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Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted. But Apple, Google, and Ama
by georgyo 5y ago
Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted.
But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products. So most of FAANG, all if you count the ones with consumer products.
The first version of these CPUs will be very ARM compatible, as they are trying to drive adoption to of their silicon. Once there get a leg up they will start adding patented operation to their stuff. And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed.
And because they are not OEMing this hardware, they really have no incentive to be cooperative with the others. Similar to older gaming console that had custom and experimental architectures.
However it is obvious why this is all happening. And that is Intel and Qualcomm inhibited growth and squeezed too much profit from the market.
- Avi-D-coder 5y agoYour right, but all of this will drive WASM adoption. I'm fine with papering over incompatibility as long as the costs continue to go down.
- junon 5y agoWASM adoption is not something everyone agrees is a great thing in the context of physical CPUs.
- astlouis44 5y ago100% this. Cross-platform binaries that "just work" everywhere in a hardware agnostic manner is going to be huge. Browser-based games and real-time 3D applications are the one's I'm most excited about, personally but that may be because I'm developing a WASM startup in this space.
- kcb 5y agoThey should think of a new slogan, maybe "Write once, run anywhere". Yea that sounds good.
- carlhjerpe 5y agoWASM runs on 3 billion devices!
- astlouis44 5y agoThis x 1000%.
- carlhjerpe 5y agoIt was a joke on the Java installer saying Java runs on 3 billion devices for ages, not sure if you got it or not.
- pjmlp 5y agoPascal P-Code.
- devwastaken 5y agoIt won't, and shouldn't. Wasm meets very few of it's goals, and is nowhere near any native speeds under real world workloads. Even speedups with SIMD ar hindered, and the entire design and implementation of it in the clang/llvm compiler is very experimental. Go work with wasm in the browser, you will pull your hair out at the fact emscripten is still the most used tool. It's all very hackey and if something breaks, you wont fix it.
- astlouis44 5y agoOh this comment is not going to age very well...
- Avi-D-coder 5y agoI have worked with wasm in the browser in production. Yes, there are many issues, yes I have some critiques of the multithreading proposal, but in the long run portable workers solve lock-in.
- ape4 5y agoEmbrace and extend.
- mhh__ 5y agoApple has already done this to an extent. M1 has undocumented instructions and a semi-closed toolchain (Assuming they have some, M1 tuning models for LLVM and GCC are nowhere to be seen afaik)
- ithkuil 5y agoAre the tuning models in opensource toolchains for Intel CPUs been released by Intel or figured out over time by opensource developers?
- kolbusa 5y agoIntel contributes optimizations to gcc and llvm.
- ithkuil 5y agoThey do now; I think I remember the time when they didn't.
- jagger27 5y agoApple also contributes plenty to LLVM, more than Intel actually, naively based on commit counts of @apple.com and @intel.com git committer email addresses. This isn't very surprising given that Chris Lattner worked at Apple for over a decade.
- mhh__ 5y agoLLVM is Apple's baby, beyond its genesis under Lattner. They hate the GPL, that's it. The thing about their contributions is that they upstream stuff they want other people to standardize on but aren't doing it out of love, as far as I can tell e.g. Valve have a direct business interest in having Linux kicking ass, Apple actively loses out (psychologically at least) if a non-apple toolchain is as good as theirs.
- pjmlp 5y agoApple used to contribute plenty to LLVM. Nowadays less so, for them C++ support is good enough for what they make out of it (MSL is based on C++14 and IO/Driver Kit use an embedded subset). The main focus is how well it is churning Objective-C, Swift and their own special flavour of bitcode. None of them end up upstream as one might wish for.
- beckman466 5y ago> Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted. Yeah i think we fail to see this common pattern of negative (even monopolistic) long term effects because we are distracted by the trade-offs or benefits the company promises us initially (but betrays later).
- fortran77 5y ago> But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products. So most of FAANG, all if you count the ones with consumer products. Microsoft too! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-pro-x/processor https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/business/surface-pro... And of course RaspberryPi: https://www.arm.com/blogs/blueprint/raspberry-pi-rp2040 https://www.arm.com/blogs/blueprint/raspberry-pi-rp2040
- staticassertion 5y agoIs this worse than the current state of things? intel has its own special extensions to its chips, right? They all do.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoAll the x86 extensions are freely implementable by any constructor. There's some stuff like SSE4a which is not available on Intel processors, and others that Intel has implemented and AMD chose not to. But they are published as extensions and part of the standard.
- ant6n 5y agoYou mean implementable by AMD, the other x86 constructor.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoI don't see you complaining about ASML being the only way of getting photolithography machines, or TSMC being basically the only constructor at scale. Some industries are awfully complex and getting into it requires insane amounts of work. x86 processor making is one of these. It's the same as making new browser engines/js JIT/etc. There is just so much work that catching up with the incumbents is almost impossible.
- ant6n 5y agoI'm not complaining about anything, just saying there are two companies that have licenses to make x86¹, so it's not true that anybody could implement a cpu with sse4 extensions. ¹Not sure what happened to that x86 license that Cyrix had.
- forty 5y agoVia technology is making x86 CPUs using Cyrix's licence (they purchased Cyrix 20 years ago)
- oefrha 5y agoThese alarmist comments seem to be comically oblivious of much of computing history. If you have something open and better, it will prevail over closed products; if you have something open and worse, you need to work on making it open and better, screaming “but they’re closed” doesn’t help.
- BeefWellington 5y agoI'm not sure that in computing history there's ever been the situation we have now of a software vendor owning so much of the market(s) that they can realistically afford to make this kind of move. Microsoft in the 90s might have been the only company positioned appropriately to try but compared with Amazon, Google, and Apple, they did not have as much of an "in" into people's daily lives the way all three of those companies do today. Unregulated capitalism leads to the company store, which is I think effectively where GP was suggesting things were headed.
- simonh 5y agoThis is the way most of the computing market has worked most of the time. Mainframes and minis were this way, then almost all the workstation vendors had their own CPU architecture and OS (often a flavour of Unix). The only real exception, and I admit it is a huge one, in Wintel but outside that in house hardware/software development in tandem has been the norm. Furthermore this model is fundamental to the ARM architecture. The whole point is for licensees to develop SOCs with their own custom components on the same die. That's literally what a SOC is.
- zaphirplane 5y agoWindows is a massive “in”, your work and home device, your gateway to the *internet*. As an aside that is monopolistic behaviour which at least California and EU are in top of. Companies have to be careful exploiting their dominance in an area. maybe an “in” and dominance are different, if they are it doesn’t matter
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- junon 5y ago> And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed. So x86, basically.
- zanethomas 5y ago... and The proprietary cpus will only run software obtained from the corresponding app store. You can take that to the bank.
- sneak 5y agoYeah. This is more about full stack DRM to provide rentseeking opportunities than Intel's fat (but historically tolerable) margins.
- marcellus23 5y agoYeah, this won’t be happening.
- oblio 5y agoWhy?
- pjc50 5y agoIt effectively is already happening: that's the iOS model. The fact that it's not enforced by incompatible instructions is irrelevant.
- marcellus23 5y agoBecause macOS is not iOS.
- Zenst 5y ago> Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted. Mixed upon that. Upside - getting software made more portable across architectures and with that, the choice of an ARM or X86 desktop also makes porting to other cpu types less of an effort. Then drivers and lets cut to the crux - support for other hardware via drivers is what holds any other architecture back from the start. Downside - Moving towards more and more closed/secret source CPU's that more locked in and if they become the norm, then a whole level of developing becomes way harder. Whilst I'm sure many more upsides and a few other downsides, the real upside in all this will be even better ARM support by the commercial apps. With that, I really do think Apple with the M1 done wonders for ARM and the whole ARM environment.
- my123 5y agoThe extensions present in the M1 are not used at all by Apple’s public compilers. From the perspective of a 3rd-party macOS developer that doesn’t reverse engineer, it’s just a regular arm64 machine. This allows Apple to deprecate/change those extensions over time without developer involvement, and even use Cortex reference designs where it would make sense for them.
- Zenst 5y agoVery true and easy to blur the lines of thought between SOC and CPU these days upon ARM. Thank you for the poignant reminder.
- antris 5y ago>However it is obvious why this is all happening. And that is Intel and Qualcomm inhibited growth and squeezed too much profit from the market. Or, it's just the regular old way capitalism works. Any sufficiently large company will start to vertically integrate to maximize their profits. If not Apple / Google, it could have been Intel / Qualcomm who started vertically integrating by offering their own laptops, phones, OSes and App Stores. The big fish eats the small ones. That's capitalism 101.
- klelatti 5y agoSorry, this is unwarranted alarmism. > The first version of these CPUs will be very Arm compatible, as they are trying to drive adoption to of their silicon. All these CPUs will be Arm compatible, otherwise they will be breaking their license. > Once there get a leg up they will start adding patented operation to their stuff. And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed. Maybe they will add accelerators as Apple has done but Arm compatible code will still run on all these CPUs. > And because they are not OEMing this hardware, they really have no incentive to be cooperative with the others. Yes they do because they need Arm code to run on them. There are thousands and thousands of Arm designs in use and they _all_ run Arm code as specified by Arm Ltd. (And yes I know that there is fragmentation in other things that go on the SoC but that is a different point).
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoYou can definitely get a license that allows you to go hog wild and make breaking changes. I believe both Apple and Google pay for that. But it doesn't help anyone to fragment too much.
- klelatti 5y ago> You can definitely get a license that allows you to go hog wild and make breaking changes. I believe both Apple and Google pay for that. Reference?
- my123 5y agoThere is some minor breakage, like Apple CPUs enforcing the VHE feature of ARMv8.1-A to be on, and not supporting it being off. But that was like… the sole issue on that front. What you are allowed to do is make extensions with the highest tier of arch licenses, you however cannot break the ISA.
- klelatti 5y agoThanks! Very interesting on VHE.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoThere's a lot of ignorance in some of the threads here, but the reality is proliferation of "custom" (but under license) ARM chips _is the end goal of ARM_. That's their whole business model. They (Arm, the company) don't manufacture anything. They just design and license their designs. To be clear there is little risk in anyone manufacturing truly proprietary chips. ARM licensing ranges from "you shall produce exactly to spec" for those wishing to vertically integrate commodity parts to "you may freely modify" -- but in either case it's the ARM design being licensed. It does nothing but harm the licensee to build something novel and strange functionality. This system has been working quite well for Arm for decades at this point. If anything, the fact that well-known brands like Apple and Google are spinning ARM chips speaks volumes to Arm's excellent business model. Nothing we've seen from either tech giants is truly revolutionary -- the smaller fabs have been doing the same things for years. Why anyone ever sold Arm, I will never understand.
- laurent92 5y agoThis is an excellent example of positive use of IP law, and why removing copyright and patent would harm some legitimate business models.
- creato 5y agoWhy is this being downvoted? I think it’s a good point. It seems like ARMs success is due in part to minimal fragmentation, which is due in turn to ARM’s licensing strategy.
- Trex_Egg 5y agohow to downvote in Hacker news? There is no down vote button right?
- lkschubert8 5y agoAfter a certain upvote threshold on your account you get the ability to downvote
- foobiekr 5y agoIn some tech sectors, the double margin problem is a very real issue. Merchant silicon vendors have a margin they need to hit, and the vendors have a gross margin they need to hit, and so on. This is especially an issue in HPC and networking.
- todd3834 5y agoThis means more competition right? I mostly think good will come from this for consumers. Things felt like they really stalled out for a while with Intel
- qqtt 5y ago> But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products. So most of FAANG, all if you count the ones with consumer products. The F in FAANG - Facebook - has consumer products (notably, the Oculus VR headset). Also Netflix spun out their consumer product into another company (Roku).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brundolf 5y ago> Once there get a leg up they will start adding patented operation to their stuff. And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed. Why would they go out of their way to make it harder for devs to target their ecosystems? Here's what I see happening: the majority of application development now takes place within architecture-agnostic languages/frameworks/platforms. The platforms solve the problem of multi-architecture once, and then everyone else can get on with their business without thinking about it. Fragmenting the hardware itself mainly serves to open the door for more finely-grained optimizations by these platforms (interpreters, browsers, LLVM, etc). Look to graphics APIs for comparison: OpenGL was a relatively high-level API because that's what game devs and others were usually writing directly. Now that most game dev happens in engines like Unity and Unreal, or even on platforms like the Web, only the platform/engine developers have to write actual graphics code a lot of the time (excluding shaders). And they want more fine-grained control, so we're switching to lower-level graphics APIs like Metal and Vulcan because the needs for the baseline API have shifted. So what I see is not a difference in the total fragmentation from the average dev's perspective, just a shifting of where the abstraction happens.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt was already like that with the UNIX wars. The only issue is with commercial software, but even there JIT enabled emulation is a possible solution.
- hrez 5y ago> But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products Oracle too, whose CPU's btw are ~20% faster than aws graviton2. Looks like they use Ampere Altras.
- sova 5y ago>Squeezed too much profit from the market. And what should they have done instead? Is it up to companies themselves to forge their own competition? Or did you snooze at the opportunity.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoQualcomm used its modem patents and licensing terms to strongarm companies into purchasing modems and CPUs together (since buying just a modem or just a CPU ended up costing nearly as much). That kind of behavior pushes companies to find alternatives and reduces choice in the market.
- api 5y agoThe worry I have is that these deep pocketed vendors will lock up access to top tier fast designs. There will no longer be a high end CPU open market, making it almost impossible for a new entrant to build anything competitive. X64 is still decoupled but how long will it survive with ARM designs like the M1 or Graviton blowing it out of the water? The thing we really have to beware of is an oligopoly of vertically integrated vendors locking up all high end fab capacity, making it impossible to even fab a competing design if you can design one. Not only do we need a revival of antitrust, but we need competitors to TSMC badly. Samsung and Intel are close on its heels but that’s not enough.
- klelatti 5y agoWe’ve moved from a less diverse world (where Intel and AMD have an oligopoly) to one where a large number of firms can use Arm’s ISA and base designs (eg Neoverse) to build a decently competitive CPU. This is the opposite of what you’re suggesting is happening.
- pjc50 5y agoThe argument from M1 is that "competitive CPU" will cease to be a thing as markets close; you'll get vertically integrated hardware. The M1 isn't a competitive CPU because it doesn't compete as a CPU; it competes only as the sealed unit of "Apple laptop"
- klelatti 5y agoM1 isn't a CPU its an SoC. The CPUs in the M1 are competitive because they build on Arm's IP which others can and are doing (Google, Amazon, Qualcomm Samsung already and others can join them) which is a much less oligopolistic position than Intel / AMD having the market to themselves.
- api 5y agoBut you can’t source the M1 for another product. If you could you’d see them in servers already as they (or at least their performance cores) would be fantastic chips for many server workloads. That was my point. Diversity doesn’t matter. It’s diversity of what can be sourced on the open market that matters.
- simorley 5y ago> However it is obvious why this is all happening. And that is Intel and Qualcomm inhibited growth and squeezed too much profit from the market. It's not that intel and qualcomm have squeezed too much profit, it's that Apple, Google, Facebook, etc have too much profit. Apple and Google are worth $2 trillion. Facebook is worth more than $1 trillion. Intel and Qualcomm are worth $300 billion put together. These tech companies are big enough and monopolistic enough to own their entire hardware stack. It's like when Rockefeller and Standard Oil got so big that they "bought" the railroads that transported their oil. Apple and Google each make more profit than Intel and Qualcomm's combined revenue.
- Trex_Egg 5y agoNice take, I infer them the same.
- thegranderson 5y agoFAANG companies will primarily be differenated based on network or software, rarely commodity hardware. They don't need to go all the way to silicon if they can just tune the designs for their workloads. We're early on in that process, and I think the internt giants will progress up the stack into the metaverse, not down into the physical science of it. Semiconductors are a capital intensive and brutal business, as evidenced by Intel's recent fall - they basically made one architectural mistake and that slip up cost them the lead on multi-threaded performance for probably 5-8 years, assuming they can get it back. Separately, Rockefeller's coercion of the railroads was not something he did because he was big, it was something he did to become big. He would strong-arm his way into controlling or coercive positions at railroads, then cut off his competitor's ability to transport their product. When they were struggling, he would buy them up at distressed prices and turn the rails back on.
- simorley 5y ago> FAANG companies will primarily be differenated based on network or software, rarely commodity hardware. I know. I didn't say they were going to sell commodity chips. Just that they were big enough to own their own stack. > Separately, Rockefeller's coercion of the railroads was not something he did because he was big, it was something he did to become big. No. It was something an already large SO did to get bigger. If Standard Oil wasn't big, it could never coerce the railroads to begin with. > When they were struggling, he would buy them up at distressed prices and turn the rails back on. I know. But small insignificant standard oil didn't do this. It was big standard oil on its way to even bigger and better things.
- johnalbertearle 5y agoI think so too.
- johnalbertearle 5y agoI do agree. Greed is not always the best.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> But Apple, Google, and Amazon are now creating their own ARM CPUs for their own products. It all leads to technical debt. They will make their own devices and keep them in-house. Then they will modify software to leverage these devices. Eventually they will loose touch with the standards. This will go well, for a while. Then something will go wrong. Their chip development will run into a roadblock and they will want to return to the standard. But by that point the cost of reverting will be far to high. They will be stuck with their in-house chips for better or worse. This isn't healthy. Sticking with the community standards on fungible hardware, or better yet contributing to them, is always the better long-term bet.
- throwaway894345 5y ago> And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed. In marked contrast to the blissful years of the utopian Intel/AMD duopoly? (:
- webmobdev 5y agoNo, your fears aren't warranted. In fact, when Apple launched their ARM SoC for their laptop / desktop platform, I pointed out that Intel / AMD x86-AMD64 processors are now the final bastion of computing freedom as they build general purpose CPUs, and their current business model prevents locking it down to any specific platform. With custom ARM SoCs we are going to see extreme platform lockdowns. (What most people here don't get, or are being deliberately obtuse about, is that ARM's IP are used to build System-on-Chips where the ARM processor is just one of the units. It is other custom parts of the SoC that allow you to lockdown and make the SoC incompatible with other ARM SoCs). This is how Apple ARM SoCs only fully support ios / macOS, Google's will only support Android / ChromeOS, Microsoft's ARM SoC will only fully support Windows etc, and will enforce platform lockdown. To understand why this is happening, we have to recognize the shift in the business model of BigTech - They want to turn everything into a service that will earn them recurring revenue. Platform lockdown will ensure they can force users data on to the cloud by pushing cloud services on these device and limiting their hardware. While initially they will lock down personal data too on to their specific cloud services, regulation may force them to allow "data transfer" between the BigTech services to give consumers the illusion of choice. Remember, PRISM has showed US government how valuable it is to have access to personal data from corporates and how easy it is when it is on the "cloud". BigTech's worldwide reach will allow them to literally spy on anyone in a few decades and the US needs that ability to maintain its influence on world politics. I predict a very bleak future for personal computing, where the concept of ownership of computers or computing device will no longer exist - your device in the future will be fully controlled by the BigTech, and we will have no computing freedom to even install any open source code on "our" device. BigTech is already experimenting with "cloud coding" - this means they will even have access to all your codes in the future too - in such a scenario no competitor will emerge in the future to be able to dislodge them for centuries until they lose political backing.
- jart 5y agoThe x86-64 patents also expired last year, so it's not only a general computing architecture, but a free as in freedom one too. It's also the architecture everyone uses for pretty much everything. Developers are finally free and united in the language we use to encode computer programs. But how long will this Tower of Babel be permitted to stand? Writing code for things other than x86-64 (e.g. GPUs, DSP/ML chips, phones, Apple SDKs) usually require entering into a legal agreement or obtaining some kind of authorization. History won't move backwards once the platforms we've fought hard to learn and use have finally opened up, just because Google and Apple want to save battery on their laptops.
- DerekL 5y agoGoogle is doing this for Chromebooks. If they want to lock out other vendors from making Chromebooks, they don't have to make a custom CPU, they'd just have to fork Chrome OS and Android. But they don't want to corner the Chromebook market, they want wide adoption. > And because they are not OEMing this hardware, they really have no incentive to be cooperative with the others. Similar to older gaming console that had custom and experimental architectures. What exactly is this referring to? Are you saying that game consoles should only use chips that are available to other manufacturers, or that every game console should be an IBM-PC compatible, like the first Xbox.
- lenkite 5y agoSeriously asking - does a fragmented CPU field even matter in today's software ecosystem of high-level languages, frameworks and extensive compiler infrastructures/virtual machines ? Wouldn't such a divergence merely only increase the demand for compiler-backend/VM engineers making this job segment more attractive ?