7 ms·

So, we're going back to the days of manufacturers having a completely custom software/hardware systems, one step at a time? Yes, ARM seems to be the standard, b

So, we're going back to the days of manufacturers having a completely custom software/hardware systems, one step at a time? Yes, ARM seems to be the standard, but once you start customizing, how long until Apple or Microsoft start making portability very difficult?

tiernano 6y ago
Apple making portability difficult, yes... Microsoft? I cant see it... Windows has been able to run on x86/x64, ARM, MIPS, Alpha, PPC and more since the beginning of time (well, NT4) and granted, they haven't released a lot of that code in a while, but i would guess its still there... remember, xbox360 was based on PPC... Also, given they sell an OS to other manufactures to install on their own machines, they are going to keep that running for a while. Same with servers... Even in the Azure side, they are allowing enterprise and OEMs build Azure Stack. I cant see them locking it down... But Apple? yes... its already locked down...
- discodave 6y ago
  Apple (M1) and Amazon (Graviton) are already out there marketing how great their chips are for various applications. They're not saying "ARM chips are great" they're saying "Apple silicon" or in the case of Amazon, "AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2". The thing to worry about is not them "locking it down" it's that they're building custom hardware that you can only access by renting cloud computing (EC2) or buying a complete machine (Apple).
  - worker767424 6y ago
    With Graviton, it's really just try it for your use case, see if it's cheaper.
    - shmoogy 6y ago
      All their managed services will be running off them in time
    - russli1993 6y ago
      I think its just the beginning. They are testing the market for their own silicon and reception from market. They are also going to need a userbase for Graviton products as well so portability in the beginning is important. This is true in any product. In the early days, increase market and mind share. So you need to make it as easy to adopt as possible. Then, add differentiation, so you product stand out from the others to continue attract users. Then slowly add some barriers for people to leave your product for a competitor's product. You want to increase moat and protection against competitors. I don't think Amazon will throw in the resources to build a chip just to offer cheaper prices than competitors alone. Pretend you are Amazon. Remember, the cost of building a chip is similar between you and another guy. And if you are getting less return on investment compared the other guy why bother? It has to be that getting into chips will give you more return on investment than the other guy. But return on investment comes from many forms. For example, using graviton to run VMs is cheaper and leading your customer to use AWS more and less likely to leave AWS is another form of return. In this strategy, you need to build up the barrier for customers to leave. You could do it by making the stuff customer use with their VMs have lock-in effect, for example databases or storage that only runs or works better on AWS. Or you can directly make sure things customers run on Graviton cannot be run on anywhere else. By the way, a better hardware performance is hard to maintain. If everyone uses the same instruction sets and the same manufacturing process, the only way you can be faster than the other guy by better circuit design. But there is only so much you can squeeze out of a circuit design and its really hard to maintain a sizable lead for many many years. Look at how AMD designed a better circuit and Intel's competitive position is gone. Changing the way software interact with the hardware is next easiest thing to do, and especially easy if you have a lot of leverage over software, OS, APIs, programming languages and developers. Basically what companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple all excel at. See the addition of matrix operations for ML significantly increased performance. And how Apple can use their control over iOS APIs to build CoreML, get developers to use it, and have add special instructions and function blocks to their hardware to accelerate core ml. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it would be only natural for these companies to explore this direction.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Yeah, that's it. I would consider buying an A1 if such a thing were possible. But I'll buy AMD and build a desktop even though that's not ideal when I travel (I'll have to downgrade to my old MBP). But if I buy a system I want to run Linux for work and windows for games. Apple and I will just never get along if they can't open up their hardware.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    Further, Microsoft will be incentivized to sell their chips to Windows OEMs. Because Microsoft makes both the CPU and the operating system, they'll be unparalleled integration and optimization between the Windows OS and the silicon (this leaves Intel and AMD at a huge competitive disadvantage) I doubt Microsoft will lock out Intel or AMD, but we could see certain Windows features compatible only with Microsoft silicon.
    - 238475235243 6y ago
      If? They already do. Why is nobody aware of the surface pro X?
      - spideymans 6y ago
        Sorry, I meant to say if MS makes Surface CPUs and licenses them to OEMs. I'm aware of the Surface Pro X. Edited my comment accordingly
userbinator 6y ago
ARM is far less of a standard than the x86/PC ever was. There are countless ARM SoCs out there with zero public documentation, and while x86 has grown its share of secrets, the heritage of backwards compatibility means a lot of things remain the same. (Incidentally, this is why I see efforts to remove backwards-compatibility from the PC as a hostile takeover and closing of the ecosystem.)
- cwyers 6y ago
  x86 and the platform around it didn't become a standard, it was _made_ one. The standard platform for PCs is WHQL Testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing The only way you get a standard like that is if a really big player, in this case Microsoft, steps in and sets the rules and does the work. It's not like backwards compatibility had enough inertia to do this without having someone set the standard.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    It's not like backwards compatibility had enough inertia to do this without having someone set the standard. No, the PC/AT was the de-facto standard and that came long before WHQL or anything else from MS.
tobylane 6y ago
For Apples previous transition, 32bit to 64bit Intel, there were seamless universal apps made with the lipo tool, or Xcode config. It sounds like the same is still possible with an intel+arm binary. Microsoft have considered their arm desktops as less serious than the others? If this new arm chip is meant to be an intel challenger that lower status must end. Universal binaries solve that too.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Apple has a much more ‘my way or the highway’ approach to its developer community than Microsoft.
discodave 6y ago
I think you're right. The economic incentives to differentiate their offerings are too strong to ignore. I predict it will be death by a thousand cuts, but by the time we're talking about AWS Graviton v7 or whatever versus the equivalent Microsoft and Google chips they will have diverged significantly. Enough that workload portability will not be trivial. Just look how hard it is to migrate a significant application from Oracle to SQL Server or Postgres. It's easy for a trivial application, but there are lots of things to trip you up if you're migrating some big hairy complicated application.
worker767424 6y ago
I'm not looking forward to platform balkanization again. I guess the web at least works everywhere. Sorta.
- core-questions 6y ago
  ...as long as you're running Chrome. :(
neogodless 6y ago
In the article, the source suggests Microsoft is exploring the idea of designing CPUs that could end up in future Surface devices. Certainly this makes some sense for the Surface Pro X, which is their very unpopular, poor-performing ARM device. And Microsoft has partnered with AMD for lightly customized AMD Ryzen APUs for their Surface Laptop. But Surface devices are a very small slice of Windows devices sold, because they are "premium" devices merely showing off what can be done with some integration between hardware and software. Most Windows computers are sold by HP, Dell, Acer and other smaller players. And most of them will be choosing between AMD and Intel for the next several years, at least, unless someone surprises with a high-performing ARM chip (and Microsoft fixes x86 emulation performance on ARM.)
- spideymans 6y ago
  > And most of them will be choosing between AMD and Intel for the next several years, at least, unless someone surprises with a high-performing ARM chip (and Microsoft fixes x86 emulation performance on ARM.) Crystal ball tells me that someone will likely be Microsoft. If Microsoft has high performance Surface chips, there is little in the way of them licensing it to OEM partners. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, etc... won't be able to compete with MS, due to the vertical integration between the Windows operating system and Microsoft silicon.
  - AntiImperialist 6y ago
    Microsoft can't do vertical integration right. It's not a part of their DNA.
    - Multicomp 6y ago
      It certainly didn't seem like it in the Balmer era. Today though? Officw 365, Azure AD, Microsoft (VS LOCAL) Accounts half forced on consumers indicate to me that times might be changing for MS.
- 7952 6y ago
  I wonder if Microsoft could gain ground on hp/dell etc by offering something new in terms of vendor management,device management, and maintenance. For example by offering laptop's on Azure with next day delivery. Vertical integration could make a lot of sense for that.
N1H1L 6y ago
Do you see Nvidia offering ARM based CPUs in the near future? And maybe a complete unit with a CPU and dGPU along with unified memory?
- core-questions 6y ago
  That has to be the shot, right? Why else would they have bought ARM? Imagine this: stick an M1-like CPU and GPU combo on a PCIe card. Run the games entirely on the card, using the host system as merely a way to provide data to the card. In one shot, you murder the AMD and Intel processor market - everyone can just buy the cheapest model and still play games, saving their money for the unified GPU/CPU board. It also paves the way for eGPU products for laptops becoming more mainstream, and could work towards a play for the Shield to become a console competitor (if cannibalizing their existing console business is worth it to them).
  - N1H1L 6y ago
    Yeah - seeing the ascendance of ARM in recent years Nvidia entering the processor market seems a very logical step. In fact Jensen Huang himself hasn't ruled out the possibility. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-hints-at-nvidia-branded-arm-cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-hints-at-nvid...
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    Aren't you just suggesting "big Tegra"? If the host PC isn't providing anything but maybe storage and networking...why not just buy a console?
    - mr_toad 6y ago
      A console with upgradable CPU/GPU.
      - XMPPwocky 6y ago
        So they'd have to be socketed? That means no HBM, which seems unfortunate. (If you mean just replacing the entire card... why not replace the entire console? All you'd be getting from the host system would be power (probably as 12V, so you need several DC/DC converters on the card), storage, and networking - besides storage, all of these are commodities; and for storage, existing consoles already support swapping drives out just fine.)
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Everything old is new again right? IBM, DEC, HP all built their own chips as part of their development. That got eaten alive by people like Sun and Apollo who started building workstations on commodity microprocessors, which got better and better so that even the "toy" computers (which is what the IBM PC started out as) became capable of eating their lunch, so they moved "into chips" with SPARC, PA-RISC, PowerPC which forced Intel to abortively try Itanium except that AMD kicked them in the nuts with AMD64. And that was where we lived until the computer architecture "for the masses" became the phone, with ARM chips and they started trickling down into the masses, and then Samsung and Apple started pushing advantages because they could customize their SoC chips and others couldn't, and all the while Intel kept adding specialized instruction sets to try to hold off ARM and AMD from their slipping hold on the Data center and what was left of the "laptop" business. Intel won some small battles in the "ARM Laptop" wars, with Microsoft's limited support for ARM applying pressure and Google's largely unsuccessful ChromeOS system of Chromebooks. But then Apple started making waves with their "tablet" the iPad and iPad pro and were getting margins that the laptop folks could only drool over so laptop makers started making bespoke chips to "up" their game like the pixel / pen processor in the Surface line. And as the iPad and the Surface and the other "ultralight" tablettops collided with overlapping features Apple went ahead and did the unthinkable and put a bespoke CPU into a laptop, and somehow once again managed to pull of huge margins. That pretty much sealed the deal for any serious laptop makers and now we've got Microsoft embracing "alternate" instruction sets, Amazon embracing non-Intel data center architectures, and Apple out competing with a bespoke CPU in a bespoke laptop form factor. <opinion!> Intel is toast. (if you were still wondering) Which truly sucks because you really really want and need a chip fab business that can compete on the global scale. Intel needs to be that business for the US (Sorry Global Foundries you had your chance) RISC-V is the new 8080A, FPGAs are the new SoC. Look for a huge number of computers available in all price points based on RISC-V sitting inside FPGA fabrics. This is going to be driven by open source tools and a set of open source HDL cores for all of the "essential" peripherals. The consumer device kingmakers will be graphics architecture suppliers. The biggest differentiator for the next few years will be "can your graphics card do this?!" </opinion!>
- bsder 6y ago
  > Everything old is new again right? Not really. All this shuffling to "custom hardware" is due to the fact that Moore's Law broke a couple generations back. Custom hardware makes no sense if you can just wait 18 months and the performance of a generic chip will double. Once you can't just "wait for performance increases" then building your own silicon starts to make sense.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mr_toad 6y ago
IMHO system libraries and OS architecture are more important for portability than the processor. In that sense x86 Windows and x86 Macs are already about as unportable as you can get.
lenkite 6y ago
Well, good job security for compiler and VM developers.
infoseek12 6y ago
I think this is a very real concern. On the other hand, now that we’re approaching the limits of miniaturization specialized silicon seems like the clearest path, on the hardware side, to achieve continued performance gains.
tracker1 6y ago
If you can't run Java, C#, Node, Python, Ruby, Rust and Go at a baseline, you're really going to piss off enough developers that you won't get uptake/use on your custom chip platform. I'm not sure how much we will see divergence, or how much it matters to most developers. If the tools can compile/target a given CPU and operate, devs largely won't care. Some will, most won't. I don't think that MS and Amazon will stray too far from generally supported 64-bit arm instructions as a base. Maybe hardware optimizations that will work better in some workloads, but the baseline will likely work. This is only because of the diverse languages and tools that they need to support. I think it's more about shoring up options, reducing costs and optimizing data center layouts. When targeting cloud, many apps are already scaling horizontally. So you don't need to perform like an M1 for general use as long as you can scale horizontally enough at a competitive price point, you can get a very long way without a ton of custom extension.

tiernano 6y ago

Apple making portability difficult, yes... Microsoft? I cant see it... Windows has been able to run on x86/x64, ARM, MIPS, Alpha, PPC and more since the beginning of time (well, NT4) and granted, they haven't released a lot of that code in a while, but i would guess its still there... remember, xbox360 was based on PPC... Also, given they sell an OS to other manufactures to install on their own machines, they are going to keep that running for a while. Same with servers... Even in the Azure side, they are allowing enterprise and OEMs build Azure Stack. I cant see them locking it down... But Apple? yes... its already locked down...

discodave 6y ago
Apple (M1) and Amazon (Graviton) are already out there marketing how great their chips are for various applications. They're not saying "ARM chips are great" they're saying "Apple silicon" or in the case of Amazon, "AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2". The thing to worry about is not them "locking it down" it's that they're building custom hardware that you can only access by renting cloud computing (EC2) or buying a complete machine (Apple).
- worker767424 6y ago
  With Graviton, it's really just try it for your use case, see if it's cheaper.
  - shmoogy 6y ago
    All their managed services will be running off them in time
  - russli1993 6y ago
    I think its just the beginning. They are testing the market for their own silicon and reception from market. They are also going to need a userbase for Graviton products as well so portability in the beginning is important. This is true in any product. In the early days, increase market and mind share. So you need to make it as easy to adopt as possible. Then, add differentiation, so you product stand out from the others to continue attract users. Then slowly add some barriers for people to leave your product for a competitor's product. You want to increase moat and protection against competitors. I don't think Amazon will throw in the resources to build a chip just to offer cheaper prices than competitors alone. Pretend you are Amazon. Remember, the cost of building a chip is similar between you and another guy. And if you are getting less return on investment compared the other guy why bother? It has to be that getting into chips will give you more return on investment than the other guy. But return on investment comes from many forms. For example, using graviton to run VMs is cheaper and leading your customer to use AWS more and less likely to leave AWS is another form of return. In this strategy, you need to build up the barrier for customers to leave. You could do it by making the stuff customer use with their VMs have lock-in effect, for example databases or storage that only runs or works better on AWS. Or you can directly make sure things customers run on Graviton cannot be run on anywhere else. By the way, a better hardware performance is hard to maintain. If everyone uses the same instruction sets and the same manufacturing process, the only way you can be faster than the other guy by better circuit design. But there is only so much you can squeeze out of a circuit design and its really hard to maintain a sizable lead for many many years. Look at how AMD designed a better circuit and Intel's competitive position is gone. Changing the way software interact with the hardware is next easiest thing to do, and especially easy if you have a lot of leverage over software, OS, APIs, programming languages and developers. Basically what companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple all excel at. See the addition of matrix operations for ML significantly increased performance. And how Apple can use their control over iOS APIs to build CoreML, get developers to use it, and have add special instructions and function blocks to their hardware to accelerate core ml. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it would be only natural for these companies to explore this direction.
- eloff 6y ago
  Yeah, that's it. I would consider buying an A1 if such a thing were possible. But I'll buy AMD and build a desktop even though that's not ideal when I travel (I'll have to downgrade to my old MBP). But if I buy a system I want to run Linux for work and windows for games. Apple and I will just never get along if they can't open up their hardware.
- spideymans 6y ago
  Further, Microsoft will be incentivized to sell their chips to Windows OEMs. Because Microsoft makes both the CPU and the operating system, they'll be unparalleled integration and optimization between the Windows OS and the silicon (this leaves Intel and AMD at a huge competitive disadvantage) I doubt Microsoft will lock out Intel or AMD, but we could see certain Windows features compatible only with Microsoft silicon.
  - 238475235243 6y ago
    If? They already do. Why is nobody aware of the surface pro X?
    - spideymans 6y ago
      Sorry, I meant to say if MS makes Surface CPUs and licenses them to OEMs. I'm aware of the Surface Pro X. Edited my comment accordingly

userbinator 6y ago

ARM is far less of a standard than the x86/PC ever was. There are countless ARM SoCs out there with zero public documentation, and while x86 has grown its share of secrets, the heritage of backwards compatibility means a lot of things remain the same. (Incidentally, this is why I see efforts to remove backwards-compatibility from the PC as a hostile takeover and closing of the ecosystem.)

cwyers 6y ago
x86 and the platform around it didn't become a standard, it was _made_ one. The standard platform for PCs is WHQL Testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing The only way you get a standard like that is if a really big player, in this case Microsoft, steps in and sets the rules and does the work. It's not like backwards compatibility had enough inertia to do this without having someone set the standard.
- userbinator 6y ago
  It's not like backwards compatibility had enough inertia to do this without having someone set the standard. No, the PC/AT was the de-facto standard and that came long before WHQL or anything else from MS.

tobylane 6y ago

For Apples previous transition, 32bit to 64bit Intel, there were seamless universal apps made with the lipo tool, or Xcode config. It sounds like the same is still possible with an intel+arm binary. Microsoft have considered their arm desktops as less serious than the others? If this new arm chip is meant to be an intel challenger that lower status must end. Universal binaries solve that too.

mr_toad 6y ago
Apple has a much more ‘my way or the highway’ approach to its developer community than Microsoft.

discodave 6y ago

I think you're right. The economic incentives to differentiate their offerings are too strong to ignore. I predict it will be death by a thousand cuts, but by the time we're talking about AWS Graviton v7 or whatever versus the equivalent Microsoft and Google chips they will have diverged significantly. Enough that workload portability will not be trivial. Just look how hard it is to migrate a significant application from Oracle to SQL Server or Postgres. It's easy for a trivial application, but there are lots of things to trip you up if you're migrating some big hairy complicated application.

worker767424 6y ago

I'm not looking forward to platform balkanization again. I guess the web at least works everywhere. Sorta.

core-questions 6y ago
...as long as you're running Chrome. :(

neogodless 6y ago

In the article, the source suggests Microsoft is exploring the idea of designing CPUs that could end up in future Surface devices. Certainly this makes some sense for the Surface Pro X, which is their very unpopular, poor-performing ARM device. And Microsoft has partnered with AMD for lightly customized AMD Ryzen APUs for their Surface Laptop. But Surface devices are a very small slice of Windows devices sold, because they are "premium" devices merely showing off what can be done with some integration between hardware and software. Most Windows computers are sold by HP, Dell, Acer and other smaller players. And most of them will be choosing between AMD and Intel for the next several years, at least, unless someone surprises with a high-performing ARM chip (and Microsoft fixes x86 emulation performance on ARM.)

spideymans 6y ago
> And most of them will be choosing between AMD and Intel for the next several years, at least, unless someone surprises with a high-performing ARM chip (and Microsoft fixes x86 emulation performance on ARM.) Crystal ball tells me that someone will likely be Microsoft. If Microsoft has high performance Surface chips, there is little in the way of them licensing it to OEM partners. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, etc... won't be able to compete with MS, due to the vertical integration between the Windows operating system and Microsoft silicon.
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  Microsoft can't do vertical integration right. It's not a part of their DNA.
  - Multicomp 6y ago
    It certainly didn't seem like it in the Balmer era. Today though? Officw 365, Azure AD, Microsoft (VS LOCAL) Accounts half forced on consumers indicate to me that times might be changing for MS.
7952 6y ago
I wonder if Microsoft could gain ground on hp/dell etc by offering something new in terms of vendor management,device management, and maintenance. For example by offering laptop's on Azure with next day delivery. Vertical integration could make a lot of sense for that.

N1H1L 6y ago

Do you see Nvidia offering ARM based CPUs in the near future? And maybe a complete unit with a CPU and dGPU along with unified memory?

core-questions 6y ago
That has to be the shot, right? Why else would they have bought ARM? Imagine this: stick an M1-like CPU and GPU combo on a PCIe card. Run the games entirely on the card, using the host system as merely a way to provide data to the card. In one shot, you murder the AMD and Intel processor market - everyone can just buy the cheapest model and still play games, saving their money for the unified GPU/CPU board. It also paves the way for eGPU products for laptops becoming more mainstream, and could work towards a play for the Shield to become a console competitor (if cannibalizing their existing console business is worth it to them).
- N1H1L 6y ago
  Yeah - seeing the ascendance of ARM in recent years Nvidia entering the processor market seems a very logical step. In fact Jensen Huang himself hasn't ruled out the possibility. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-hints-at-nvidia-branded-arm-cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-hints-at-nvid...
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  Aren't you just suggesting "big Tegra"? If the host PC isn't providing anything but maybe storage and networking...why not just buy a console?
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    A console with upgradable CPU/GPU.
    - XMPPwocky 6y ago
      So they'd have to be socketed? That means no HBM, which seems unfortunate. (If you mean just replacing the entire card... why not replace the entire console? All you'd be getting from the host system would be power (probably as 12V, so you need several DC/DC converters on the card), storage, and networking - besides storage, all of these are commodities; and for storage, existing consoles already support swapping drives out just fine.)

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Everything old is new again right? IBM, DEC, HP all built their own chips as part of their development. That got eaten alive by people like Sun and Apollo who started building workstations on commodity microprocessors, which got better and better so that even the "toy" computers (which is what the IBM PC started out as) became capable of eating their lunch, so they moved "into chips" with SPARC, PA-RISC, PowerPC which forced Intel to abortively try Itanium except that AMD kicked them in the nuts with AMD64. And that was where we lived until the computer architecture "for the masses" became the phone, with ARM chips and they started trickling down into the masses, and then Samsung and Apple started pushing advantages because they could customize their SoC chips and others couldn't, and all the while Intel kept adding specialized instruction sets to try to hold off ARM and AMD from their slipping hold on the Data center and what was left of the "laptop" business. Intel won some small battles in the "ARM Laptop" wars, with Microsoft's limited support for ARM applying pressure and Google's largely unsuccessful ChromeOS system of Chromebooks. But then Apple started making waves with their "tablet" the iPad and iPad pro and were getting margins that the laptop folks could only drool over so laptop makers started making bespoke chips to "up" their game like the pixel / pen processor in the Surface line. And as the iPad and the Surface and the other "ultralight" tablettops collided with overlapping features Apple went ahead and did the unthinkable and put a bespoke CPU into a laptop, and somehow once again managed to pull of huge margins. That pretty much sealed the deal for any serious laptop makers and now we've got Microsoft embracing "alternate" instruction sets, Amazon embracing non-Intel data center architectures, and Apple out competing with a bespoke CPU in a bespoke laptop form factor. <opinion!> Intel is toast. (if you were still wondering) Which truly sucks because you really really want and need a chip fab business that can compete on the global scale. Intel needs to be that business for the US (Sorry Global Foundries you had your chance) RISC-V is the new 8080A, FPGAs are the new SoC. Look for a huge number of computers available in all price points based on RISC-V sitting inside FPGA fabrics. This is going to be driven by open source tools and a set of open source HDL cores for all of the "essential" peripherals. The consumer device kingmakers will be graphics architecture suppliers. The biggest differentiator for the next few years will be "can your graphics card do this?!" </opinion!>

bsder 6y ago
> Everything old is new again right? Not really. All this shuffling to "custom hardware" is due to the fact that Moore's Law broke a couple generations back. Custom hardware makes no sense if you can just wait 18 months and the performance of a generic chip will double. Once you can't just "wait for performance increases" then building your own silicon starts to make sense.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mr_toad 6y ago

IMHO system libraries and OS architecture are more important for portability than the processor. In that sense x86 Windows and x86 Macs are already about as unportable as you can get.

lenkite 6y ago

Well, good job security for compiler and VM developers.

infoseek12 6y ago

I think this is a very real concern. On the other hand, now that we’re approaching the limits of miniaturization specialized silicon seems like the clearest path, on the hardware side, to achieve continued performance gains.

tracker1 6y ago

If you can't run Java, C#, Node, Python, Ruby, Rust and Go at a baseline, you're really going to piss off enough developers that you won't get uptake/use on your custom chip platform. I'm not sure how much we will see divergence, or how much it matters to most developers. If the tools can compile/target a given CPU and operate, devs largely won't care. Some will, most won't. I don't think that MS and Amazon will stray too far from generally supported 64-bit arm instructions as a base. Maybe hardware optimizations that will work better in some workloads, but the baseline will likely work. This is only because of the diverse languages and tools that they need to support. I think it's more about shoring up options, reducing costs and optimizing data center layouts. When targeting cloud, many apps are already scaling horizontally. So you don't need to perform like an M1 for general use as long as you can scale horizontally enough at a competitive price point, you can get a very long way without a ton of custom extension.