10 ms·

The End of x86?

203 points by mjfern 16y ago

praecipula 16y ago
I think the largest hurdle for ARM to get over is the preponderance of Windows installations with kernels only complied for x86. Linux and OS X (Mach) already run on ARM, and I think that possibly the NT kernel runs on ARM (Windows phone 7 is ARM, right?) I have trouble seeing Microsoft port over Windows proper to ARM until there's a really strong market for it. That being said, perhaps low power consumption ARM devices will provide that market. Perhaps this is another reason that Apple has their own ARM chip - to be at the forefront of the ARM revolution, displacing MSFT?
- contextfree 16y ago
  NT doesn't currently run on ARM (WP7 is still based on CE), though it was originally designed to be CPU independent. Probably the biggest obstacle for MSFT porting Windows to ARM is not the expense of the port itself, but reluctance to put out a version of Windows that's binary incompatible with all the Windows software out there. Incidentally (and speaking of breaking compatibility), MSFT is working on a brand new kernel and operating environment (Midori) which does have ARM as a target. But this is an incubation project with no guaranteed release, though it's a very serious effort.
  - nivertech 16y ago
    Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.
    - RomP 16y ago
      There is nothing in Windows which requires fixed endianness. While all known versions of the OS have been shipped on little-endian machines (except XBox 360, albeit running highly modified version of NT Kernel), there is very little dependency on the endianness for all modules except format parsers and network API. Changing that is a relatively simple undertaking, much simpler than building a new version of kernel, for XBox, for example
    - gecko 16y ago
      That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.
      - tesseract 16y ago
        PowerPC (except PPC970 aka G5, as I recall) is bi-endian (configurable endianness); so are Alpha and Itanium which also had Windows NT ports.
        froydnj 16y ago
        Alpha is most definitely not a bi-endian architecture; it's little-endian only. PowerPC chips can be either, but the vast, vast majority are big endian.
        kinetik 16y ago
        Incorrect. The Cray T3E used Alpha processors in big-endian mode.
    - wolfgke 16y ago
      This is no problem for ARM processors since they are bi-endian (as PowerPC). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware
- wmf 16y ago
  I don't think Windows Phone is based on NT. Apple and Android have shown that you can build a mainstream platform ecosystem from nothing in 2-3 years, so who needs Windows compatibility?
  - nl 16y ago
    Neither Apple iOS or Android were "build from nothing in 2-3 years". iOS is based on OS-X, which is based on NeXT, which is based on BSD (~40 years of work) Android is based on Linux (so ~20 years of work)
    - wmf 16y ago
      My point is that they went from zero apps and zero users to lots in 2-3 years. IMO the argument that Windows backwards compatibility is the only way to get the long tail of tens of thousands of apps has been refuted.
      - nl 16y ago
        Oh right. Yes, I agree, then. All a new platforms needs is a great webbrowser (which these days seems to mean "port webkit") and it's instantly viable.
- zyb09 16y ago
  Didn't OSX just recently get rid of ARM support? Might be wrong though..
  - vurlix 16y ago
    You're confusing ARM with PowerPC, both of which are RISC architectures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
neilc 16y ago
Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? If an Atom-based CPU consumes ~2-3 extra watts but offers marginally better performance and (more importantly) compatibility with an enormous base of existing applications, that doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for switching.
- sanswork 16y ago
  Think of a data center situation though where you can get a ~50% power requirement difference for marginal performance decreases. The cost savings would be huge even if you require more servers to make up for the performance difference. For most home users I think you're right for now but for businesses it could be huge.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Of course, you've got to remember that which chip has the best performance per watt depends on the job. A sufficiently smart data center could determine this automatically and take that into account in its job scheduling.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > Think of a data center situation though where you can get a ~50% power requirement difference for marginal performance decreases. 50% lower processor power isn't the same as 50% less system power.
- hackermom 16y ago
  Except that the Atoms at same (and even a bit higher) clock don't even offer marginally better performance. And another thing that I came to think of that weighs heavily in ARM's favor is the multitude of composite, multifunctional chips, SoCs etc. currently available in the ARM flavor. Is there ANYTHING like this for Atom, or any x86 at all?
  - maximilianburke 16y ago
    Yes, AMD's Fusion line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion) aims to provide SoC functionality.
nl 16y ago
I think ARM is going to continue to bite into x86 market share significantly. But this article is wrong to right off x86 so easily. Firstly, power consumption. It's right that ARM has lower power draw than x86. The article is wrong by how much, though. Very low power ARM chips draw much, much less than 2-3 watts. These are mostly for embedded systems, though. The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm. For sub-netbook systems, Intel is launching it's Moorestown architecture. This is probably still isn't dropping into the Smartphone market in this generation (despite Intel's marketing: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux-on-x86-smartphone-intels-small-step-forward.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux...), but should be great for tablets: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-opening-salvo-in-x86-vs-arm-smartphone-wars.ars http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-open... The article also implies that Intel's foundries are a liability. That would be true if there really was useful "competition in the foundry market". Sure, if you want 45nm+ chips produced, there are a number of foundries that can do it. But once you start looking for 32nm foundries they get a lot rarer, and Intel has just announced it's building its new 22nm foundries. That's a whole generation ahead of anyone else in the industry and is a big competitive advantage (Smaller scale in chip foundries means more performance for the same power, or less power for the same performance.)
- lsc 16y ago
  The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm. Oh my god yes. If you could actually run an atom server in less than 10 watts for a 4GiB system, even before disk, I'd be renting those out instead of VPSs, and probably killing the competition on it, too. My (perhaps unreasonably cynical) theory is that intel nerfed the desktop atoms because they don't want them to compete with their server chips in my applications. But, on the other hand, that's irrational, because when per-core performance doesn't matter, (and in virtualization, more, smaller cores are better than fewer, faster cores) AMD already beats Intel by quite a lot. And atoms certainly don't compete in applications where per-core performance matters, so yeah, that's probably not it.
aidenn0 16y ago
Intel is aware of this. Atom is the shot across the bow. They are working on making smaller and lower-power parts. It's interesting to watch ARM race up as Intel races down.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  If we compare the RISC nature of ARM with the CISC-implemented-over-RISC approach of contemporary x86s, it's easy to believe it will prove simpler to upscale ARM than to downscale the Atom. Transmeta-style emulation could be one possible way out of this death spiral for Intel.
  - semipermeable 16y ago
    History has shown that intel is very good at getting out of potential death spirals...
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Intel's x86 killed the RISC workstation with Windows compatibility and price per MIPS. Intel then matched and surpassed AMD on AMD64 counting on its own size and on the complexity of building a very fast 64-bit x86. All factors, Windows compatibility excepted, are on ARM's side this time. Of course Intel has survived bad situations before, but this time I am not betting on them.
      - nl 16y ago
        Which factors exactly on ARM's side? I can think of only two: 1) Power usage on low end chips. ARM will be ahead of x86 on platforms below the smartphone for the foreseeable future, and on smartphones for another generation (2-3 years) 2) Manufactures can customize ARM to build SOCs. I can't see Intel allowing complete customization like that, but I'd expect them to ship some competitive SOCs themselves.
        rbanffy 16y ago
jules 16y ago
What portion of x86 transistors are dedicated to supporting the bad instruction set design?
- protomyth 16y ago
  I seem to remember from one article that is was the same amount of transistors as the older ARM cores (not the A8 or A9). This is a pretty big anchor to overcome. previous on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051
- tedunangst 16y ago
  Less than 10% of the transistors dedicated to cache.
- m0th87 16y ago
  That's an interesting question that I don't think anyone would be able to quantify, just because performance is so subjective to the applications that are run. In an interview, Alan Kay remarked that bad processor architectures degrade performance by three orders of magnitude [1]. If he's right, that's a pretty hefty tax. But I don't see anyone being able to prove or disprove his hypothesis. Maybe most of the tax is an inevitable byproduct of increasingly complex chipsets. [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 around 1/3 of the way in
Geee 16y ago
That will surely happen. CPUs have for some time been limited by heating problems and the architecture with more performance with the same power consumption will win. If ARM can deliver that, then there's no question about it.
dstein 16y ago
I ran some rough numbers once. I couldn't find exact numbers but estimated for about $1.5 million worth of ARM-based plug servers, you would have close to enough raw CPU power (in terms of FLOPS) compete with the 2003-version of Google.
gamble 16y ago
I'm not going to write off Intel yet, but they're in a dangerous position. The number one reason Microsoft's stock has been moribund the past ten years is that Linux took over the datacenter. Imagine how much more revenue they'd have if the millions upon millions of X86 servers deployed since 2000 ran Windows. Instead, they're stuck in a saturated, slow-growth monopoly. If non-x86 chips take off in data centers, Intel will be in a similarly bad spot.
- gridspy 16y ago
  ... And windows will be locked out of the datacenter until they create ARM-compatible versions of windows. Next thing you know Windows runs on both ARM and x86 (with x86 emulation for applications) and pushes x86 out of the commercial / domestic arena.
  - Hoff 16y ago
    Microsoft Windows on Itanium was once marketed as the path forward for x86 applications, too. Intel hasn't had particular success with microprocessor designs outside of its core x86 business. Examples of other designs include iAPX432, i860/i960, StrongARM/XScale and Itanium. These architecture transitions don't always work out. While Apple has some experience with porting and has maked it look (relatively) easy, Windows hasn't had particular success with its ports, whether via Itanium's x86 emulation or via translation tools such as FX!32.
jacabado 16y ago
I'm a web developer (C# full stack) with 2 years of experience, I have been attracted to ARM development since the moment I studied it in university. As I'll be mostly in technical functions for some time (3 years?) what should I consider when trying an experience in ARM development? What are the pros and cons career wise and technical challenges relatively to continue to do boring CRUD C# applications?
ssp 16y ago
The tagline from Innovator's Dilemma is that well-managed companies can get into trouble when they are being disrupted. The reason is that it's normally good business to get rid of low-margin products and focus your resources on the ones that make the most money. And then someone takes over the low end and expands into the high end. But Intel is not falling for that one. They have made the Atom, a slow, cheap, low-power chip that competes directly with ARM. That's likely a wise move, but Intel now has the problem that low-margin chips are still bad business. They have to have their expensive best-in-industry fabs make low-margin Atoms, when they would much, much rather have them make expensive Xeons. At one point they made a deal to have Atoms manufactured at TSMC, which would have helped a lot with this problem, but apparently that deal didn't work out. Even if it had worked out, the Atom would no longer have the process advantage, and then backwards compatibility would be the only advantage for x86. With Windows becoming less and less relevant, that's a big problem, considering the technical advantages ARM has over x86. So fundamentally, Intel has a problem that CPUs are becoming commoditized, which means they will either have to take much lower margins or retreat to the high end. Both scenarios are unpleasant for them.
- ippisl 16y ago
  Also intel is being disrupted from the higher end by GPU's and the new ARM processors(due to performance/watt), and multicore processors like tilera.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    I haven't heard about Tilera until just now: it does have potential, but disrupting X86? That requires proof. Also GPUs have their uses, but general-purpose they are not. GPUs are complements to CPUs (just as coprocessors specialized for floating-point calculations where back in the day). Most people here probably haven't lived the day when 80387 had to be installed alongside i386 if you wanted decent graphics performance. It is actually interesting that it takes so long for GPUs to be merged with X86. In my opinion ARM is the only credible threat in the data-center, especially for servers that are mostly I/O bound. But on the other hand costs can skyrocket when scaling horizontally and having 500 HTTP servers (like Digg) is not at all fun. And IMHO, x86 chips have better performance / watt. For desktop computing X86 will still dominate, at least for the following 10 years, simply because of Windows; which runs on over 1 billion computers. Yeah, I know it is fashionable on HN to say Windows is not relevant anymore. Doesn't make it true.
atomly 16y ago
"Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything." "Yeah. RISC is good."
- Gibbon 16y ago
  "So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat." - John Sculley
jayphelps 16y ago
Great article. As an example, it's fairly obvious Apple is building up it's internal CPU engineering abilities to inevitably put an ARM in a Macbook. But I don't think it will be in the near future due to breaking compatibility with current software, especially those who use SSE instructions. But who knows, maybe they'll create an x86 emulator for the transition like Rosetta. OS XI maybe?
protomyth 16y ago
I do wonder, for some of these higher performance devices could Intel / AMD build a version of their chip that was 64-bit only and removed a lot of the legacy instructions / vector attempts? Its not like a recompile / endian shift wouldn't be necessary going from ARM to x86, so it shouldn't add any time to the conversion. You have to account for all the variations of the x86 in a compiler anyway.
bsergean 16y ago
People are still gonna need PCs for a while and as Windows does not run on ARM it seems a bit early for an x86 death.
happybuy 16y ago
As I wrote in a similar thread I think Intel and x86 is already dead - the writing is on the wall - Intel just doesn't know it yet. Below is how I believe a key customer has already planned to leave the x86 architecture as nothing but a footnote in their history (alongside the remnants of PowerPC). --- Currently Apple relies on Intel for a major component in a key product. Strategically, Apple doesn't like to have to rely on a single source or supplier for key products. Apple will do whatever is possible to remove this reliance. Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple designed ARM processor. How? By slowly, step by step, providing a way towards this. Step 1. Migrate your OS to the new architecture (e.g. iOS already, OS X not far behind) - done Step 2. Migrate your developer base onto developer tools which you control and can easily change the architecture it targets (e.g. Xcode and LLVM) - done Step 3. Provide a space where problematic applications which use other VMs or rely directly on getting too close to the hardware are not welcome (e.g. a Mac App Store) - announced Step 4. Change the marketplace behaviour so that you control how the majority of applications are distributed and can quickly provide updates without user intervention. Such as an App store. Step 5. Release a new Macbook with an ARM processor, absolutely killing on form factor, price and battery performance that Intel cannot compete with. Encourage your Mac App Store developers to flick a switch in Xcode, to recompile and upload their new Universal (x86 & ARM) versions of their Apps to the Mac App Store. Result: you now control the processor direction and application distribution mechanism for a key product and no longer rely upon the whims of Intel. Apple is all about controlling an integrated experience for their customers. Currently Intel is getting in the way of this for the Mac product.
- albertzeyer 16y ago
  In addition: Extend Rosetta to translate x86 to ARM.
- zppx 16y ago
  What's next? Will Apple design their own GPUs instead of using third parties to design one for every product in the Apple Store just to control the costumer experience? What kind of business advantage Apple will have compared to NVidia that sells its technology? I think that Steve Jobs understands these questions very well, and that's partly what separate him from the Average Joe Tech-loving guy.
mjfern 16y ago
Does anyone have any data that they can share on the following -- as a company, if I licensed the latest generation ARM processor (e.g., Cortex-A15) and then factored in any additional design and manufacturing costs (e.g., via a foundry), what would be the total cost advantage of using an ARM chip versus a comparable Intel chip (e.g., Atom)? Thanks!
jawee 16y ago
From my experience in running Debian on ARM, I can say that the software difference is really non-existence. Any of the normal Debian OSS software works fine.. I did not run into any problems with software not working except for the closed source programs that didn't have ARM packages. I really can't imagine the architecture shift being that big of a problem, as I'm assuming the bulk of the work for ARM with Debian was just recompiling packages.. I had a working XFCE desktop with common packages like Iceweasel (Firefox), OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and so on that was just as easy to set up as x86.
- regularfry 16y ago
  It used to be the case that Java had serious performance problems on the ARM. I don't know if that's still true.
- junkbit 16y ago
  The last time I had an architecture issue was with a SNES emulator that had pieces hard coded in 32bit Asm. Pretty rare these days. Maybe things like VirtualBox too.
- konad 16y ago
  How about ffmpeg / libdv / mplayer Last time I looked they had hand coded asm.
  - jawee 16y ago
    I only tried with VLC player which didn't present any immediate problems, but I don't know if it uses any of these libraries.
tsotha 16y ago
The x86 architecture will win out for the same reason it won out decades ago. Most of the world's software was compiled for x86. I have all sorts of software I've been running on my Windows laptop. When I go to buy a new laptop, it'll be another Windows x86 laptop because my software would cost more to replace than the machine upon which it's running.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Visualization today is vastly better today than 10 years ago. We've also got a big, growing market that intel isn't doing well in. I wouldn't count Intel out just yet, but them winning is far from sure.
protomyth 16y ago
In the article it states people are holding onto their PCs longer because they are satisfied with the capabilities of their older machine. I wonder if this is really proven or a misread caused by the XP -> Vista transition problems.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I tossed Ubuntu (with ext4) on my 2005 laptop, and it's proving to be a formidable word processor and web browsing machine. I think a lot of people are just realizing that they don't need another core or a chip built with a smaller process to play flash games and write e-mail. Though I'm a little concerned about what the smaller number of hardware sales will do to development in the server market. Can they maintain R&D budgets?
regularfry 16y ago
The rest of the article aside, one thing jumped out at me - AMD's P/E ratio. What's the received wisdom for why they are so cheap?
- DavidSJ 16y ago
  They have tons of debt.
SriniK 16y ago
Just wanted to mention... (e.g., A4 in a MacBook Air). incorrect. Intel Core 2 Duo 1.4 GHz processor in a MacBook Air http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/2 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A13... I guess author wanted to mention iPad
soramimo 16y ago
while this might be true for the mobile world, the author does not seem to consider that people do more of their computations in the cloud or data centers that in turn have to purchase great numbers of classical high-performance chips. While people are happy with the performance they get on their home machines the demand for greater computing power in the cloud will grow further.
thomasfl 16y ago
It's the return for Advanced RISC Machines.
16s 16y ago
ARM is new? It's been around longer than most Ruby developers have been alive ;)
yason 16y ago
Modern CPUs are pretty low-level RISC stuff internally with x86 instruction set layered on top, right? Now, it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone started making desktop-class cpus with the ARM instruction set instead of the legacy x86 instruction set.
Symmetry 16y ago
I don't think its clear that ARM would actually be that competitive with x86 at the high end. Many ARM features, like conditional execution, are great for increasing IPC for traditional in-order designs, but make complicated OoO designs more difficult. As you have bigger more featureful chips the relative cost of x86's decoding stage becomes less significant too. All of which isn't to say that the article is wrong and that ARM isn't about to take over the mainstream (I could see it happening but wouldn't bet on it).

203 points by mjfern 16y ago

I think the largest hurdle for ARM to get over is the preponderance of Windows installations with kernels only complied for x86. Linux and OS X (Mach) already run on ARM, and I think that possibly the NT kernel runs on ARM (Windows phone 7 is ARM, right?) I have trouble seeing Microsoft port over Windows proper to ARM until there's a really strong market for it. That being said, perhaps low power consumption ARM devices will provide that market. Perhaps this is another reason that Apple has their own ARM chip - to be at the forefront of the ARM revolution, displacing MSFT?

contextfree 16y ago
NT doesn't currently run on ARM (WP7 is still based on CE), though it was originally designed to be CPU independent. Probably the biggest obstacle for MSFT porting Windows to ARM is not the expense of the port itself, but reluctance to put out a version of Windows that's binary incompatible with all the Windows software out there. Incidentally (and speaking of breaking compatibility), MSFT is working on a brand new kernel and operating environment (Midori) which does have ARM as a target. But this is an incubation project with no guaranteed release, though it's a very serious effort.
- nivertech 16y ago
  Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.
  - RomP 16y ago
    There is nothing in Windows which requires fixed endianness. While all known versions of the OS have been shipped on little-endian machines (except XBox 360, albeit running highly modified version of NT Kernel), there is very little dependency on the endianness for all modules except format parsers and network API. Changing that is a relatively simple undertaking, much simpler than building a new version of kernel, for XBox, for example
  - gecko 16y ago
    That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.
    - tesseract 16y ago
      PowerPC (except PPC970 aka G5, as I recall) is bi-endian (configurable endianness); so are Alpha and Itanium which also had Windows NT ports.
      - froydnj 16y ago
        Alpha is most definitely not a bi-endian architecture; it's little-endian only. PowerPC chips can be either, but the vast, vast majority are big endian.
        kinetik 16y ago
        Incorrect. The Cray T3E used Alpha processors in big-endian mode.
  - wolfgke 16y ago
    This is no problem for ARM processors since they are bi-endian (as PowerPC). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware
wmf 16y ago
I don't think Windows Phone is based on NT. Apple and Android have shown that you can build a mainstream platform ecosystem from nothing in 2-3 years, so who needs Windows compatibility?
- nl 16y ago
  Neither Apple iOS or Android were "build from nothing in 2-3 years". iOS is based on OS-X, which is based on NeXT, which is based on BSD (~40 years of work) Android is based on Linux (so ~20 years of work)
  - wmf 16y ago
    My point is that they went from zero apps and zero users to lots in 2-3 years. IMO the argument that Windows backwards compatibility is the only way to get the long tail of tens of thousands of apps has been refuted.
    - nl 16y ago
      Oh right. Yes, I agree, then. All a new platforms needs is a great webbrowser (which these days seems to mean "port webkit") and it's instantly viable.
zyb09 16y ago
Didn't OSX just recently get rid of ARM support? Might be wrong though..
- vurlix 16y ago
  You're confusing ARM with PowerPC, both of which are RISC architectures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

neilc 16y ago

Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? If an Atom-based CPU consumes ~2-3 extra watts but offers marginally better performance and (more importantly) compatibility with an enormous base of existing applications, that doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for switching.

sanswork 16y ago
Think of a data center situation though where you can get a ~50% power requirement difference for marginal performance decreases. The cost savings would be huge even if you require more servers to make up for the performance difference. For most home users I think you're right for now but for businesses it could be huge.
- pjscott 16y ago
  Of course, you've got to remember that which chip has the best performance per watt depends on the job. A sufficiently smart data center could determine this automatically and take that into account in its job scheduling.
- anamax 16y ago
  > Think of a data center situation though where you can get a ~50% power requirement difference for marginal performance decreases. 50% lower processor power isn't the same as 50% less system power.
hackermom 16y ago
Except that the Atoms at same (and even a bit higher) clock don't even offer marginally better performance. And another thing that I came to think of that weighs heavily in ARM's favor is the multitude of composite, multifunctional chips, SoCs etc. currently available in the ARM flavor. Is there ANYTHING like this for Atom, or any x86 at all?
- maximilianburke 16y ago
  Yes, AMD's Fusion line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion) aims to provide SoC functionality.

nl 16y ago

I think ARM is going to continue to bite into x86 market share significantly. But this article is wrong to right off x86 so easily. Firstly, power consumption. It's right that ARM has lower power draw than x86. The article is wrong by how much, though. Very low power ARM chips draw much, much less than 2-3 watts. These are mostly for embedded systems, though. The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm. For sub-netbook systems, Intel is launching it's Moorestown architecture. This is probably still isn't dropping into the Smartphone market in this generation (despite Intel's marketing: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux-on-x86-smartphone-intels-small-step-forward.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux...), but should be great for tablets: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-opening-salvo-in-x86-vs-arm-smartphone-wars.ars http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-open... The article also implies that Intel's foundries are a liability. That would be true if there really was useful "competition in the foundry market". Sure, if you want 45nm+ chips produced, there are a number of foundries that can do it. But once you start looking for 32nm foundries they get a lot rarer, and Intel has just announced it's building its new 22nm foundries. That's a whole generation ahead of anyone else in the industry and is a big competitive advantage (Smaller scale in chip foundries means more performance for the same power, or less power for the same performance.)

lsc 16y ago
The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm. Oh my god yes. If you could actually run an atom server in less than 10 watts for a 4GiB system, even before disk, I'd be renting those out instead of VPSs, and probably killing the competition on it, too. My (perhaps unreasonably cynical) theory is that intel nerfed the desktop atoms because they don't want them to compete with their server chips in my applications. But, on the other hand, that's irrational, because when per-core performance doesn't matter, (and in virtualization, more, smaller cores are better than fewer, faster cores) AMD already beats Intel by quite a lot. And atoms certainly don't compete in applications where per-core performance matters, so yeah, that's probably not it.

aidenn0 16y ago

Intel is aware of this. Atom is the shot across the bow. They are working on making smaller and lower-power parts. It's interesting to watch ARM race up as Intel races down.

rbanffy 16y ago
If we compare the RISC nature of ARM with the CISC-implemented-over-RISC approach of contemporary x86s, it's easy to believe it will prove simpler to upscale ARM than to downscale the Atom. Transmeta-style emulation could be one possible way out of this death spiral for Intel.
- semipermeable 16y ago
  History has shown that intel is very good at getting out of potential death spirals...
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Intel's x86 killed the RISC workstation with Windows compatibility and price per MIPS. Intel then matched and surpassed AMD on AMD64 counting on its own size and on the complexity of building a very fast 64-bit x86. All factors, Windows compatibility excepted, are on ARM's side this time. Of course Intel has survived bad situations before, but this time I am not betting on them.
    - nl 16y ago
      Which factors exactly on ARM's side? I can think of only two: 1) Power usage on low end chips. ARM will be ahead of x86 on platforms below the smartphone for the foreseeable future, and on smartphones for another generation (2-3 years) 2) Manufactures can customize ARM to build SOCs. I can't see Intel allowing complete customization like that, but I'd expect them to ship some competitive SOCs themselves.
      - rbanffy 16y ago

jules 16y ago

What portion of x86 transistors are dedicated to supporting the bad instruction set design?

protomyth 16y ago
I seem to remember from one article that is was the same amount of transistors as the older ARM cores (not the A8 or A9). This is a pretty big anchor to overcome. previous on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051
tedunangst 16y ago
Less than 10% of the transistors dedicated to cache.
m0th87 16y ago
That's an interesting question that I don't think anyone would be able to quantify, just because performance is so subjective to the applications that are run. In an interview, Alan Kay remarked that bad processor architectures degrade performance by three orders of magnitude [1]. If he's right, that's a pretty hefty tax. But I don't see anyone being able to prove or disprove his hypothesis. Maybe most of the tax is an inevitable byproduct of increasingly complex chipsets. [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 around 1/3 of the way in

Geee 16y ago

That will surely happen. CPUs have for some time been limited by heating problems and the architecture with more performance with the same power consumption will win. If ARM can deliver that, then there's no question about it.

dstein 16y ago

I ran some rough numbers once. I couldn't find exact numbers but estimated for about $1.5 million worth of ARM-based plug servers, you would have close to enough raw CPU power (in terms of FLOPS) compete with the 2003-version of Google.

gamble 16y ago

I'm not going to write off Intel yet, but they're in a dangerous position. The number one reason Microsoft's stock has been moribund the past ten years is that Linux took over the datacenter. Imagine how much more revenue they'd have if the millions upon millions of X86 servers deployed since 2000 ran Windows. Instead, they're stuck in a saturated, slow-growth monopoly. If non-x86 chips take off in data centers, Intel will be in a similarly bad spot.

gridspy 16y ago
... And windows will be locked out of the datacenter until they create ARM-compatible versions of windows. Next thing you know Windows runs on both ARM and x86 (with x86 emulation for applications) and pushes x86 out of the commercial / domestic arena.
- Hoff 16y ago
  Microsoft Windows on Itanium was once marketed as the path forward for x86 applications, too. Intel hasn't had particular success with microprocessor designs outside of its core x86 business. Examples of other designs include iAPX432, i860/i960, StrongARM/XScale and Itanium. These architecture transitions don't always work out. While Apple has some experience with porting and has maked it look (relatively) easy, Windows hasn't had particular success with its ports, whether via Itanium's x86 emulation or via translation tools such as FX!32.

jacabado 16y ago

I'm a web developer (C# full stack) with 2 years of experience, I have been attracted to ARM development since the moment I studied it in university. As I'll be mostly in technical functions for some time (3 years?) what should I consider when trying an experience in ARM development? What are the pros and cons career wise and technical challenges relatively to continue to do boring CRUD C# applications?

ssp 16y ago

The tagline from Innovator's Dilemma is that well-managed companies can get into trouble when they are being disrupted. The reason is that it's normally good business to get rid of low-margin products and focus your resources on the ones that make the most money. And then someone takes over the low end and expands into the high end. But Intel is not falling for that one. They have made the Atom, a slow, cheap, low-power chip that competes directly with ARM. That's likely a wise move, but Intel now has the problem that low-margin chips are still bad business. They have to have their expensive best-in-industry fabs make low-margin Atoms, when they would much, much rather have them make expensive Xeons. At one point they made a deal to have Atoms manufactured at TSMC, which would have helped a lot with this problem, but apparently that deal didn't work out. Even if it had worked out, the Atom would no longer have the process advantage, and then backwards compatibility would be the only advantage for x86. With Windows becoming less and less relevant, that's a big problem, considering the technical advantages ARM has over x86. So fundamentally, Intel has a problem that CPUs are becoming commoditized, which means they will either have to take much lower margins or retreat to the high end. Both scenarios are unpleasant for them.

ippisl 16y ago
Also intel is being disrupted from the higher end by GPU's and the new ARM processors(due to performance/watt), and multicore processors like tilera.
- bad_user 16y ago
  I haven't heard about Tilera until just now: it does have potential, but disrupting X86? That requires proof. Also GPUs have their uses, but general-purpose they are not. GPUs are complements to CPUs (just as coprocessors specialized for floating-point calculations where back in the day). Most people here probably haven't lived the day when 80387 had to be installed alongside i386 if you wanted decent graphics performance. It is actually interesting that it takes so long for GPUs to be merged with X86. In my opinion ARM is the only credible threat in the data-center, especially for servers that are mostly I/O bound. But on the other hand costs can skyrocket when scaling horizontally and having 500 HTTP servers (like Digg) is not at all fun. And IMHO, x86 chips have better performance / watt. For desktop computing X86 will still dominate, at least for the following 10 years, simply because of Windows; which runs on over 1 billion computers. Yeah, I know it is fashionable on HN to say Windows is not relevant anymore. Doesn't make it true.

atomly 16y ago

"Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything." "Yeah. RISC is good."

Gibbon 16y ago
"So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat." - John Sculley

jayphelps 16y ago

Great article. As an example, it's fairly obvious Apple is building up it's internal CPU engineering abilities to inevitably put an ARM in a Macbook. But I don't think it will be in the near future due to breaking compatibility with current software, especially those who use SSE instructions. But who knows, maybe they'll create an x86 emulator for the transition like Rosetta. OS XI maybe?

protomyth 16y ago

I do wonder, for some of these higher performance devices could Intel / AMD build a version of their chip that was 64-bit only and removed a lot of the legacy instructions / vector attempts? Its not like a recompile / endian shift wouldn't be necessary going from ARM to x86, so it shouldn't add any time to the conversion. You have to account for all the variations of the x86 in a compiler anyway.

bsergean 16y ago

People are still gonna need PCs for a while and as Windows does not run on ARM it seems a bit early for an x86 death.

happybuy 16y ago

As I wrote in a similar thread I think Intel and x86 is already dead - the writing is on the wall - Intel just doesn't know it yet. Below is how I believe a key customer has already planned to leave the x86 architecture as nothing but a footnote in their history (alongside the remnants of PowerPC). --- Currently Apple relies on Intel for a major component in a key product. Strategically, Apple doesn't like to have to rely on a single source or supplier for key products. Apple will do whatever is possible to remove this reliance. Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple designed ARM processor. How? By slowly, step by step, providing a way towards this. Step 1. Migrate your OS to the new architecture (e.g. iOS already, OS X not far behind) - done Step 2. Migrate your developer base onto developer tools which you control and can easily change the architecture it targets (e.g. Xcode and LLVM) - done Step 3. Provide a space where problematic applications which use other VMs or rely directly on getting too close to the hardware are not welcome (e.g. a Mac App Store) - announced Step 4. Change the marketplace behaviour so that you control how the majority of applications are distributed and can quickly provide updates without user intervention. Such as an App store. Step 5. Release a new Macbook with an ARM processor, absolutely killing on form factor, price and battery performance that Intel cannot compete with. Encourage your Mac App Store developers to flick a switch in Xcode, to recompile and upload their new Universal (x86 & ARM) versions of their Apps to the Mac App Store. Result: you now control the processor direction and application distribution mechanism for a key product and no longer rely upon the whims of Intel. Apple is all about controlling an integrated experience for their customers. Currently Intel is getting in the way of this for the Mac product.

albertzeyer 16y ago
In addition: Extend Rosetta to translate x86 to ARM.
zppx 16y ago
What's next? Will Apple design their own GPUs instead of using third parties to design one for every product in the Apple Store just to control the costumer experience? What kind of business advantage Apple will have compared to NVidia that sells its technology? I think that Steve Jobs understands these questions very well, and that's partly what separate him from the Average Joe Tech-loving guy.

mjfern 16y ago

Does anyone have any data that they can share on the following -- as a company, if I licensed the latest generation ARM processor (e.g., Cortex-A15) and then factored in any additional design and manufacturing costs (e.g., via a foundry), what would be the total cost advantage of using an ARM chip versus a comparable Intel chip (e.g., Atom)? Thanks!

jawee 16y ago

From my experience in running Debian on ARM, I can say that the software difference is really non-existence. Any of the normal Debian OSS software works fine.. I did not run into any problems with software not working except for the closed source programs that didn't have ARM packages. I really can't imagine the architecture shift being that big of a problem, as I'm assuming the bulk of the work for ARM with Debian was just recompiling packages.. I had a working XFCE desktop with common packages like Iceweasel (Firefox), OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and so on that was just as easy to set up as x86.

regularfry 16y ago
It used to be the case that Java had serious performance problems on the ARM. I don't know if that's still true.
junkbit 16y ago
The last time I had an architecture issue was with a SNES emulator that had pieces hard coded in 32bit Asm. Pretty rare these days. Maybe things like VirtualBox too.
konad 16y ago
How about ffmpeg / libdv / mplayer Last time I looked they had hand coded asm.
- jawee 16y ago
  I only tried with VLC player which didn't present any immediate problems, but I don't know if it uses any of these libraries.

tsotha 16y ago

The x86 architecture will win out for the same reason it won out decades ago. Most of the world's software was compiled for x86. I have all sorts of software I've been running on my Windows laptop. When I go to buy a new laptop, it'll be another Windows x86 laptop because my software would cost more to replace than the machine upon which it's running.

loewenskind 16y ago
Visualization today is vastly better today than 10 years ago. We've also got a big, growing market that intel isn't doing well in. I wouldn't count Intel out just yet, but them winning is far from sure.

protomyth 16y ago

In the article it states people are holding onto their PCs longer because they are satisfied with the capabilities of their older machine. I wonder if this is really proven or a misread caused by the XP -> Vista transition problems.

mkr-hn 16y ago
I tossed Ubuntu (with ext4) on my 2005 laptop, and it's proving to be a formidable word processor and web browsing machine. I think a lot of people are just realizing that they don't need another core or a chip built with a smaller process to play flash games and write e-mail. Though I'm a little concerned about what the smaller number of hardware sales will do to development in the server market. Can they maintain R&D budgets?

regularfry 16y ago

The rest of the article aside, one thing jumped out at me - AMD's P/E ratio. What's the received wisdom for why they are so cheap?

DavidSJ 16y ago
They have tons of debt.

SriniK 16y ago

Just wanted to mention... (e.g., A4 in a MacBook Air). incorrect. Intel Core 2 Duo 1.4 GHz processor in a MacBook Air http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/2 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A13... I guess author wanted to mention iPad

soramimo 16y ago

while this might be true for the mobile world, the author does not seem to consider that people do more of their computations in the cloud or data centers that in turn have to purchase great numbers of classical high-performance chips. While people are happy with the performance they get on their home machines the demand for greater computing power in the cloud will grow further.

thomasfl 16y ago

It's the return for Advanced RISC Machines.

16s 16y ago

ARM is new? It's been around longer than most Ruby developers have been alive ;)

yason 16y ago

Modern CPUs are pretty low-level RISC stuff internally with x86 instruction set layered on top, right? Now, it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone started making desktop-class cpus with the ARM instruction set instead of the legacy x86 instruction set.

Symmetry 16y ago

I don't think its clear that ARM would actually be that competitive with x86 at the high end. Many ARM features, like conditional execution, are great for increasing IPC for traditional in-order designs, but make complicated OoO designs more difficult. As you have bigger more featureful chips the relative cost of x86's decoding stage becomes less significant too. All of which isn't to say that the article is wrong and that ARM isn't about to take over the mainstream (I could see it happening but wouldn't bet on it).