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I sincerely hope this doesn't turn out the way the announcements for Intel's 10nm and 7nm process nodes turned out. We were promised a lot of fantastic technolo

I sincerely hope this doesn't turn out the way the announcements for Intel's 10nm and 7nm process nodes turned out. We were promised a lot of fantastic technology and got a lot of disappointment. Even if Intel manages to adhere to this aggressive technological roadmap, it's still unclear to me what the market for x86-based machines is going to look like 3-5 years down the road. COVID-19-related PC sales are more of an anomaly than an actual trend; the knock-on effect though of that development promoting an embrace of remote work could possibly turn things around for x86, but I'm still left wondering why most people would want / need x86 when Apple's M1 chips clearly demonstrate that ARM-based solutions are not just sufficient, but potentially superior.

baybal2 5y ago
You hit the nail. Potential fab clients look now at Intel, and keep guessing what's been going on with both their 10nm process, and their fab offering for the last 5 years. Now people keep seeing Intel setting ambitious new targets, and keeping missing them. Would they bet their tapeout on a fab like this now? No. The least worst thing Intel can do for itself now is to disclose what in the world was actually happening which led to the current situation. They long missed the window when their leading edge offer can capture first few clients ready to pay any premium for it.
anotherman554 5y ago
Sony and Microsoft consoles are running x86 hardware so demand is certainly not just driven by COVID-19, people would want those machines regardless. There is no current consumer option to pair an ARM processor with a high end graphic card. I don't know what the future holds but it's pretty obvious why people want x86 at the moment.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Not for consumers yet, but a demonstration recently made by Nvidia[1] involving ARM+dGPu(+Linux!) proves that world isn't as far away as you think. Assuming pure cloud gaming experiences such as Xbox 365 or Playstation Infinity don't become the only way to play console games over the next decade and half, An ARM-based Xbox or Playstation could happen by the next generation or the one following. [1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/nvidia-shows-off-rtx-and-dlss-on-arm-using-arch-linux https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/nvidia-shows-off-rtx-a...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anotherman554 5y ago
    Sure it "could" happen but they would actually need a reason to switch. They aren't selling Laptops where battery life matters.
monocasa 5y ago
These are the 10nm and 7nm processes. They're just retconning the names. 10nm+ is Intel 7, 7nm is now Intel 4, 7nm+ is Intel 3, 5nm is Intel 20A.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  It makes sense. Intel marketing must be kicking themselves with all the press about them not being on 10nm while TSMC is on 5 even though 7nm is the best anyone but apple can get from TSMC and Intel's 10nm is (marginally)better than TSMC's 7.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    Sounds like the "equivalent speed" advertising war back in the day between Intel and AMD.
  - lumost 5y ago
    So there is a weird factor here that we only know what intel tells us about 10nm. The actual parts that have shipped on 10nm have not been competitive with AMD parts at 7nm, or Apple at 5nm. When Apple/AMD were shipping Intel beating parts folks were quick to dismiss it as a byproduct of TSMC's process. Is intel's chip design so much worse that AMD can trounce them on a substantially worse process? Or is Intel 10nm just not very good.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      When the chips worked they had better perf/gate, but Intel had a lot of yield issues, making the perf/$ ratio worse.
      - adrian_b 5y ago
        Not true. The 10 nm Intel Ice Lake Server has much worse perf/W than the 7 nm Epyc made by TSMC, and this is what matters. That means that at the same power limit and the same number of active cores the Ice Lake Server clock frequency is much lower, or at the same clock frequency and same number of active cores the power consumption of Ice Lake Server is much higher. The SuperFin 10 nm process used by Tiger Lake allows much higher maximum clock frequencies, up to 5.0 GHz, than the Ice Lake Server 10 nm process, and it also has a better perf/W, but even the SuperFin 10 nm does not reach the perf/W of the 7 nm TSMC process. If the previous claims made by Intel are true, the process used for Alder Lake, now renamed "Intel 7" will be the first Intel process that is better in perf/W than the 7 nm TSMC process. Nevertheless, it will be still worse than the "5 nm" process that has been used by TSMC in high volume products (Apple) for more than a year.
totalZero 5y ago
On the one hand, x86 is (eventually) going the way of the dodo for some of the biggest datacenter customers, which is a large part of the reason that Intel has once again opened itself up to the prospect of foundry. On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it would take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over. Users and businesses are entrenched and this isn't the first time that Apple has run a different architecture from the rest of the PC crowd. I, for one, prefer my x86 MBP to the newfangled M1 because of RAM, compatibility, external display support, and number of ports. These limitations are all a function of implementation, not inherent to Apple Silicon, but they influence my preferences nonetheless. COVID-19 has changed the way that work is balanced against everything else in our lives, and I view its impact on the chip market as demand creation rather than a demand spike. We will never go back 100% to the way that things were prior to the pandemic; big shocks all have that in common. The hybrid model of work from home as a complement to office work means that people/companies will need to buy and maintain more hardware. I share your hope that this doesn't turn out the way the delayed nodes did. Intel's 10nm and 7nm setbacks started in the Krzanich days during the doldrums of the PC glut. People were mobile, phone innovations were booming, and no substantial PC advancements came to the fore during that time. I think we can give Intel some benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren't dumb enough to repeat the error of announcing a road map for which there is no road map...especially because the tick-tock model is already a thing of the past and exerts no expectations nowadays.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Users and businesses are entrenched What dependency do you think most users and business have on the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you can translate?
  - wmf 5y ago
    In many cases the dependency is native (not virtualized) Windows and Windows doesn't run natively on any good ARMs.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    There's an unbelievable amount of software out there for which porting is either not viable or not economical.
stefan_ 5y ago
If architecture doesn't matter, why on earth would you think x86 is a negative. The most ARM can ever hope for is that people don't care or notice it's ARM.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Energy efficiency is a thing that some people (including phone manufacturers) care about.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    As much as ARM is associated with efficiency, the instruction set itself is largely irrelevant to the performance of modern CPUs. x86s CPUs are translating x86 instructions into the CPU's native instruction set, and while that used to impose some non-trivial overhead, it's been trivial for quite some time.
smoldesu 5y ago
> I'm still left wondering why most people would want / need x86 when Apple's M1 chips clearly demonstrate that ARM-based solutions are not just sufficient, but potentially superior. Simple, I use Linux and MacOS cannot run the software that I need to use on a daily basis. The most powerful Apple Silicon you can buy right now still can't quite beat my 2014 beater-PC in raw performance, which also doesn't exactly instill confidence in it.
- GiorgioG 5y ago
  I have an M1 MacBook Air and I love it. But it's no replacement for my Threadripper 1950X / RTX 3080 for work/gaming. x86 gives me choices. I can run Windows, Linux, etc. With M1...I'm at the mercy of Apple's closed-system. Sure, there are folks working on getting Linux working on the M1, but there's no guarantee that Apple will let you keep running/installing Linux. You're one Apple firmware update away from bricking your device/alternate-OS.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Who says Apple will be the only vendor of successful ARM desktops? It seems like it's only a matter of time before other vendors catch up. The point is simply that Apple demonstrated the viability of ARM in those use cases.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Windows on ARM laptops existed long before the M1 and they didn't catch on. It's Apple that is late to the party.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      But like you said yourself, they didn't catch on. Therefore I wouldn't describe those vendors as "successful". Apple was the first vendor to achieve that. It may be that the Qualcomm chips used by the majority of those devices just aren't competitive enough to replace desktop use cases.
      - 5y ago
14u2c 5y ago
Retail PC sales are only a small portion of the x86 market. The vast majority of corporate PCs will continue to use x86 in the foreseeable future for compatibility reasons. On the datacenter / cloud side providers are trying to make inroads with ARM, such as Amazon's Graviton, but are meeting similar resistance. Additionally we have yet to see x86 on the TSMC 5nm process. Making that leap once Apple's reservations expire may remove much of the performance gap.
- qalmakka 5y ago
  I think one big reason for this is how disappointing on the shelves ARM chips are compared with Apple's offering, and the lack of a standardized platform like the PC was for x86. UEFI on AArch64 is a good start, but we really need to reach a point where a single image can be installed on every ARM desktop machine, like it has been for decades for Intel and AMD. Also, the lack of FOSS drivers for lots of boards mean that you risk getting stuck on a specific kernel version forever.l All of this is absolutely unacceptable, as long as there's x86_64 out there that's competitive and doesn't suffer from these downsides.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    Absolutely. x86 standardization has made generations of developers forget what it was like coding for a specific machine. ARM is still far behind despite the enthusiasm.
ksec 5y ago
>t's still unclear to me what the market for x86-based machines is going to look like 3-5 years down the road. ~750M of PC are used in Cooperate and Business. And if IBM mainframe has taught us anything business couldn't give a f what ISA they are using. They want 100% ( when possible ) backward compatibility. Considering most Business PC are already using low end x86 CPU, and they have not been CPU bottlenecked for long, I mean most of them are still using PC with HDD for all sort of reasons. So I dont see them switching any time soon. Excluding that the vast majority of PC are Laptop and Gaming PCs. Gaming wont switch. Laptop is a complicated issue. And I think it sort of depends on Microsoft and how aggressive will Apple price their MacBook Air. I see no reason why they cant have the lowest cost MacBook starting at $799 while maintaining the same margin. On Server I think x86 is pretty much done, at least in the HyperScaler market. The whole reason why Amazon is an Intel foundry customer is because Amazon are moving everything they could to Graviton. So you either loss Amazon as a customer leaving them to buy some x86 for some smaller part of their AWS, or you try and Fab them a chip they want. And I believe, for political reason, Intel will gain lots of foundry customers. So while a potential lost of 30-40% of their DC market in the next 5 years. x86 should still be a healthy state in 5 years time.
pankajdoharey 5y ago
TSMC Announced a 2nm soon after Intel announced it can catch up https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/28/tsmc-2nm-production-set-for-2023/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/28/tsmc-2nm-production-set-for-2...

baybal2 5y ago

You hit the nail. Potential fab clients look now at Intel, and keep guessing what's been going on with both their 10nm process, and their fab offering for the last 5 years. Now people keep seeing Intel setting ambitious new targets, and keeping missing them. Would they bet their tapeout on a fab like this now? No. The least worst thing Intel can do for itself now is to disclose what in the world was actually happening which led to the current situation. They long missed the window when their leading edge offer can capture first few clients ready to pay any premium for it.

anotherman554 5y ago

Sony and Microsoft consoles are running x86 hardware so demand is certainly not just driven by COVID-19, people would want those machines regardless. There is no current consumer option to pair an ARM processor with a high end graphic card. I don't know what the future holds but it's pretty obvious why people want x86 at the moment.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
Not for consumers yet, but a demonstration recently made by Nvidia[1] involving ARM+dGPu(+Linux!) proves that world isn't as far away as you think. Assuming pure cloud gaming experiences such as Xbox 365 or Playstation Infinity don't become the only way to play console games over the next decade and half, An ARM-based Xbox or Playstation could happen by the next generation or the one following. [1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/nvidia-shows-off-rtx-and-dlss-on-arm-using-arch-linux https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/nvidia-shows-off-rtx-a...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anotherman554 5y ago
  Sure it "could" happen but they would actually need a reason to switch. They aren't selling Laptops where battery life matters.

monocasa 5y ago

These are the 10nm and 7nm processes. They're just retconning the names. 10nm+ is Intel 7, 7nm is now Intel 4, 7nm+ is Intel 3, 5nm is Intel 20A.

colinmhayes 5y ago
It makes sense. Intel marketing must be kicking themselves with all the press about them not being on 10nm while TSMC is on 5 even though 7nm is the best anyone but apple can get from TSMC and Intel's 10nm is (marginally)better than TSMC's 7.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Sounds like the "equivalent speed" advertising war back in the day between Intel and AMD.
- lumost 5y ago
  So there is a weird factor here that we only know what intel tells us about 10nm. The actual parts that have shipped on 10nm have not been competitive with AMD parts at 7nm, or Apple at 5nm. When Apple/AMD were shipping Intel beating parts folks were quick to dismiss it as a byproduct of TSMC's process. Is intel's chip design so much worse that AMD can trounce them on a substantially worse process? Or is Intel 10nm just not very good.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    When the chips worked they had better perf/gate, but Intel had a lot of yield issues, making the perf/$ ratio worse.
    - adrian_b 5y ago
      Not true. The 10 nm Intel Ice Lake Server has much worse perf/W than the 7 nm Epyc made by TSMC, and this is what matters. That means that at the same power limit and the same number of active cores the Ice Lake Server clock frequency is much lower, or at the same clock frequency and same number of active cores the power consumption of Ice Lake Server is much higher. The SuperFin 10 nm process used by Tiger Lake allows much higher maximum clock frequencies, up to 5.0 GHz, than the Ice Lake Server 10 nm process, and it also has a better perf/W, but even the SuperFin 10 nm does not reach the perf/W of the 7 nm TSMC process. If the previous claims made by Intel are true, the process used for Alder Lake, now renamed "Intel 7" will be the first Intel process that is better in perf/W than the 7 nm TSMC process. Nevertheless, it will be still worse than the "5 nm" process that has been used by TSMC in high volume products (Apple) for more than a year.

totalZero 5y ago

On the one hand, x86 is (eventually) going the way of the dodo for some of the biggest datacenter customers, which is a large part of the reason that Intel has once again opened itself up to the prospect of foundry. On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it would take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over. Users and businesses are entrenched and this isn't the first time that Apple has run a different architecture from the rest of the PC crowd. I, for one, prefer my x86 MBP to the newfangled M1 because of RAM, compatibility, external display support, and number of ports. These limitations are all a function of implementation, not inherent to Apple Silicon, but they influence my preferences nonetheless. COVID-19 has changed the way that work is balanced against everything else in our lives, and I view its impact on the chip market as demand creation rather than a demand spike. We will never go back 100% to the way that things were prior to the pandemic; big shocks all have that in common. The hybrid model of work from home as a complement to office work means that people/companies will need to buy and maintain more hardware. I share your hope that this doesn't turn out the way the delayed nodes did. Intel's 10nm and 7nm setbacks started in the Krzanich days during the doldrums of the PC glut. People were mobile, phone innovations were booming, and no substantial PC advancements came to the fore during that time. I think we can give Intel some benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren't dumb enough to repeat the error of announcing a road map for which there is no road map...especially because the tick-tock model is already a thing of the past and exerts no expectations nowadays.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> Users and businesses are entrenched What dependency do you think most users and business have on the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you can translate?
- wmf 5y ago
  In many cases the dependency is native (not virtualized) Windows and Windows doesn't run natively on any good ARMs.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  There's an unbelievable amount of software out there for which porting is either not viable or not economical.

stefan_ 5y ago

If architecture doesn't matter, why on earth would you think x86 is a negative. The most ARM can ever hope for is that people don't care or notice it's ARM.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Energy efficiency is a thing that some people (including phone manufacturers) care about.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  As much as ARM is associated with efficiency, the instruction set itself is largely irrelevant to the performance of modern CPUs. x86s CPUs are translating x86 instructions into the CPU's native instruction set, and while that used to impose some non-trivial overhead, it's been trivial for quite some time.

smoldesu 5y ago

> I'm still left wondering why most people would want / need x86 when Apple's M1 chips clearly demonstrate that ARM-based solutions are not just sufficient, but potentially superior. Simple, I use Linux and MacOS cannot run the software that I need to use on a daily basis. The most powerful Apple Silicon you can buy right now still can't quite beat my 2014 beater-PC in raw performance, which also doesn't exactly instill confidence in it.

GiorgioG 5y ago
I have an M1 MacBook Air and I love it. But it's no replacement for my Threadripper 1950X / RTX 3080 for work/gaming. x86 gives me choices. I can run Windows, Linux, etc. With M1...I'm at the mercy of Apple's closed-system. Sure, there are folks working on getting Linux working on the M1, but there's no guarantee that Apple will let you keep running/installing Linux. You're one Apple firmware update away from bricking your device/alternate-OS.
shawnz 5y ago
Who says Apple will be the only vendor of successful ARM desktops? It seems like it's only a matter of time before other vendors catch up. The point is simply that Apple demonstrated the viability of ARM in those use cases.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Windows on ARM laptops existed long before the M1 and they didn't catch on. It's Apple that is late to the party.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    But like you said yourself, they didn't catch on. Therefore I wouldn't describe those vendors as "successful". Apple was the first vendor to achieve that. It may be that the Qualcomm chips used by the majority of those devices just aren't competitive enough to replace desktop use cases.
    - 5y ago

14u2c 5y ago

Retail PC sales are only a small portion of the x86 market. The vast majority of corporate PCs will continue to use x86 in the foreseeable future for compatibility reasons. On the datacenter / cloud side providers are trying to make inroads with ARM, such as Amazon's Graviton, but are meeting similar resistance. Additionally we have yet to see x86 on the TSMC 5nm process. Making that leap once Apple's reservations expire may remove much of the performance gap.

qalmakka 5y ago
I think one big reason for this is how disappointing on the shelves ARM chips are compared with Apple's offering, and the lack of a standardized platform like the PC was for x86. UEFI on AArch64 is a good start, but we really need to reach a point where a single image can be installed on every ARM desktop machine, like it has been for decades for Intel and AMD. Also, the lack of FOSS drivers for lots of boards mean that you risk getting stuck on a specific kernel version forever.l All of this is absolutely unacceptable, as long as there's x86_64 out there that's competitive and doesn't suffer from these downsides.
- shadilay 5y ago
  Absolutely. x86 standardization has made generations of developers forget what it was like coding for a specific machine. ARM is still far behind despite the enthusiasm.

ksec 5y ago

>t's still unclear to me what the market for x86-based machines is going to look like 3-5 years down the road. ~750M of PC are used in Cooperate and Business. And if IBM mainframe has taught us anything business couldn't give a f what ISA they are using. They want 100% ( when possible ) backward compatibility. Considering most Business PC are already using low end x86 CPU, and they have not been CPU bottlenecked for long, I mean most of them are still using PC with HDD for all sort of reasons. So I dont see them switching any time soon. Excluding that the vast majority of PC are Laptop and Gaming PCs. Gaming wont switch. Laptop is a complicated issue. And I think it sort of depends on Microsoft and how aggressive will Apple price their MacBook Air. I see no reason why they cant have the lowest cost MacBook starting at $799 while maintaining the same margin. On Server I think x86 is pretty much done, at least in the HyperScaler market. The whole reason why Amazon is an Intel foundry customer is because Amazon are moving everything they could to Graviton. So you either loss Amazon as a customer leaving them to buy some x86 for some smaller part of their AWS, or you try and Fab them a chip they want. And I believe, for political reason, Intel will gain lots of foundry customers. So while a potential lost of 30-40% of their DC market in the next 5 years. x86 should still be a healthy state in 5 years time.

pankajdoharey 5y ago

TSMC Announced a 2nm soon after Intel announced it can catch up https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/28/tsmc-2nm-production-set-for-2023/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/28/tsmc-2nm-production-set-for-2...