by how difficult it is to optimize something, and how accessible the research is. A huge part of the cost of a chip is the design. You can get custom fab jobs for under $10,000. But if the design requires you to implement hundreds of op codes, the chip will be nowhere near that cheap. With simpler specs, a lot of this design cost is reduced. You may not be able to get 11nm chips, but you don't need that to be competitive. You just need to be close enough that your performance hit is not a deal breaker, at a price that's not a deal breaker.
  - Someone 10y ago
    Hundreds of millions is peanuts for ARM. https://www.arm.com https://www.arm.com claims "ARM’s partners shipped 14.9 billion ARM-based chips in 2015." That's about two CPUs for everyone on earth and likely two more this year.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      People don't realise how many things have CPUs these days. PPC (not POWER) and MIPS are also still within the same magnitude as x86 chips (hundreds of millions/year) - they both used to be selling more than x86 because they were more widespread in embedded niches (networking, automotive, set-top boxes), but I don't know whether or not that's still true or not. It's not economies of scale that gives Intel its sustained advantage as much as it is huge margins that allow them to continue re-investing in their fabrication process advantage, which again protects their margins by keeping them on top in the only segments of the CPU market that are both high price, high margin (at east for the top SKUs) and high unit.
  - qb45 10y ago
- mfukar 10y ago
  So if Intel made worse hardware, it would have competition. Yes, that is true. On the other hand, it's a completely useless situation for everybody who actually wants to use hardware, instead of getting rich in the hardware business.
- akerro 10y ago
  Won't RISC MIT-licences hardware fix that issue to some degree?
- chrishacken 10y ago
  On this topic, Microsoft just partnered with Qualcomm to use their chips in new devices. https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/08/qualcomm-collaborates-microsoft-support-windows-10-computing-devices-next https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/08/qualcomm-c...
- astrodust 10y ago
  Would you rather we were in a world where the 6502 was still current-generation hardware and any hillbilly with a fab in their shed could crank out a top-end CPU? Intel's got a lock on top-end performance, but don't think for a second they're in control of the CPU market. You can get a custom ASIC fabricated for under $10K in low volumes using process that's a generation behind. You can get things fabbed on the current process if you're willing to pay more, but it's on the order of $1-2M or so. It's not often people make new CPUs, but look at how the Bitcoin space took advantage of low ASIC prototyping and production costs to produce high-performance hashing devices. The cost of producing a 6502 chip in that era was basically the cost of building your own foundry. Now we have places like TSMC that will make chips for anyone who can afford the tape-out costs.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Would you rather we were in a world where the 6502 was still current-generation hardware and any hillbilly with a fab in their shed could crank out a top-end CPU? In a heartbeat!
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Play more Fallout then. That's what that world looks like. I'd rather live here where if you wanted you could tape out some 60nm chips for less than it costs to print some posters.
- tomcam 10y ago
  That moat is accompanied by staggering amounts of risk. They spend well over $1 billion on each new fab plant, which they have no guarantee of breaking even. I hate the ME too, by the way. But we still have a choice. No one forces us to use Intel.

by dpc_pw 10y ago

Taek 10y ago

I disagree that it's great. The immense complexity associated with creating a competitve x86 processor gives Intel a huge competitive moat. You can't make a competing processor without billions of dollars of R&D. As a result Intel is able to deploy highly unfavorable features like the Management Engine and consumers don't feel like they have an alternative. A reasonable alternative like Talos costs $3700. If startups could reasonably compete with traditional volumes of funding, we'd probably have better hardware.

m_mueller 10y ago
It seems to me more and more that Intel has relied way too much on x86 to shut out competition in the last 10-15 years. The world is currently moving onto greener pastures (lower power / higher performance per watt) and Intel is loosing more and more of their market at the bottom and top ends. Xeon Phi and their failed x86 mobile adventures to me are the prime indications that they bet too much on one horse.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Is the x86 architecture itself limited in its adaptability compared to others such as ARM? If yes, why and if no, why are Intel's mobile/low-power attempts failing?
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    The way I understand it, x86 does quite a lot in hardware what could be done in Software (compiler) just as well. That includes backwards compatibility to a whole host of instruction sets / extensions. All this seems closely linked to the IBM PC standard and Microsofts software strategy. All of this costs power. The result is that you can either have a mobile x86 that's competitive on power or on performance, but not both.
    - richardwhiuk 10y ago
      Hmm, I don't believe that's true. The power budget of the backwards compatibility is very small. Intel's problem is a case of optimization I think - their design teams have been optimizing towards producing a processor with an effective power budget of whatever the cooler could dissipate, rather than optimizing for low power, and that's a very different task. There's no one processor that will fit all workloads.
      - m_mueller 10y ago
        I think compatibility to IBM PC has lots of hidden costs. One is that it seems to make Intel much less nimble at producing SoCs with features that are specific for each usecase. It's not just the ISA, it's basically the whole ecosystem around PC that's not well adapted. That's why we don't have Dell, HP and Intel phones and hardly any Microsoft ones today. x86 may not be the only reason, but from what I can see it's at least one of the major ones.
- Double_Cast 10y ago
  Nah. Intel tried several times to quit the x86. They couldn't because the market rejected anything that wasn't backwards compatible.
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    well, did they try it for the mobile or the HPC market?
    - hobo_mark 10y ago
      You mean with XScale and Itanium? Yes they tried.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    The market rejected it for desktops and servers. But not in other markets. Which is why Intel is still selling in the hundreds of millions of CPUs, while ARM licensees are selling in the billions, and MIPS and PPC licensees are also selling in the hundreds of millions (but reap far less revenue than Intel, as more of are low price units going into embedded systems).
  - chrishacken 10y ago
    I have a feeling that the market rejected it because rewriting a ton of software didn't make sense for a negligible performance "upgrade", not because it wasn't backwards compatible. There were also emulators available to run x86 code. > When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. - Wikipedia
    - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
      I think the backwards compatibility problem wasn't that it lacked backwards compatibility, but rather that the proposition was to pay more to run your existing binaries slower. I recall Pentium Pro having a similar problem with 16-bit code.
- robochat42 10y ago
  From what I've read, it seems that the Itanium was Intel's attempt to get away from x86 but it didn't work out as they had hoped. It seems to me that it is market-forces that have kept x86 as the incumbent instruction set.
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    People keep bringing this up when talking about Intel's botched mobile strategy, but IMO it just doesn't apply. Itanium was marketed based on features for servers that frankly weren't really popular. People always wanted one of the following things: * performance per dollar * performance per watt * highest single threaded performance * lowest possible power draw Itanium AFAIK improved neither of these, or it did so only for very narrow usecases. What Intel needed was either (a) an ARM competitor and/or (b) a processor with large vectors and a SIMT-like parallelisation model (i.e. a Tesla competitor). In both of these cases they didn't think twice before just throwing x86 at the problem until the pain goes away... which it never did.
    - robochat42 10y ago
      Just because the Itanium was a failure doesn't change the fact that Intel have tried several times to get away from x86. So it's unfair to claim that Intel have relied purely on x86 in order to shut out competition. Of course, they're not going to quit x86 until another instruction set has been proven more popular to the market and they have made attempts to create that instruction set.
      - minipci1321 10y ago
        Agreed, some people just don't realize how many arches were tried at Intel, i432, i860, i960 etc...
        m_mueller 10y ago
        Still missing the point. Which non-x86 architectures targeted at low power or HPC - if you count computer graphics as a subset the main growth markets - were tried in the last 15 years? Why trying to win people over on compatibility if they have to rewrite their software anyways for other reasons, especially after ARM took the largest market share in mobile?
nine_k 10y ago
The catch is in the economy of scale. You can't make a Power8 cost comparably to an i7 unless you also produce it in huge numbers. ARM chips are cheap not (only) because the R&D is excessively cheap but because the chips are produced in hundreds of millions. Were it not for the explosion of mobile phones, they'd stay in the "nice but expensive for the performance" niche.
- Taek 10y ago
  Economies of scale are governed by how difficult it is to optimize something, and how accessible the research is. A huge part of the cost of a chip is the design. You can get custom fab jobs for under $10,000. But if the design requires you to implement hundreds of op codes, the chip will be nowhere near that cheap. With simpler specs, a lot of this design cost is reduced. You may not be able to get 11nm chips, but you don't need that to be competitive. You just need to be close enough that your performance hit is not a deal breaker, at a price that's not a deal breaker.
- Someone 10y ago
  Hundreds of millions is peanuts for ARM. https://www.arm.com https://www.arm.com claims "ARM’s partners shipped 14.9 billion ARM-based chips in 2015." That's about two CPUs for everyone on earth and likely two more this year.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    People don't realise how many things have CPUs these days. PPC (not POWER) and MIPS are also still within the same magnitude as x86 chips (hundreds of millions/year) - they both used to be selling more than x86 because they were more widespread in embedded niches (networking, automotive, set-top boxes), but I don't know whether or not that's still true or not. It's not economies of scale that gives Intel its sustained advantage as much as it is huge margins that allow them to continue re-investing in their fabrication process advantage, which again protects their margins by keeping them on top in the only segments of the CPU market that are both high price, high margin (at east for the top SKUs) and high unit.
- qb45 10y ago
mfukar 10y ago
So if Intel made worse hardware, it would have competition. Yes, that is true. On the other hand, it's a completely useless situation for everybody who actually wants to use hardware, instead of getting rich in the hardware business.
akerro 10y ago
Won't RISC MIT-licences hardware fix that issue to some degree?
chrishacken 10y ago
On this topic, Microsoft just partnered with Qualcomm to use their chips in new devices. https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/08/qualcomm-collaborates-microsoft-support-windows-10-computing-devices-next https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/08/qualcomm-c...
astrodust 10y ago
Would you rather we were in a world where the 6502 was still current-generation hardware and any hillbilly with a fab in their shed could crank out a top-end CPU? Intel's got a lock on top-end performance, but don't think for a second they're in control of the CPU market. You can get a custom ASIC fabricated for under $10K in low volumes using process that's a generation behind. You can get things fabbed on the current process if you're willing to pay more, but it's on the order of $1-2M or so. It's not often people make new CPUs, but look at how the Bitcoin space took advantage of low ASIC prototyping and production costs to produce high-performance hashing devices. The cost of producing a 6502 chip in that era was basically the cost of building your own foundry. Now we have places like TSMC that will make chips for anyone who can afford the tape-out costs.
- gaius 10y ago
  Would you rather we were in a world where the 6502 was still current-generation hardware and any hillbilly with a fab in their shed could crank out a top-end CPU? In a heartbeat!
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Play more Fallout then. That's what that world looks like. I'd rather live here where if you wanted you could tape out some 60nm chips for less than it costs to print some posters.
tomcam 10y ago
That moat is accompanied by staggering amounts of risk. They spend well over $1 billion on each new fab plant, which they have no guarantee of breaking even. I hate the ME too, by the way. But we still have a choice. No one forces us to use Intel.