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This. I wonder why so many seem so eager to engage in the fantasy that Intel (and AMD) are planning to jump ship to ARM or RISC-V. Yes, ISA's matter, to a poin

by jabl 4y ago

This. I wonder why so many seem so eager to engage in the fantasy that Intel (and AMD) are planning to jump ship to ARM or RISC-V. Yes, ISA's matter, to a point. And yes, ARM64 and RISC-V are much closer to 'best practice' ISA design than x86 with all its legacy baggage. But enough better to make AMD&Intel throw away the x86 market and their position in that as explained in the parent comment? No effing way.

klelatti 4y ago
I forgot to add that there is the risk of 'Osborning'[1] x86 on day 1 of announcing a move to a new architecture as they effectively declare it a 'legacy' product. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- andromeduck 4y ago
  Do you remember Itanium?
  - klelatti 4y ago
    I do and I'm giving them credit that they won't make the same mistakes again with a product that fails.
    - andromeduck 4y ago
      But why not just jump and let momentum carry x86 like before? The problem with Itanium was largely that the ISA itself sucked to work with and SW/tools were not ready for prime time when 3p SW/HW vendors like Nvidia were expected to have ported to it. It doesn't seem like ARM and maybe RISC-V will have the same issues, at leatin terms of magnitude so I don't really see why it matters. I think long term they risk ending up like Canon/Nikon in the DSLR market when Sony came along with the new fangled mirrorless technology - sometimes you gotta disrupt yourself and skate to where the pick is going.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        Largely agree. I'd be astonished of they don't have high performance RISC-V designs under development. Problem is that the endpoint is much less attractive (for them) than where they are now and the transition will be very, very messy. At a time when the business is under strain for other reasons it's a risky move. Should have done it a few years ago - when they had process lead - but hindsight is a wonderful thing!
    - xorcist 4y ago
      Mistake? They killed almost all their competition in one blow. Only IBM survived. Ruthless, yes. But mistake?
      - klelatti 4y ago
        You think Itanium was entirely successful? Really? Plus I think you've overlooked AMD if you think they killed off all the competition.
        mepian 4y ago
        It was indeed successful at killing PA-RISC, high-end MIPS, and Alpha, because their owners (HP, SGI, Compaq) abandoned them for Itanium.
        klelatti 4y ago
        You think Itanium was entirely successful then? My point is that it doesn't matter how good the architecture is or if a few firms follow you - you need it to be successful in the market. If you think Itanium was a cunning plan to take a few competitors out of the market only to abandon a few years later then we'll have to disagree.
        xorcist 4y ago
        Itanium was absolutely a plan to take out the competitors in the unix- and minicomputer market, where margins were much, much higher than in the generic x86 market. That worked. SGI, Digital, HP, Compaq/Tandem, they all fell. It was not necessarily the plan to abandon the architecture, but once it was won, it also wasn't terribly important to keep going. Much like most corporate takeovers to this day. Intel would have been happy to keep the market segmented for a few more years, but what happened instead was that the market vacuum was filled by Linux and x86 instead. That would likely have happened sooner or later anyway, but there you go.
        klelatti 4y ago
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      I'm sure people said the same thing when they did Intel iAPX 432. Surely they are not doing that again. Well ...
      - klelatti 4y ago
        Indeed. I suspect the 'x86 always' mindset though led to the expensive failure in mobile - a huge miss. Easy to see this in hindsight though.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Yes, it only failed because AMD came up with AMD64 thanks to their patent agreements. Had it not been the case, and everyone would be using Itanium no matter what.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      > Had it not been the case, and everyone would be using Itanium no matter what. That's quite a strong statement.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        It is the hard reality, no AMD64, Itanium would have been the only 64 bit CPU successor for x86 coming out from Intel. Take it or leave it, and with Wintel going Itanium, that would be it.
        klelatti 4y ago
        Today not 'everyone' is using x86 - by a long margin - so it's a bit of a stretch to say that in a hypothetical alternative history an architecture that failed in the market would be utterly dominant.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        85% of desktop users and about 90% cloud users certainly are. Mobile phones and tablets are mostly consumer devices, Apple's ARM laptops are only relevant for about 10% of the desktop market. Outside embedded devices and electronic appliances, every other CPU is a rounding error in what concerns the general public.
        temac 4y ago
        If you exclude everything that does not go into your direction and make the hypothesis that a poor architecture would have risen and then would not have been replaced, you conclude that "everybody" would use it?
ksec 4y ago
That is RISC-V Evangelism Strikeforce at work.
viraptor 4y ago
Not that I expect it to happen any time soon, but Intel and AMD are proving with every release they have nothing for energy efficient machines. M1 battery is almost always the first thing people mention. And as M2 gets released, more people will get used/cheaper M1s. Companies release more aarch64-compatible software and even games every day. At some point the x86 companies will either have to respond or see more and more people migrate to either Apple or other arm laptops (serious alternatives are not here yet, but a few producers are starting to experiment)
- temac 4y ago
  I expect zen4 on laptop to be quite energy efficient, but we will see.
- toast0 4y ago
  > AMD are proving with every release they have nothing for energy efficient machines Every release AMD has done lately has two sides: side A is for the same compute as previously, you use less watts; side B is for the same watts, you get more compute; the third side is often oh yeah, you can pump a lot more watts (Zen4 almost doubled TDP on the high end parts, to compete with Intel's raised TDPs). If you want an energy efficient AMD machine, you just have to limit the wattage. It may or may not get all the way to M1/M2 level of efficiency, but it's decent. Of course, lots of people are going to prefer performance, and it makes sense for AMD to allow that if system design can handle the power supply and cooling requirements. Apple gets to design their CPUs around an assumption that clock speed won't need to scale because cooling will not be sufficient for astronomical clocks, but Intel and AMD are in a competitive market where clock speed sells chips, so everything needs to scale. Arm's more relaxed memory model helps Apple as well.
  - Pasta123 4y ago
    Apple has been busy making their chips more efficient, while simultaneously putting beefier coolers & PSUs in their latest design. I believe Apple have enough leverage to raise their clock speed.
hajile 4y ago
Intel has tried to move away from x86 three times already. They only stuck with it in the early 2000s because AMD64 forced their hand. This chip shows why Intel would like RISC-V. The core ISA is RISC-V, but every other piece of the chip is proprietary and patented Intel stuff. They are far ahead of almost everyone in these areas, so they don't have much to fear in their current markets from the ISA itself. Few companies have the ability, desire, or connections to spend billions designing a next-gen chip. China has thoroughly proved this. They have designed for x86, Alpha, MIPS, ARM, RISC-V, etc, but none of their designs were particularly good. For example, they recently released their Phytium D2000 chip. It was basically a clone of A72 with improvements, but chips and cheese analysis[0] showed that the supposed improvements actually resulted in a worse design. If designing a good high-performance chip was down to just ISA, then everyone would be doing it. Meanwhile, x86 patents for SSE2 and before have expired (with SSE3 expiring in 2023-4). Analysis of real-world code shows that only a couple percent use something beyond SSE3 and pretty much all of that has fallbacks for SSE2. There's already not much left to keep companies from designing x86-compatible chips (Apple's Rosetta x86 compatibility tracks this expiration exactly). At the same time, x86 is incapable of competing in MCU and DSP markets and Intel's phone offerings were flatly rejected and only competitive when they had the huge advantage of being a couple fabrication nodes ahead of their competitors. Intel paid billions trying to make it happen, but never had many sales outside of the lemonade they made in the embedded market. Intel and AMD would far rather have a non-proprietary solution like RISC-V win than a proprietary one like ARM. [0] https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/09/29/chinas-phytium-d2000-building-on-a72/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/09/29/chinas-phytium-d2000-b...
- temac 4y ago
  > Intel has tried to move away from x86 three times already Also, they tried to move to other ISAs they owned. Trying to move from their position to 3rd party or open ISAs would make even less sense.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Exactly what I wanted to say. Intel doesn't want x86, it wants something better day control. They use RISC-V to compete in markets other then where x86 is dominant. That seems pretty clear.

by jabl 4y ago

klelatti 4y ago

I forgot to add that there is the risk of 'Osborning'[1] x86 on day 1 of announcing a move to a new architecture as they effectively declare it a 'legacy' product. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

andromeduck 4y ago
Do you remember Itanium?
- klelatti 4y ago
  I do and I'm giving them credit that they won't make the same mistakes again with a product that fails.
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    But why not just jump and let momentum carry x86 like before? The problem with Itanium was largely that the ISA itself sucked to work with and SW/tools were not ready for prime time when 3p SW/HW vendors like Nvidia were expected to have ported to it. It doesn't seem like ARM and maybe RISC-V will have the same issues, at leatin terms of magnitude so I don't really see why it matters. I think long term they risk ending up like Canon/Nikon in the DSLR market when Sony came along with the new fangled mirrorless technology - sometimes you gotta disrupt yourself and skate to where the pick is going.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      Largely agree. I'd be astonished of they don't have high performance RISC-V designs under development. Problem is that the endpoint is much less attractive (for them) than where they are now and the transition will be very, very messy. At a time when the business is under strain for other reasons it's a risky move. Should have done it a few years ago - when they had process lead - but hindsight is a wonderful thing!
  - xorcist 4y ago
    Mistake? They killed almost all their competition in one blow. Only IBM survived. Ruthless, yes. But mistake?
    - klelatti 4y ago
      You think Itanium was entirely successful? Really? Plus I think you've overlooked AMD if you think they killed off all the competition.
      - mepian 4y ago
        It was indeed successful at killing PA-RISC, high-end MIPS, and Alpha, because their owners (HP, SGI, Compaq) abandoned them for Itanium.
        klelatti 4y ago
        You think Itanium was entirely successful then? My point is that it doesn't matter how good the architecture is or if a few firms follow you - you need it to be successful in the market. If you think Itanium was a cunning plan to take a few competitors out of the market only to abandon a few years later then we'll have to disagree.
        xorcist 4y ago
        Itanium was absolutely a plan to take out the competitors in the unix- and minicomputer market, where margins were much, much higher than in the generic x86 market. That worked. SGI, Digital, HP, Compaq/Tandem, they all fell. It was not necessarily the plan to abandon the architecture, but once it was won, it also wasn't terribly important to keep going. Much like most corporate takeovers to this day. Intel would have been happy to keep the market segmented for a few more years, but what happened instead was that the market vacuum was filled by Linux and x86 instead. That would likely have happened sooner or later anyway, but there you go.
        klelatti 4y ago
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I'm sure people said the same thing when they did Intel iAPX 432. Surely they are not doing that again. Well ...
    - klelatti 4y ago
      Indeed. I suspect the 'x86 always' mindset though led to the expensive failure in mobile - a huge miss. Easy to see this in hindsight though.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Yes, it only failed because AMD came up with AMD64 thanks to their patent agreements. Had it not been the case, and everyone would be using Itanium no matter what.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    > Had it not been the case, and everyone would be using Itanium no matter what. That's quite a strong statement.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      It is the hard reality, no AMD64, Itanium would have been the only 64 bit CPU successor for x86 coming out from Intel. Take it or leave it, and with Wintel going Itanium, that would be it.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        Today not 'everyone' is using x86 - by a long margin - so it's a bit of a stretch to say that in a hypothetical alternative history an architecture that failed in the market would be utterly dominant.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        85% of desktop users and about 90% cloud users certainly are. Mobile phones and tablets are mostly consumer devices, Apple's ARM laptops are only relevant for about 10% of the desktop market. Outside embedded devices and electronic appliances, every other CPU is a rounding error in what concerns the general public.
        temac 4y ago
        If you exclude everything that does not go into your direction and make the hypothesis that a poor architecture would have risen and then would not have been replaced, you conclude that "everybody" would use it?

ksec 4y ago

That is RISC-V Evangelism Strikeforce at work.

viraptor 4y ago

Not that I expect it to happen any time soon, but Intel and AMD are proving with every release they have nothing for energy efficient machines. M1 battery is almost always the first thing people mention. And as M2 gets released, more people will get used/cheaper M1s. Companies release more aarch64-compatible software and even games every day. At some point the x86 companies will either have to respond or see more and more people migrate to either Apple or other arm laptops (serious alternatives are not here yet, but a few producers are starting to experiment)

temac 4y ago
I expect zen4 on laptop to be quite energy efficient, but we will see.
toast0 4y ago
> AMD are proving with every release they have nothing for energy efficient machines Every release AMD has done lately has two sides: side A is for the same compute as previously, you use less watts; side B is for the same watts, you get more compute; the third side is often oh yeah, you can pump a lot more watts (Zen4 almost doubled TDP on the high end parts, to compete with Intel's raised TDPs). If you want an energy efficient AMD machine, you just have to limit the wattage. It may or may not get all the way to M1/M2 level of efficiency, but it's decent. Of course, lots of people are going to prefer performance, and it makes sense for AMD to allow that if system design can handle the power supply and cooling requirements. Apple gets to design their CPUs around an assumption that clock speed won't need to scale because cooling will not be sufficient for astronomical clocks, but Intel and AMD are in a competitive market where clock speed sells chips, so everything needs to scale. Arm's more relaxed memory model helps Apple as well.
- Pasta123 4y ago
  Apple has been busy making their chips more efficient, while simultaneously putting beefier coolers & PSUs in their latest design. I believe Apple have enough leverage to raise their clock speed.

hajile 4y ago

Intel has tried to move away from x86 three times already. They only stuck with it in the early 2000s because AMD64 forced their hand. This chip shows why Intel would like RISC-V. The core ISA is RISC-V, but every other piece of the chip is proprietary and patented Intel stuff. They are far ahead of almost everyone in these areas, so they don't have much to fear in their current markets from the ISA itself. Few companies have the ability, desire, or connections to spend billions designing a next-gen chip. China has thoroughly proved this. They have designed for x86, Alpha, MIPS, ARM, RISC-V, etc, but none of their designs were particularly good. For example, they recently released their Phytium D2000 chip. It was basically a clone of A72 with improvements, but chips and cheese analysis[0] showed that the supposed improvements actually resulted in a worse design. If designing a good high-performance chip was down to just ISA, then everyone would be doing it. Meanwhile, x86 patents for SSE2 and before have expired (with SSE3 expiring in 2023-4). Analysis of real-world code shows that only a couple percent use something beyond SSE3 and pretty much all of that has fallbacks for SSE2. There's already not much left to keep companies from designing x86-compatible chips (Apple's Rosetta x86 compatibility tracks this expiration exactly). At the same time, x86 is incapable of competing in MCU and DSP markets and Intel's phone offerings were flatly rejected and only competitive when they had the huge advantage of being a couple fabrication nodes ahead of their competitors. Intel paid billions trying to make it happen, but never had many sales outside of the lemonade they made in the embedded market. Intel and AMD would far rather have a non-proprietary solution like RISC-V win than a proprietary one like ARM. [0] https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/09/29/chinas-phytium-d2000-building-on-a72/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/09/29/chinas-phytium-d2000-b...

temac 4y ago
> Intel has tried to move away from x86 three times already Also, they tried to move to other ISAs they owned. Trying to move from their position to 3rd party or open ISAs would make even less sense.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Exactly what I wanted to say. Intel doesn't want x86, it wants something better day control. They use RISC-V to compete in markets other then where x86 is dominant. That seems pretty clear.