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AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosy

AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive. I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century. The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design. It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.

ravenstine 5y ago
I think Intel is too late. They can play catch up with the ARM market, but it will take time because there are are enough other players that they're not relevant enough to be on top again. That is unless they can out-innovate the competition, which I doubt, but who knows. Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Might take a decade for them to realise. Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong. Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    >Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      In fairness, are you not merely implying the opposite prediction? I'm sure there were people who thought pagers/beepers wouldn't instantaneously disappear from use, and there were plenty of developers who thought Java was going to be the language for the web. I'm not sure how pointing to the year of the Linux desktop is a good argument. Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      There was a small measure of satire/hyperbole in what I said. But you have separated that one sentence from the second sentence that provided context, so I don't think I particularly need to defend it on its own. Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you. The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet. But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate. Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think: 1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or 2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server) Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
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ravenstine 5y ago

I think Intel is too late. They can play catch up with the ARM market, but it will take time because there are are enough other players that they're not relevant enough to be on top again. That is unless they can out-innovate the competition, which I doubt, but who knows. Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Might take a decade for them to realise. Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong. Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  >Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    In fairness, are you not merely implying the opposite prediction? I'm sure there were people who thought pagers/beepers wouldn't instantaneously disappear from use, and there were plenty of developers who thought Java was going to be the language for the web. I'm not sure how pointing to the year of the Linux desktop is a good argument. Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    There was a small measure of satire/hyperbole in what I said. But you have separated that one sentence from the second sentence that provided context, so I don't think I particularly need to defend it on its own. Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you. The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet. But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate. Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think: 1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or 2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server) Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
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