11 ms·
Is this the beginning of the end for x86?
by lx3459683 8y ago
Is this the beginning of the end for x86?
- ianai 8y agoI doubt it. But competition is sorely needed.
- reddotX 8y agoyes
- kyriakos 8y agoProbably not. Arm is power efficient but still x86 performance is ahead. At some point you need a balance between battery life and performance.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
- wtetzner 8y agoRight, but Intel CPUs are used in more than laptops. I don't know if Intel's days are numbered or not, but I don't think this alone would be enough.
- monocasa 8y agoiPods could gain market share from marketing and consumer focused industrial design. ARM cores don't have the same way out.
- mkhalil 8y agoWoah, fatal_error. Does "Intel Inside" sound familiar? That's because it worked amazingly well, and people chose Intel over AMD back in the day just because they "felt" better about it. Some even chose it because they didn't want to get AMD shamed ("Aw poor person; they could only a afford an AMD."). Not saying Intel CPU lineup wasn't better than AMD's product, (especially at the height of the marketing program when laptops used to have "Intel Inside" stickers), but a lot of people didn't even bother comparing. They just chose Intel-based computers. And that's the story of how so many people I know ended up buying a PC with a crappy Celeron* (I know, I know, the new ones are better). Sure, CPUs are harder than iPods to market to consumers. Most haven't a clue what ARM Cortex-A7 is. But, that could be the issue. They need to step up their brand identity. They also should probably tell people that ARM doesn't actually make hardware for consumers. They just design the architecture and license that design to silicon manufactures. Most people knew they were buying an Intel. Most people don't know they bought an ARM. They could do better. *: I assume some bought them because the salesman at Best Buy said "dude, Intel's are what you want. AMDs are slow."
- monocasa 8y agoIntel has ~60x the revenue of ARM and is already a known brand with the public. If it gets into a marketing slugging match, Intel wins hands down.
- matwood 8y agoI'm not sure that type of marketing will happen again though. Since then, computers have gone further down the path of being an appliance. What's inside matters less than what it can do. If Apple releases a MacBook with 1-5 days of battery life, no one will care what's inside.
- monocasa 8y agoI agree, I don't think it will. It just doesn't make sense.
- kuwze 8y agoARM is owned by Softbank, which has a net worth of ~2x Intel.
- monocasa 8y agoAnd many many more commitments. They can't dedicate the same resources that Intel can.
- 27182818284 8y agoIt is rather amazing that just reading "Intel Inside" I heard the little chimes from the TV commercials and saw it in my head.
- dsr_ 8y agoIf everything goes right for ARM, next year's CPU line should be single-core competitive against Intel's laptop line; the year after, ARM could be ahead. Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area. Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
- dman 8y agoJust built a 64 core workstation based on AMD Epyc cpus, seeing how fast my simulation workloads run on it brings a smile to my face.
- effie 8y agoI can appreciate the fun to be had with so many core cpu, but did you actually measure the performance? According to Passmark, both single and multithread performance of EPYC is very poor [1][2]. Passmark database is years in building and very informative, but I think for EPYC that is an erroneous result. Could you run Passmark benchmark on your rig to get another data point public? [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=3153 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=31... [2] Compare that with performance and price of something like E5-2670 from 2012: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+%40+2.60GHz&id=1220 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+...
- dman 8y agoWill give that a try tonight. Have to warn you that right now 1 of my DIMM was bad, so the system is running with only 15 DIMMS (which is an unsupported config) so the results might be suboptimal until I receive a new DIMM from the seller.
- effie 8y agoThat's great, looking forward to the results. But, there's no rush. If you'd like to measure today anyway, please just make sure the result doesn't get reported to Passmark database so as not to spoil the small dataset with a biased result. Good luck with the replacement, hope it will stay solid from now on.
- mkozlows 8y agoLiterally exactly what Arm is talking about in this roadmap.
- Symmetry 8y agoYou can't really look at power and performance in isolation, given that you can trade one for the other by modifying their clock speeds. It would be better to say that from the milliwatt range to 20W socket draw or so ARM is more performance and current x86 designs are more performant above 20W.
- bsder 8y agoDoubtful. Performance generally corresponds to active area and, hence, power. So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power. That having been said, breaking a monoculture would be welcome, especially given how cavalier Intel is about security. (You will note I didn't say "In light of" with respect to Intel and security. IBM, DEC, etc. have been preaching about the fact that x86 has lousy security for 30+ years. It's just that nobody cared until x86 became a mainframe ... err ... cloud.)
- tomp 8y ago> Performance generally corresponds to active area and, hence, power Then how come ARM won on mobile?
- gpderetta 8y agox86 has overhead in small low power systems; it didn't help that the initial intel low power products were low-effort garbage.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoAtom came too late and it wasn't enough to beat ARM. All the other low power players stagnated.
- pjc50 8y agoDramatically lower performance expectations. Low power Intel is not as good as low power ARM. "High power" ARM competitive with desktop doesn't quite exist yet, although the iPhones are very close (and better than a desktop of a few years ago)
- bsder 8y agoBecause an enterprising engineer managed to hand code an assembly language implementation of cellular baseband on ARM thus entrenching ARM as the low cost implementation on a cell phone. After that, ARM expanded outward to run the GUI. In addition, the batteries of the time demanded a specific power envelope. Not many chips had this envelope ... pretty much only ARM , MIPS, and a handful of also rans that you've never heard of. Once ARM got going, network effects took over. There is no reason you couldn't implement a cell phone on a MIPS core, for example, at this point except for network effects.
- Symmetry 8y agoMaybe. Traditionally it's hard for companies to compete with much cheaper but slightly less performant rivals. That's the whole idea behind "Disruptive Innovation." When x86 came out it was the cheap knockoff that everybody could afford and it eventually ended up eating it's way into workstations and servers as its scale let it pour more engineering resources in. ARM may be achieving that sort of scale advantage over x86 but its fragmented nature makes the story more complex.
- scj 8y agoI used an ARM Chromebook with Linux installed for about 2 years. YMMV, but VLC seemed to not work anywhere near as well as it does on the x86 (in terms of playback and codec availability). Good battery life though.