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I remember watching this video on the Intel 8086 by Harvard Business School, and they mentioned how revolutionary it is from a business perspective because it t

I remember watching this video on the Intel 8086 by Harvard Business School, and they mentioned how revolutionary it is from a business perspective because it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market. (I can't find the video after a cursory search...) Is this is the reversal of this revolution? Are we going back to a vertically integrated market due to consolidation in market players or because of performance / power concerns? Everyone seems to be making their own chips and boards these days. Google / TPU, AWS / Graviton, Microsoft / SQ1... Will we ever see a fragmentation in ISAs a la EEE? IMHO that would be a catastrophic regression in the software space, easily a black swan event, if you say needed to compile software differently between major cloud vendors just to deploy.

HugoDaniel 6y ago
It certainly feels that way. I think that the fragmentation problem might be diluted this time because the software is way more abstracted from hardware (mainstream languages are all very high level, and there is widespread adoption of open compilers - with llvm/clang being pushed by apple)
raverbashing 6y ago
Of the Intel 8086 or of the IBM PC platform? I don't remember anything specific to the 8086 that made it a "horizontally integrated market" w.r.t. its competitors (I might be wrong, of course)
frozenport 6y ago
While Apple products may be popular with tech bros and aspiring creative like Martin Luther King, John Lennon or Mahatma Gandhi they only represent a small fraction of computing outside California.
wukerplank 6y ago
Apple has a history of doing everything in their own way if feasible. Not sure if one should extrapolate from them to the entire market.
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  No no, they are superior lifestyle brand and Im sure any day now everything will be maybe usb c maybe lightning connector and save pictures in formats nobody can open
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Absolutely agreed with that. The key is they insist and hence they failed in the desktop to fight WinTel, then they go to try non-Desktop. iPod, iPhone, iPad etc. The MAC is left abandon quite awhile. And I am not sure it is still a big business enough for them.
  - DeathArrow 6y ago
    I won't be surprised if what happened in desktop space will repeat in mobile space. The pressure from Android side is huge.
brazzy 6y ago
> I remember watching this video on the Intel 8086 by Harvard Business School, and they mentioned how revolutionary it is from a business perspective because it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market. I never really fully appreciated this until I read a review (probably linked on HN) for a new system released in 1981 or 1982 and my mind couldn't stop boggling at how there was a CPU with its custom ISA and an OS written specifically for that ISA and applications written specifically for that OS, and the reviewer was praising some innovative features of the ISA and how the applications could make use of those. The icing of the cake was how the reviewer discussed how this system could be a big commercial success and which other systems it might take marketshare from - without ever mentioning the IBM PC released around the same time...
- zwischenzug 6y ago
  This is a great reminder that everything in business history looks obvious in retrospect.
- new299 6y ago
  The irony is that the ARM architecture was also developed in the same way. A custom CPU, for a new machine, with an operating system specifically designed for it, and applications written specifically for that OS (the Acorn Archimedes/RiscOS). The platform ended up failing, but they spun out ARM. If ARM end up overtaking Intel on the desktop, it gives the story some entertaining irony/symmetry.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    I still can't quite believe those crappy computers in my school IT lab eventually morphed into iPhones. Saying that, I did write my first ever computer program on them and ended up making iPhone apps.
    - new299 6y ago
      When they were released in the 1990s they were pretty capable machines. The OS had its issues, but I don’t think it faired badly against DOS/Windows 3.11. They were however largely limited to the UK marketed, and had a more limited selection of software. I’m not sure it’s really fair to characterize them as “crappy”.
microtherion 6y ago
> it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market I find that a curious statement. While there was quite a bit of diversity in microprocessors, microcomputer manufacturers almost never built their own processors. The majority of the 8 bit market was 6502 and Z80, with a smattering of 8080 and 6809. The 16 bit market mostly was 68000. Neither Motorola nor Intel were big players in microcomputer manufactoring. The 6502 story is a bit more complicated: MOS sold the KIM-1. And MOS itself were bought by Commodore, though there were several 6502 manufacturers. The only microcomputer manufacturers I can think of that truly designed their processors were Acorn and Texas Instruments.
- magoghm 6y ago
  At that time microcomputers were still a small portion of the computer business. Most of the market was for mainframes and minicomputers, which were vertically integrated.
  - twic 6y ago
    But the 8086 was used in microcomputers, not mainframes or minis. The broader interpretation of this idea, that the x86 era saw a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is absolutely true. The narrower interpretation, that the 8086 chip triggered a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is not. The "x86 era" is really the era of microcomputer architectures eating mainframes and minis. I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86. I think that is probably correct. The economics of "commodity" microprocessors were such that one (or two) would have probably won had the x86 not. (Of course, the shift to horizontal is not just about the microprocessor but volume operating systems, volume scale out servers, packaged software and open source, etc.
Kye 6y ago
>> "IMHO that would be a catastrophic regression in the software space, easily a black swan event, if you say needed to compile software differently between major cloud vendors just to deploy." Wasm blobs seem poised to moot this in the next 10 years. So many things on the desktop have already moved to the web or Electron. Server-side applications turning into browser-executed blobs backed by one of a few database systems still on the server is the next logical step.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  I've heard it 10 years ago. Together with: "in 10 years we won't need desktops, only dumb clients as most software will run from the cloud"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- higerordermap 6y ago
  I am tired of wasm hype. Can someone explain what it does so well than existing cross platform solutions like CLR / JVM? It doesn't yet have a GC nor is most efficient for that matter. And JIT is not efficient in terms of memory and power compared to native code.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Both of those are owned by organizations that have behaved pathologically in the past so I think many people reflexively avoid them. Wasm is supposedly language agnostic (although I’d disagree heh) whereas even CLR imposes a lot on the language you build for it.
bald 6y ago
This development of market dynamics & structure has been famously featured in the book "Only the Paranoid Survive" by Andy Grove, which I can only recommend (it's a quick and easy read). Anecdotally, it seems to me that today, the more successful companies are those that tend to be vertically integrated, such as Apple, Tesla, and Amazon.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  Yet many companies are in a craze to go to cloud and outsource every bit of competence which isn't a core product.
karmakaze 6y ago
Difference being these aren't vertically integrated in an ecosystem, they're made in-house as a result of corps owning their supply chains.
mdasen 6y ago
In a certain way, this move is horizontally integrated. Intel vertically integrated its chip design and fab. This moves design and fab apart. One of the reasons that Intel is falling so far behind is that they can't keep up with TSMC (and maybe others as well) on the fab side. Intel's vertical integration worked well for them for so many years. However, the crack has been around long enough for others to start muscling in. AWS can push Graviton because Intel has been stuck at 14nm for so long (yes, they have some 10nm parts now, but it's been limited). Apple can push a move to ARM desktop/laptops because Intel has stagnated on the fab side. I wouldn't say this is a reversal of that revolution as much as a demonstration of the power and fragility of vertical integration. Intel's vertical integration of design and fab gave them a lot of power. Money from chip sales drove fab improvements for a long time and kept them well ahead of competitors. However, enough stumbling left them in a fragile place. I think part of it is that ARM also has reference implementations that people can use as starting blocks. I don't know a lot about chip design myself, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to start off with a working processor and improve it than starting from scratch. I think we're just seeing a dominant player that no one really likes stumble for long enough combined with people willing to target ARM. Whether I run my Python or C# or Java on ARM or Intel doesn't matter too much to me and if AWS can offer me ARM servers at a discount, I might as well take advantage of that. Intel pressed its fab advantage and the importance of the x86 instruction set against everyone. Now Intel has a worse fab and their instruction set isn't as important anymore. They've basically lost their two competitive advantages. I'm not arguing that Intel is dying, but they're certainly in a weaker position than they used to be.
- koolba 6y ago
  NodeJS is in that category as well. If you avoid native modules it’s easy to cross deploy on ARM. The workload seem to translate well to the process model of scaling out as well.
  - TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
    Really though, unless you're writing x86 assembly, any language should be just fine on ARM. The only potential holdp is is you rely on precompiled binaries at some point. Otherwise it should just be a matter of hitting the compile button again.
einr 6y ago
It's not that bad yet. Almost everything is still some flavor of x86 or ARM. Back in the 90's server/workstation space, almost every player made their own wildly incompatible chips; * DEC Alpha * Sun SPARC * HP PA-RISC * SGI MIPS (MIPS was owned by SGI in the 90's) * IBM PowerPC, RS/6000
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Well, if you have a 100 billions of dollar that sits doing nothing like Apple does, spending it to get a new competitive advantage may make sense. They can do what no other computer manufacturers can no in that position.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  Those billions are made from iPhone sales. Lenovo, Dell and HP don't make billions from selling phones. And the move to ARM isn't guaranteed to bring them more sales. Customers might dislike it and software makers might dislike it.
ghaff 6y ago
Andy Grove goes into the flip to horizontal integration at length in Only the Paranoid Survive. He also touches on it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfU2Qu4MzZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfU2Qu4MzZk There's something of a shift back to more vertical integration but: -- As another commenter mentioned, there's simultaneously been something of a split between chip design and fabs -- The big public cloud providers probably make a stronger case for a return to vertical integration than Apple does -- For the most part, any vertical integration today is taking place in the context of both global supply chains and standards. You don't have every company using their own networking protocols and disk drive interconnects.
danielscrubs 6y ago
I kind of hope so. AMD and Intel hasn't really had a tight software department. For example, offloading some math to the Intel GPU has been in the OpenMP 4.5 spec since 2015 in a really easy way. It is supported by using Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit AND the Intel® oneAPI HPC Toolkit. Which... no one uses. That we still don't have any good GPGPU resources is just crazy to me. Heterogenous computing with TPUs/GPUs/DSPs and other chips should be standard by now.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  >Heterogenous computing with TPUs/GPUs/DSPs and other chips should be standard by now. It sounds nice in theory but in practice is hard. Writing CUDA or OpenCL is not exactly pleasant or easy and compilers do a poor job at vectorizing code. Se we use accelerators when it's an absolute must.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    So we also need to be able to see the IR/ASM. It's not like the CPU only compilers are great at it either, quite a lot of handholding is needed there too, but one step at a time.
ken 6y ago
Apple also made their own operating system, their own programming language, their own external connectors, etc. Have their competitors followed their lead in becoming more vertically integrated in any other way? I’m not really seeing it. This wouldn’t be the first time Apple used a non-x86 chip in the Mac. Nobody followed them last time.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  Yet most things they did weren't original. macOS was mostly made from bits of BSD. Apple's CPUs rely on ARM and in the beginning they were designed with the help of Samsung. They are mainly polishing things. >Nobody followed them last time. Breaking compatibility with software and operating systems and hardware is bad for the consumer. With x86 I can run any software I need and I can optimize for cost and performance. I can use diverse CPUs, use graphic cards, memory chips, cases, PSUs, SSDs and HDDs from different makers at different price points and performance points. I can hit exactly the sweet point I need to. And if something breaks, it won't be hard to replace.
pradn 6y ago
I don't see it as a çatastropic regression. We're already seeing instances of software gatekeepers like the Apple Appstore requiring users to upload bitcode that can be specialized to different processors. This is strictly better for consumers because they get more efficient software. Developers don't have to do much work; they just need to pick a compiler that supports the bitcode output. Hopefully, we'll settle on a bitcode format that works across multiple clouds and storefronts. LLVM bitcode or WASM are the best candidates right now. The clouds/storefronts can perform additional optimizations (perhaps even run a superoptimizer per hardware SKU), and additional privacy/security checks. With Moore's Law ending, these are the tricks we need to get up to to improve user experience, reduce power draw, and make hardware go further.

HugoDaniel 6y ago

It certainly feels that way. I think that the fragmentation problem might be diluted this time because the software is way more abstracted from hardware (mainstream languages are all very high level, and there is widespread adoption of open compilers - with llvm/clang being pushed by apple)

raverbashing 6y ago

Of the Intel 8086 or of the IBM PC platform? I don't remember anything specific to the 8086 that made it a "horizontally integrated market" w.r.t. its competitors (I might be wrong, of course)

frozenport 6y ago

While Apple products may be popular with tech bros and aspiring creative like Martin Luther King, John Lennon or Mahatma Gandhi they only represent a small fraction of computing outside California.

wukerplank 6y ago

Apple has a history of doing everything in their own way if feasible. Not sure if one should extrapolate from them to the entire market.

dr-detroit 6y ago
No no, they are superior lifestyle brand and Im sure any day now everything will be maybe usb c maybe lightning connector and save pictures in formats nobody can open
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Absolutely agreed with that. The key is they insist and hence they failed in the desktop to fight WinTel, then they go to try non-Desktop. iPod, iPhone, iPad etc. The MAC is left abandon quite awhile. And I am not sure it is still a big business enough for them.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  I won't be surprised if what happened in desktop space will repeat in mobile space. The pressure from Android side is huge.

brazzy 6y ago

> I remember watching this video on the Intel 8086 by Harvard Business School, and they mentioned how revolutionary it is from a business perspective because it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market. I never really fully appreciated this until I read a review (probably linked on HN) for a new system released in 1981 or 1982 and my mind couldn't stop boggling at how there was a CPU with its custom ISA and an OS written specifically for that ISA and applications written specifically for that OS, and the reviewer was praising some innovative features of the ISA and how the applications could make use of those. The icing of the cake was how the reviewer discussed how this system could be a big commercial success and which other systems it might take marketshare from - without ever mentioning the IBM PC released around the same time...

zwischenzug 6y ago
This is a great reminder that everything in business history looks obvious in retrospect.
new299 6y ago
The irony is that the ARM architecture was also developed in the same way. A custom CPU, for a new machine, with an operating system specifically designed for it, and applications written specifically for that OS (the Acorn Archimedes/RiscOS). The platform ended up failing, but they spun out ARM. If ARM end up overtaking Intel on the desktop, it gives the story some entertaining irony/symmetry.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  I still can't quite believe those crappy computers in my school IT lab eventually morphed into iPhones. Saying that, I did write my first ever computer program on them and ended up making iPhone apps.
  - new299 6y ago
    When they were released in the 1990s they were pretty capable machines. The OS had its issues, but I don’t think it faired badly against DOS/Windows 3.11. They were however largely limited to the UK marketed, and had a more limited selection of software. I’m not sure it’s really fair to characterize them as “crappy”.

microtherion 6y ago

> it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market I find that a curious statement. While there was quite a bit of diversity in microprocessors, microcomputer manufacturers almost never built their own processors. The majority of the 8 bit market was 6502 and Z80, with a smattering of 8080 and 6809. The 16 bit market mostly was 68000. Neither Motorola nor Intel were big players in microcomputer manufactoring. The 6502 story is a bit more complicated: MOS sold the KIM-1. And MOS itself were bought by Commodore, though there were several 6502 manufacturers. The only microcomputer manufacturers I can think of that truly designed their processors were Acorn and Texas Instruments.

magoghm 6y ago
At that time microcomputers were still a small portion of the computer business. Most of the market was for mainframes and minicomputers, which were vertically integrated.
- twic 6y ago
  But the 8086 was used in microcomputers, not mainframes or minis. The broader interpretation of this idea, that the x86 era saw a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is absolutely true. The narrower interpretation, that the 8086 chip triggered a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is not. The "x86 era" is really the era of microcomputer architectures eating mainframes and minis. I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86. I think that is probably correct. The economics of "commodity" microprocessors were such that one (or two) would have probably won had the x86 not. (Of course, the shift to horizontal is not just about the microprocessor but volume operating systems, volume scale out servers, packaged software and open source, etc.

Kye 6y ago

>> "IMHO that would be a catastrophic regression in the software space, easily a black swan event, if you say needed to compile software differently between major cloud vendors just to deploy." Wasm blobs seem poised to moot this in the next 10 years. So many things on the desktop have already moved to the web or Electron. Server-side applications turning into browser-executed blobs backed by one of a few database systems still on the server is the next logical step.

DeathArrow 6y ago
I've heard it 10 years ago. Together with: "in 10 years we won't need desktops, only dumb clients as most software will run from the cloud"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
higerordermap 6y ago
I am tired of wasm hype. Can someone explain what it does so well than existing cross platform solutions like CLR / JVM? It doesn't yet have a GC nor is most efficient for that matter. And JIT is not efficient in terms of memory and power compared to native code.
- swiley 6y ago
  Both of those are owned by organizations that have behaved pathologically in the past so I think many people reflexively avoid them. Wasm is supposedly language agnostic (although I’d disagree heh) whereas even CLR imposes a lot on the language you build for it.

bald 6y ago

This development of market dynamics & structure has been famously featured in the book "Only the Paranoid Survive" by Andy Grove, which I can only recommend (it's a quick and easy read). Anecdotally, it seems to me that today, the more successful companies are those that tend to be vertically integrated, such as Apple, Tesla, and Amazon.

DeathArrow 6y ago
Yet many companies are in a craze to go to cloud and outsource every bit of competence which isn't a core product.

karmakaze 6y ago

Difference being these aren't vertically integrated in an ecosystem, they're made in-house as a result of corps owning their supply chains.

mdasen 6y ago

In a certain way, this move is horizontally integrated. Intel vertically integrated its chip design and fab. This moves design and fab apart. One of the reasons that Intel is falling so far behind is that they can't keep up with TSMC (and maybe others as well) on the fab side. Intel's vertical integration worked well for them for so many years. However, the crack has been around long enough for others to start muscling in. AWS can push Graviton because Intel has been stuck at 14nm for so long (yes, they have some 10nm parts now, but it's been limited). Apple can push a move to ARM desktop/laptops because Intel has stagnated on the fab side. I wouldn't say this is a reversal of that revolution as much as a demonstration of the power and fragility of vertical integration. Intel's vertical integration of design and fab gave them a lot of power. Money from chip sales drove fab improvements for a long time and kept them well ahead of competitors. However, enough stumbling left them in a fragile place. I think part of it is that ARM also has reference implementations that people can use as starting blocks. I don't know a lot about chip design myself, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to start off with a working processor and improve it than starting from scratch. I think we're just seeing a dominant player that no one really likes stumble for long enough combined with people willing to target ARM. Whether I run my Python or C# or Java on ARM or Intel doesn't matter too much to me and if AWS can offer me ARM servers at a discount, I might as well take advantage of that. Intel pressed its fab advantage and the importance of the x86 instruction set against everyone. Now Intel has a worse fab and their instruction set isn't as important anymore. They've basically lost their two competitive advantages. I'm not arguing that Intel is dying, but they're certainly in a weaker position than they used to be.

koolba 6y ago
NodeJS is in that category as well. If you avoid native modules it’s easy to cross deploy on ARM. The workload seem to translate well to the process model of scaling out as well.
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
  Really though, unless you're writing x86 assembly, any language should be just fine on ARM. The only potential holdp is is you rely on precompiled binaries at some point. Otherwise it should just be a matter of hitting the compile button again.

einr 6y ago

It's not that bad yet. Almost everything is still some flavor of x86 or ARM. Back in the 90's server/workstation space, almost every player made their own wildly incompatible chips; * DEC Alpha * Sun SPARC * HP PA-RISC * SGI MIPS (MIPS was owned by SGI in the 90's) * IBM PowerPC, RS/6000

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Well, if you have a 100 billions of dollar that sits doing nothing like Apple does, spending it to get a new competitive advantage may make sense. They can do what no other computer manufacturers can no in that position.

DeathArrow 6y ago
Those billions are made from iPhone sales. Lenovo, Dell and HP don't make billions from selling phones. And the move to ARM isn't guaranteed to bring them more sales. Customers might dislike it and software makers might dislike it.

ghaff 6y ago

Andy Grove goes into the flip to horizontal integration at length in Only the Paranoid Survive. He also touches on it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfU2Qu4MzZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfU2Qu4MzZk There's something of a shift back to more vertical integration but: -- As another commenter mentioned, there's simultaneously been something of a split between chip design and fabs -- The big public cloud providers probably make a stronger case for a return to vertical integration than Apple does -- For the most part, any vertical integration today is taking place in the context of both global supply chains and standards. You don't have every company using their own networking protocols and disk drive interconnects.

danielscrubs 6y ago

I kind of hope so. AMD and Intel hasn't really had a tight software department. For example, offloading some math to the Intel GPU has been in the OpenMP 4.5 spec since 2015 in a really easy way. It is supported by using Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit AND the Intel® oneAPI HPC Toolkit. Which... no one uses. That we still don't have any good GPGPU resources is just crazy to me. Heterogenous computing with TPUs/GPUs/DSPs and other chips should be standard by now.

DeathArrow 6y ago
>Heterogenous computing with TPUs/GPUs/DSPs and other chips should be standard by now. It sounds nice in theory but in practice is hard. Writing CUDA or OpenCL is not exactly pleasant or easy and compilers do a poor job at vectorizing code. Se we use accelerators when it's an absolute must.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  So we also need to be able to see the IR/ASM. It's not like the CPU only compilers are great at it either, quite a lot of handholding is needed there too, but one step at a time.

ken 6y ago

Apple also made their own operating system, their own programming language, their own external connectors, etc. Have their competitors followed their lead in becoming more vertically integrated in any other way? I’m not really seeing it. This wouldn’t be the first time Apple used a non-x86 chip in the Mac. Nobody followed them last time.

DeathArrow 6y ago
Yet most things they did weren't original. macOS was mostly made from bits of BSD. Apple's CPUs rely on ARM and in the beginning they were designed with the help of Samsung. They are mainly polishing things. >Nobody followed them last time. Breaking compatibility with software and operating systems and hardware is bad for the consumer. With x86 I can run any software I need and I can optimize for cost and performance. I can use diverse CPUs, use graphic cards, memory chips, cases, PSUs, SSDs and HDDs from different makers at different price points and performance points. I can hit exactly the sweet point I need to. And if something breaks, it won't be hard to replace.

pradn 6y ago

I don't see it as a çatastropic regression. We're already seeing instances of software gatekeepers like the Apple Appstore requiring users to upload bitcode that can be specialized to different processors. This is strictly better for consumers because they get more efficient software. Developers don't have to do much work; they just need to pick a compiler that supports the bitcode output. Hopefully, we'll settle on a bitcode format that works across multiple clouds and storefronts. LLVM bitcode or WASM are the best candidates right now. The clouds/storefronts can perform additional optimizations (perhaps even run a superoptimizer per hardware SKU), and additional privacy/security checks. With Moore's Law ending, these are the tricks we need to get up to to improve user experience, reduce power draw, and make hardware go further.