8 ms·

Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

130 points by LorenDB 2y ago

bloated5048 2y ago
RISC is the future
dmitrygr 2y ago
[flagged]
rdudek 2y ago
I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. If there is something that still needs it, x86 emulation is very efficient nowadays. Just look what Apple has done with this ARM architecture. Even now, Qualcom's ARM processors running Windows are doing a fantastic job emulating x86 as needed.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  They want to keep x86 going because they have cross-licensed patents which keep their market share a walled-garden. Anything else would invite competition. Mind you, it's not just them. MIPS was pretty shady with their patent that even if trapped and implemented in software they sued so you could not compete without licensing and losing your margen. SPARC was open... until UltraSPARC IIRC and then they tried something similar. https://www.edn.com/mips-lexra-both-claim-victory-in-markman-ruling/ https://www.edn.com/mips-lexra-both-claim-victory-in-markman... > MIPS said the court’s ruling Friday rejected Lexra’s attempt to limit the claims of U.S. Patent No. 4,814,976 to hardware implementations of the unaligned load and store instructions (LWL, LWR, SWL, SWR) of the MIPS instruction set architecture. MIPS argues the claims should also cover software implementations like Lexra’s That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Multi arch support has never been better and yet x86 is still competitive. Maybe in 10 years everything will be risc V but it doesn't seem to be happening very fast.
  - simcop2387 2y ago
    > That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies. Not just that, but also by being fairly vanilla/boring about a lot of things in the ISA too. Thus letting the ISA itself be less an impediment to being compatible with ARM and x86_64 as far as behavior for memory ordering and such.
  - monocasa 2y ago
    Those patents are starting to expire. Original x86-64 is probably free and clear now, being released in 2001. The big sticking point for general code out there (cmpxchg16b) was released in 2008, so it only has a few more years left. If anything this x86 "reshaping" sounds like a way to get some new patent bricks for the wall of the garden.
- mey 2y ago
  Qualcom's chips do a very good job, but it's not perfect. Not sure if it's the chip or software, but if you need things to work (on either Apple or Windows ARM), emulation isn't suitable still. Apple gets away with it because they just wrote off the gaming market and everything else was forced to quickly migrate to the new platform.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  IIRC Apple chips are particularly good at x86 emulation because they have a special option to run with an x86-compatible memory model which is stronger than the standard arm one. A generic arm chip is not necessarily good at x86 emulation.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    It could be, if it has fast RCpc.
- maximilianroos 2y ago
  Move on to what? ARM? Is ARM better in every way than x86? (genuine question)
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    It’s not. There are a lot of ways it’s cleaner but x86 handles some things (debugging and handling of traps, for example) better.
  - kimixa 2y ago
    Apple have shown that you can get x86-tier performance, but it generally costs a similar amount of silicon and engineering effort as those x86 devices. The lack of other competitors managing this suggest the arm ISA isn't "fundamentally" better at delivering that performance, it doesn't seem easier in engineering effort or silicon cost. The Apple products tend to outperform in perf/watt though, but that's hard to really compare as they're focusing on a slightly different market that favors that over "Peak Server Performance". Is ARM better from a license POV? I also don't think so. Some people claim they want away from the "monopoly" of x86 copyright and license shenanigans from Intel and AMD, but I'd argue ARM control their ISA to a similar degree - you need to buy it off ARM to use it, and they have the right to revoke that license. See the Qualcomm/Nuvia legal mess, and that was when both companies were paying ARM already. So in many ways I see ARM vs x86 as the "Coke v Pepsi" of ISAs, they seem pretty similar from the outside, serving pretty much the same use case (even if how they go around serving that use case is different), but some people online have rather dramatic opinions they confuse with "Proven Objective Fact". RISC-V might be a good path away from just repeating the same "Single company controls all licensing" problem, but that's similar to how arm was 15 years ago - there's not really any proven high-performance cores approaching common "desktop" use cases yet, and at least ARM had to do a pretty clean re-write to go from then to now in armv8. Some of the things they "fixed" were very non-obvious until you actually tried to make a large, superscaler speculative implementation too - and who knows what pitfalls there may be in current ISA designs that trip over the "next" performance increasing techniques. Maybe they've managed to avoid all them for the near future, but like many things in R&D we don't really know until we get there.
    - 2y ago
- trynumber9 2y ago
  Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. Qualcomm isn't on that level - they're only on par with AMD and Intel without emulation. The market won't move from the x86 duopoly to Apple's walled garden because they have a fast chip. It's on ARM to make a licensable core that's so much faster than the x86 options that people actually move to it.
  - Almondsetat 2y ago
    Apple's emulation literally implements some x86 in hardware, and they will likely drop that silicon when the transition end, so I won't rely on that
    - ArchOversight 2y ago
      It doesn't implement some x86 in hardware, it implements some memory ordering guarantees in hardware to match what x86 requires. However that is a very minor implementation, there is no actual x86 in Apple's ARM. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383762124000390 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376212... TSO could be implemented by other ARM processors easily as well, to provide the same memory ordering guarantees. Besides that the x86 code is translated by Rosetta to ARM instructions.
      - sqeaky 2y ago
        He didn't say it implemented any instructions, I would argue that the memory ordering is quite important and part of why other CPU architectures can sometimes be faster or more efficient than x86, it takes effort to guarantee atomicity and apparent read and write ordering. And when a CPU was expending effort that means either transistors or time.
      - Findecanor 2y ago
        Apple also implements a couple x86 CPU status register flags not present in AArch64.
      - wmf 2y ago
- magic_hamster 2y ago
  Even if Apple supports x86 emulation, they are doing a subpar job when it comes to actually running things. I got a Mac recently and I was very surprised to see Docker running as an underprivileged second class citizen, literally breaking a lot of flags and features in tools like docker-compose. Come to think of it, it's not even limited to x86 containers (which do run with rosetta) but Docker as a whole. So far in emulation, trying to emulate a full blown x86 Linux distro was excruciatingly slow for me, not even remotely usable. I don't know where this incredible x86 emulation people are talking about on Mac is hiding. Maybe it's some legacy apps I never used. Everything I did try so far was simply not good enough.
  - spockz 2y ago
    What flags are you talking about? Everything here runs just fine out of the box. Just slow for x86 images and slow compared to running docker engine or podman on Linux.
  - ArchOversight 2y ago
    Docker on Mac is running a VM in a hypervisor to run Linux.
  - pantulis 2y ago
    > I don't know where this incredible x86 emulation people are talking about on Mac is hiding. It's in Rosetta, running x86 binaries compiled for older macOS versions. The state of Docker in macOS has never been good, with Orbdev being the best Docker compatible container engine for desktop Macs.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  What have they done with ARM? Cut out all I/O put memory on package and pay for the latest TSMC node? I think ARM is overhyped because people see Apple's success and just assume aarch64 > x86_64
  - tester756 2y ago
    >I think ARM is overhyped because people see Apple's success and just assume aarch64 > x86_64 It seems like that's the case "ARM has bigger share in people's minds than actual numbers"
- Sakos 2y ago
  I simply can't comprehend why people are so all-in on ARM. Snapdragon X Elite support in the Linux kernel is still a work in progress. There's still no GPU driver. It's been months. Is this going to happen every time there's a new Snapdragon? How is this sustainable long-term? If Intel or AMD release a new CPU architecture, it's basically supported out of the box, even if it might need some bug fixing (which actually happens fairly regularly). How does Qualcomm's commitment to Linux and an open platform actually stack up to x86? Because the biggest benefit of x86 is that it forces interoperability through heavy standardization and established culture. Every ARM manufacturer is basically doing their own thing and it requires the manufacturer to give a crap about Linux or a volunteer group months or years of effort to get things running (see Asahi). And what happens when an ARM-based device is EoL?
- WithinReason 2y ago
  What's wrong with x86? According to Jim Keller the disadvantage is minor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfFuTgnvwgs&t=474s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfFuTgnvwgs&t=474s (I wish Linus let him finish though)
- tester756 2y ago
  >I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. But actually why? is there reason that isn't licensing? Because perf or perf/watt is not the reason
  - t-3 2y ago
    The best reason I can think of is aesthetic: x86 is the ugliest (extant?) ISA. Nobody wants to read, write, or think about x86 assembly. Most RISCs are easy and enjoyable to read, reason about, and write by hand.
- akira2501 2y ago
  No one "needs" a particular architecture. It's just that some of them are better suited to certain problems than others. If you really want to get rid of something and "move on" why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has? Far more valuable than worrying about how instruction bits are arranged in a stream.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    The main problem with non-speculative options isn't hardware it's performance. You can turn x86 CPUs into in order machines without respinning hardware. Nobody wants to do it because it's slow as molasses. If there was a completely alternative design that was better than speculative execution wholesale then it'd be back to being the original "just go to the fastest thing".
  - Atotalnoob 2y ago
    Yes people need a particular architecture. There are many legacy systems that still rely on IBM chips, mainframes, etc. They can’t just move on without rebuilding the entire system from scratch. a monumental and risky proposition. Even if tomorrow everyone went all in on arm, risc5, whatever, x86 is here to stay.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has? Because almost no one but cloud-computing providers have a threat model that justifies the performance hit (and, not coincidentally, the carbon footprint) associated with crippled CPUs.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Laptops could do with the power use reduction.
      - epcoa 2y ago
        Speculative execution like almost every modern CPU performance trick decreases power use. Mobile SoCs have OOO.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  I think for most 'general' computing, yeah Arm is fine. It has been that way for a while with smart phones and tablets being the primary device many people use now. Either you can run it through a compatibility layer like Rosetta 2 or it shifts to native. The performance hit is unlikely to really be felt for something like Word. But the traditional gaming market (not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not the traditional market that is relevant to this conversation) is likely not going to make that shift anytime soon. To the best of my knowledge I have yet to see any ability for a consumer to build their own ARM pc (someone correct me if I am wrong here?) and there are many gamers that will fight tooth and nail to not give that up. If consoles did it, it would most likely mean a break in backwards compatibility or a lot of investment in emulation. With consoles often being the devices that set a performance standard for PC's, I doubt they would be moving to ARM in the next generation so would not happen until the 10th generation. We are likely 2-3 years away from hearing about gen 9, and then another ~8 years until ARM becomes a conversation for any serious game console. There just would not be any incentive for PC to make a serious switch until that point (or around that time) since it would also fruther complicate game development. There just have not been much movement in this regard. We are seeing a few ports come to Mac (and iPhone) but those are the exceptions. Not saying that companies are not trying to try to push Arm hardware for gaming, try to claim that their compatibility layer is just fine for playing games on Windows. I am sure some people will do it. But I just don't see any serious effort to push Arm into gaming outside of mobile devices.
  - heraldgeezer 2y ago
    This. I understand web devs can just use whatever runs Google Chrome but the real world is a bit more complex. CS2 has over 900k online on Steam right now... Where people push the game to 200fps plus. A PC that can do that can also do anything else. Dev work, VMs, Docker, whatever. Why switch to ARM? Because their soy starbuxx latte workplace gets 2-3h more in battery life? But I have to disagree on >With consoles often being the devices that set a performance standard for PC's, I doubt they would be moving to ARM in the next generation so would not happen until the 10th generation. We are likely 2-3 years away from hearing about gen 9, and then another ~8 years until ARM becomes a conversation for any serious game console. There just would not be any incentive for PC to make a serious switch until that point (or around that time) since it would also fruther complicate game development. Consoles used to be MIPS, POWERPC and stuff and PCs where x86 "back then". XBOX is like the first x86 console. So I dunno your point here. Really man. ??? Switch is ARM right. Nintendo Switch. Sony and MS went from POWERPC to x86 as IBM could not make a PPC CPU fast enough and ARM was not good in a big formfactor. Sony and MS use AMD hardware but in PCs Nvidia GPUS are still the best, yes they are my experiece personally and look at numbers. XBOX1 used to be nvidia gforce 3 but abd pricing. So all went AMD later. PS3 was CELL 8 core PPC and Nvidia 70xx GPU. 360 was PPC and AMD gpu. Wii was PPC and AMD gpu. >There just have not been much movement in this regard. We are seeing a few ports come to Mac (and iPhone) but those are the exceptions. Nobody on Mac is actually a gamer. >(not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not the traditional market that is relevant to this conversation I will btw. I do not understand why people here love mobile games. No wait I do. They are easy, quick and P2W. They are busy adults or kids or pajeets with no money. In mobile, what sells? Gatcha games, pay to win trash. There are some gems but few and far between. They are built in a predatory way to take your money.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  Why? AMDs new x86 is just as good as M3. For gaming, emulation is shit. I use a desktop gaming PC and I can do anything. Use it as a workstation too. Why should I switch to ARM. Why should our enterprise laptops be ARM? Just please, you are just spouting nonsense.
rwaksmunski 2y ago
Just let it fade away with dignity.
autoexecbat 2y ago
Give us some riscv instruction decoders on the x86 cpus, let us pick per-process what ISA we use
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  Why would Intel and AMD put a hole in the wall that guards their duopoly? Justifiably it wouldn't be a sales booster in the short term and in the long term it's a threat.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Intel used to sell some embedded ARM CPU's too back in the day. They could adapt to RISC-V in few years.
    - Pet_Ant 2y ago
      That was a side hustle. That was expanding their markets. They also tried with the Atom and the Xeon Phi, but this is now other architectures moving into their heartland. Sure, if RISC-V takes over then of course Intel will adapt, but right now they have the duopoly that they share with AMD. If RISC-V becomes a standard than IBM for example will get involved and they definitely know how to design a chip. But this really looks like another industry shift like when businesses all moved to Unix, or when unixes all moved to business, or homes consolidated on Wintel, each time moving to a more open commodity platform. RISC-V and (to a lesser degree) ARM are much more commodity than the duopoly.
ConanRus 2y ago
[dead]
Remnant44 2y ago
This is hopeful. Whatever the ARM enthusiasts would like, x86 is going to stick around for a long time, and working together to evolve the ISA extensions in a more cohesive manner would go a long way. In particular, I'd really like AMD and Intel to get on the same page in terms of avx10 / avx512 support. Many people correctly note that avx512 support is not super relevant today, but this can be laid heavily at the feet of Intel's process troubles and a terrible decision to use ISA for market segmentation purposes. Zen4/zen5 show that it is possible to implement wide vector units on a cpu in an extremely beneficial way - even if you're running reduced width execution units under the hood, the improved frontend performance is really useful - and also actually saves power, as the decoders and schedulers account for a fair chunk of power consumption these days.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  honestly, as exciting as proper AVX-512 support will be, I am probably at least as excited for APX (16->32 general purpose registers). It brings x86 inline with ARM and RISCV, and just generally makes it a lot easier for compilers to not spill registers to the stack.
  - Remnant44 2y ago
    Agreed.. in a lot of ways, APX is like AVX(512) for scalar code. Double integer register count, three-operand instructions, improved predication support including conditional load/stores.. If I remember correctly, they actually implement it by having the scalar instructions use the EVEX prefix introduced with avx512. I would really love to seem them settle on APX + AVX10/512 as a next-generation x86 baseline.
- emn13 2y ago
  Phoronix has a specific benchmark subset that tries to tease out (at least for zen5) a hint of how much the wider data-path matters vs. how much the frontend/ISA extension itself, by disabling those selectively on an epyc zen5 chip: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9755-avx512 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9755-avx512 It's pretty clear that the ISA/frontend is much more impactful than the data-width on this set of workloads, and that also seems to jive with more indirect evidence from performance patterns more broadly. i.e. it's the new instructions (and potentially register width) that matter significantly more than the actually wider data-path.
sedatk 2y ago
After 40+ years, finally :) I really want x86 and ARM to push each other for better power efficiency and performance instead of one side winning out. I’m using an ARM laptop nowadays and the battery life is so impressive.
- pizza234 2y ago
  Very surprisingly, x86 can be competitive (and in some cases, even winning) in terms of power efficiency; see https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-ampereone/5 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-ampereone/5.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    If you compare a good x86 to a crap ARM yes. Laptops are populated mostly with crap x86 and good ARM (apart from snapdragon which is a crap ARM)
    - emn13 2y ago
      That statement strongly suggests it's the implementation of the ISA that matters more than the ISA, whether that be due to process node, skill and investment by the manufacturer, or perhaps a bit of luck. By good ARM, do you mean specifically (and only) Apple? Given their budgets (both financial and transistor), their very long history and investment into their chips, their deep integration of stuff like memory and GPU, and their tendency to be a process node ahead of their competitors, Apple is a particularly hard example to interpret when it comes to ISA impact. Hard to imagine another company making all those choices, since they all have costs too, which many won't be willing or able to bear, and some of those costs (like the lack of flexibility due to the deep integration) are possibly a non-starter for many niches.
      - sedatk 2y ago
        I think parent means "Ampere" being a bad ARM implementation, and Snapdragon X or Apple M-series being the good ones. It's mentioned in the article too. Ampere performs really poorly on idle (101W vs EPYC's meager 19W). I haven't witnessed that problem on my Snapdragon X laptop. I'm not saying Ampere is bad myself though. It's obviously very competitive being a relatively new player and all. But, it's not as polished for desktop/laptop workloads as it seems.
rasz 2y ago
Start with optional fixed instruction size mode.
anthk 2y ago
Let it die, adopt RISC-V. X86 is built on cruft over cruft.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I was wondering about this as well. What do Intel and AMD gain from protecting x86? Why not just adopt RISC-V themselves and make the best processors and process for that? Wouldn’t that get them what they want (in terms of their company’s strategy)? There’s not really value in the architecture itself as much as the real products they sell, right (the actual processors)?
  - layer8 2y ago
    The value of the ISA is the huge volume of existing software for it, including hardware drivers. The whole x86-using industry migrating away from x86 would be a multi-decade and costly process. In addition, this would just mean more competition for Intel and AMD, as they would lose the moat of their x86 know-how. Why would they do that?
    - tenebrisalietum 2y ago
      Nah. Not in this day and age. Most of that software can be recompiled - hopefully no one is writing stuff in assembly, at least not to the point where it can't easily be ported. With many-core CPUs cheap and common, everything is fast. Hardware drivers matter less in the 2020s - there is far less diversity of hardware than there was in the 1990s. x86 "know-how" is vendor lock-in, not a benefit.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Will you recompile the proprietary Nvidia driver for a GTX260? (not a typo)
        anthk 2y ago
        Nvidia would. Most of the work it's in the firmware blob after all.
bewaretheirs 2y ago
Odd that the article makes no mention of intel's APX extensions (which add more integer registers, 3-operand variants of most 2-operand instructions, and assorted other tweaks).
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Feels like one of the signs of the apocalypse :-) And it is a pretty stunning "conclusion" to a war that started 20 years ago with the introduction of Sledgehammer and the AMD64 instruction set. For me though it really emphasizes how much of a threat ARM (and presumably RISCV) architectures are to these two companies.
- imchillyb 2y ago
  TPM was the sign. This is a symptom. The apocalypse countdown began with IMNVN. > https://www.dechert.com/knowledge/onpoint/2021/2/occ-confirms-authority-of-national-banks-to-use-independent-node.html https://www.dechert.com/knowledge/onpoint/2021/2/occ-confirm... Here's a fun little aside: Somark Innovations' Lab Stamp is a 'beast mark.'
tliltocatl 2y ago
Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integrator providing support (hopefully in the form of throw-over-the-fence-and-forget Linux kernel headers, but more common are just kernel binaries) to run it at all. In theory UEFI supports ARM, but can I buy a desktop ARM processor that does? And this is going to be worse with RISC-V because hardware vendor are not interested in providing platform compatibility. So we would be back in pre-PC era platform-wise. There is no replacement for x86, not because it is impossible to replace, but because no vendor is interested in making one.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box store and buy any AMD or Intel laptop I can throw whatever kernel and userspace I want on it in a few minutes. The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. If x86 dies we will wind up with a bunch of devices where step 1 is "run this code to exploit a buffer overflow to bypass the locked bootloader. Only works on v1.2 PCB revision 7"
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.
    - janice1999 2y ago
      That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1]. [1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html
bcrl 2y ago
The prior rumours that Jim Keller had AMD develop the K10 core with the option of using an ARM front end would have created an extremely interesting way to compare the merits of the 2 instruction sets. x86 has constraints that make it far more programmer friendly than ARM (weak memory ordering models make my brain hurt!), yet performance has been pushed ahead through techniques that were only dreamed of decades ago. I really wonder what Intel and AMD could come up with using the ARM64 instruction set combined with the knowledge gained from decades of pushing x86 and x86-64 to the limit.
ytch 2y ago
As the news mentions, I hope it is the time pushing x86s Architecture[1] to real world. [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
ksec 2y ago
Finally. I hope Intel and AMD allows a clean, may be slightly backward incompatible subset of x86-64 that is open for all to implement. Lets call the new institutions set AE86. It is old, but fast around corners.

130 points by LorenDB 2y ago

bloated5048 2y ago

RISC is the future

dmitrygr 2y ago

[flagged]

rdudek 2y ago

I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. If there is something that still needs it, x86 emulation is very efficient nowadays. Just look what Apple has done with this ARM architecture. Even now, Qualcom's ARM processors running Windows are doing a fantastic job emulating x86 as needed.

Pet_Ant 2y ago
They want to keep x86 going because they have cross-licensed patents which keep their market share a walled-garden. Anything else would invite competition. Mind you, it's not just them. MIPS was pretty shady with their patent that even if trapped and implemented in software they sued so you could not compete without licensing and losing your margen. SPARC was open... until UltraSPARC IIRC and then they tried something similar. https://www.edn.com/mips-lexra-both-claim-victory-in-markman-ruling/ https://www.edn.com/mips-lexra-both-claim-victory-in-markman... > MIPS said the court’s ruling Friday rejected Lexra’s attempt to limit the claims of U.S. Patent No. 4,814,976 to hardware implementations of the unaligned load and store instructions (LWL, LWR, SWL, SWR) of the MIPS instruction set architecture. MIPS argues the claims should also cover software implementations like Lexra’s That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Multi arch support has never been better and yet x86 is still competitive. Maybe in 10 years everything will be risc V but it doesn't seem to be happening very fast.
- simcop2387 2y ago
  > That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies. Not just that, but also by being fairly vanilla/boring about a lot of things in the ISA too. Thus letting the ISA itself be less an impediment to being compatible with ARM and x86_64 as far as behavior for memory ordering and such.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Those patents are starting to expire. Original x86-64 is probably free and clear now, being released in 2001. The big sticking point for general code out there (cmpxchg16b) was released in 2008, so it only has a few more years left. If anything this x86 "reshaping" sounds like a way to get some new patent bricks for the wall of the garden.
mey 2y ago
Qualcom's chips do a very good job, but it's not perfect. Not sure if it's the chip or software, but if you need things to work (on either Apple or Windows ARM), emulation isn't suitable still. Apple gets away with it because they just wrote off the gaming market and everything else was forced to quickly migrate to the new platform.
School-Cotton 2y ago
IIRC Apple chips are particularly good at x86 emulation because they have a special option to run with an x86-compatible memory model which is stronger than the standard arm one. A generic arm chip is not necessarily good at x86 emulation.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  It could be, if it has fast RCpc.
maximilianroos 2y ago
Move on to what? ARM? Is ARM better in every way than x86? (genuine question)
- saagarjha 2y ago
  It’s not. There are a lot of ways it’s cleaner but x86 handles some things (debugging and handling of traps, for example) better.
- kimixa 2y ago
  Apple have shown that you can get x86-tier performance, but it generally costs a similar amount of silicon and engineering effort as those x86 devices. The lack of other competitors managing this suggest the arm ISA isn't "fundamentally" better at delivering that performance, it doesn't seem easier in engineering effort or silicon cost. The Apple products tend to outperform in perf/watt though, but that's hard to really compare as they're focusing on a slightly different market that favors that over "Peak Server Performance". Is ARM better from a license POV? I also don't think so. Some people claim they want away from the "monopoly" of x86 copyright and license shenanigans from Intel and AMD, but I'd argue ARM control their ISA to a similar degree - you need to buy it off ARM to use it, and they have the right to revoke that license. See the Qualcomm/Nuvia legal mess, and that was when both companies were paying ARM already. So in many ways I see ARM vs x86 as the "Coke v Pepsi" of ISAs, they seem pretty similar from the outside, serving pretty much the same use case (even if how they go around serving that use case is different), but some people online have rather dramatic opinions they confuse with "Proven Objective Fact". RISC-V might be a good path away from just repeating the same "Single company controls all licensing" problem, but that's similar to how arm was 15 years ago - there's not really any proven high-performance cores approaching common "desktop" use cases yet, and at least ARM had to do a pretty clean re-write to go from then to now in armv8. Some of the things they "fixed" were very non-obvious until you actually tried to make a large, superscaler speculative implementation too - and who knows what pitfalls there may be in current ISA designs that trip over the "next" performance increasing techniques. Maybe they've managed to avoid all them for the near future, but like many things in R&D we don't really know until we get there.
  - 2y ago
trynumber9 2y ago
Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. Qualcomm isn't on that level - they're only on par with AMD and Intel without emulation. The market won't move from the x86 duopoly to Apple's walled garden because they have a fast chip. It's on ARM to make a licensable core that's so much faster than the x86 options that people actually move to it.
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  Apple's emulation literally implements some x86 in hardware, and they will likely drop that silicon when the transition end, so I won't rely on that
  - ArchOversight 2y ago
    It doesn't implement some x86 in hardware, it implements some memory ordering guarantees in hardware to match what x86 requires. However that is a very minor implementation, there is no actual x86 in Apple's ARM. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383762124000390 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376212... TSO could be implemented by other ARM processors easily as well, to provide the same memory ordering guarantees. Besides that the x86 code is translated by Rosetta to ARM instructions.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      He didn't say it implemented any instructions, I would argue that the memory ordering is quite important and part of why other CPU architectures can sometimes be faster or more efficient than x86, it takes effort to guarantee atomicity and apparent read and write ordering. And when a CPU was expending effort that means either transistors or time.
    - Findecanor 2y ago
      Apple also implements a couple x86 CPU status register flags not present in AArch64.
    - wmf 2y ago
magic_hamster 2y ago
Even if Apple supports x86 emulation, they are doing a subpar job when it comes to actually running things. I got a Mac recently and I was very surprised to see Docker running as an underprivileged second class citizen, literally breaking a lot of flags and features in tools like docker-compose. Come to think of it, it's not even limited to x86 containers (which do run with rosetta) but Docker as a whole. So far in emulation, trying to emulate a full blown x86 Linux distro was excruciatingly slow for me, not even remotely usable. I don't know where this incredible x86 emulation people are talking about on Mac is hiding. Maybe it's some legacy apps I never used. Everything I did try so far was simply not good enough.
- spockz 2y ago
  What flags are you talking about? Everything here runs just fine out of the box. Just slow for x86 images and slow compared to running docker engine or podman on Linux.
- ArchOversight 2y ago
  Docker on Mac is running a VM in a hypervisor to run Linux.
- pantulis 2y ago
  > I don't know where this incredible x86 emulation people are talking about on Mac is hiding. It's in Rosetta, running x86 binaries compiled for older macOS versions. The state of Docker in macOS has never been good, with Orbdev being the best Docker compatible container engine for desktop Macs.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
What have they done with ARM? Cut out all I/O put memory on package and pay for the latest TSMC node? I think ARM is overhyped because people see Apple's success and just assume aarch64 > x86_64
- tester756 2y ago
  >I think ARM is overhyped because people see Apple's success and just assume aarch64 > x86_64 It seems like that's the case "ARM has bigger share in people's minds than actual numbers"
Sakos 2y ago
I simply can't comprehend why people are so all-in on ARM. Snapdragon X Elite support in the Linux kernel is still a work in progress. There's still no GPU driver. It's been months. Is this going to happen every time there's a new Snapdragon? How is this sustainable long-term? If Intel or AMD release a new CPU architecture, it's basically supported out of the box, even if it might need some bug fixing (which actually happens fairly regularly). How does Qualcomm's commitment to Linux and an open platform actually stack up to x86? Because the biggest benefit of x86 is that it forces interoperability through heavy standardization and established culture. Every ARM manufacturer is basically doing their own thing and it requires the manufacturer to give a crap about Linux or a volunteer group months or years of effort to get things running (see Asahi). And what happens when an ARM-based device is EoL?
WithinReason 2y ago
What's wrong with x86? According to Jim Keller the disadvantage is minor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfFuTgnvwgs&t=474s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfFuTgnvwgs&t=474s (I wish Linus let him finish though)
tester756 2y ago
>I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. But actually why? is there reason that isn't licensing? Because perf or perf/watt is not the reason
- t-3 2y ago
  The best reason I can think of is aesthetic: x86 is the ugliest (extant?) ISA. Nobody wants to read, write, or think about x86 assembly. Most RISCs are easy and enjoyable to read, reason about, and write by hand.
akira2501 2y ago
No one "needs" a particular architecture. It's just that some of them are better suited to certain problems than others. If you really want to get rid of something and "move on" why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has? Far more valuable than worrying about how instruction bits are arranged in a stream.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  The main problem with non-speculative options isn't hardware it's performance. You can turn x86 CPUs into in order machines without respinning hardware. Nobody wants to do it because it's slow as molasses. If there was a completely alternative design that was better than speculative execution wholesale then it'd be back to being the original "just go to the fastest thing".
- Atotalnoob 2y ago
  Yes people need a particular architecture. There are many legacy systems that still rely on IBM chips, mainframes, etc. They can’t just move on without rebuilding the entire system from scratch. a monumental and risky proposition. Even if tomorrow everyone went all in on arm, risc5, whatever, x86 is here to stay.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has? Because almost no one but cloud-computing providers have a threat model that justifies the performance hit (and, not coincidentally, the carbon footprint) associated with crippled CPUs.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Laptops could do with the power use reduction.
    - epcoa 2y ago
      Speculative execution like almost every modern CPU performance trick decreases power use. Mobile SoCs have OOO.
nerdjon 2y ago
I think for most 'general' computing, yeah Arm is fine. It has been that way for a while with smart phones and tablets being the primary device many people use now. Either you can run it through a compatibility layer like Rosetta 2 or it shifts to native. The performance hit is unlikely to really be felt for something like Word. But the traditional gaming market (not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not the traditional market that is relevant to this conversation) is likely not going to make that shift anytime soon. To the best of my knowledge I have yet to see any ability for a consumer to build their own ARM pc (someone correct me if I am wrong here?) and there are many gamers that will fight tooth and nail to not give that up. If consoles did it, it would most likely mean a break in backwards compatibility or a lot of investment in emulation. With consoles often being the devices that set a performance standard for PC's, I doubt they would be moving to ARM in the next generation so would not happen until the 10th generation. We are likely 2-3 years away from hearing about gen 9, and then another ~8 years until ARM becomes a conversation for any serious game console. There just would not be any incentive for PC to make a serious switch until that point (or around that time) since it would also fruther complicate game development. There just have not been much movement in this regard. We are seeing a few ports come to Mac (and iPhone) but those are the exceptions. Not saying that companies are not trying to try to push Arm hardware for gaming, try to claim that their compatibility layer is just fine for playing games on Windows. I am sure some people will do it. But I just don't see any serious effort to push Arm into gaming outside of mobile devices.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  This. I understand web devs can just use whatever runs Google Chrome but the real world is a bit more complex. CS2 has over 900k online on Steam right now... Where people push the game to 200fps plus. A PC that can do that can also do anything else. Dev work, VMs, Docker, whatever. Why switch to ARM? Because their soy starbuxx latte workplace gets 2-3h more in battery life? But I have to disagree on >With consoles often being the devices that set a performance standard for PC's, I doubt they would be moving to ARM in the next generation so would not happen until the 10th generation. We are likely 2-3 years away from hearing about gen 9, and then another ~8 years until ARM becomes a conversation for any serious game console. There just would not be any incentive for PC to make a serious switch until that point (or around that time) since it would also fruther complicate game development. Consoles used to be MIPS, POWERPC and stuff and PCs where x86 "back then". XBOX is like the first x86 console. So I dunno your point here. Really man. ??? Switch is ARM right. Nintendo Switch. Sony and MS went from POWERPC to x86 as IBM could not make a PPC CPU fast enough and ARM was not good in a big formfactor. Sony and MS use AMD hardware but in PCs Nvidia GPUS are still the best, yes they are my experiece personally and look at numbers. XBOX1 used to be nvidia gforce 3 but abd pricing. So all went AMD later. PS3 was CELL 8 core PPC and Nvidia 70xx GPU. 360 was PPC and AMD gpu. Wii was PPC and AMD gpu. >There just have not been much movement in this regard. We are seeing a few ports come to Mac (and iPhone) but those are the exceptions. Nobody on Mac is actually a gamer. >(not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not the traditional market that is relevant to this conversation I will btw. I do not understand why people here love mobile games. No wait I do. They are easy, quick and P2W. They are busy adults or kids or pajeets with no money. In mobile, what sells? Gatcha games, pay to win trash. There are some gems but few and far between. They are built in a predatory way to take your money.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
Why? AMDs new x86 is just as good as M3. For gaming, emulation is shit. I use a desktop gaming PC and I can do anything. Use it as a workstation too. Why should I switch to ARM. Why should our enterprise laptops be ARM? Just please, you are just spouting nonsense.

rwaksmunski 2y ago

Just let it fade away with dignity.

autoexecbat 2y ago

Give us some riscv instruction decoders on the x86 cpus, let us pick per-process what ISA we use

Pet_Ant 2y ago
Why would Intel and AMD put a hole in the wall that guards their duopoly? Justifiably it wouldn't be a sales booster in the short term and in the long term it's a threat.
- anthk 2y ago
  Intel used to sell some embedded ARM CPU's too back in the day. They could adapt to RISC-V in few years.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    That was a side hustle. That was expanding their markets. They also tried with the Atom and the Xeon Phi, but this is now other architectures moving into their heartland. Sure, if RISC-V takes over then of course Intel will adapt, but right now they have the duopoly that they share with AMD. If RISC-V becomes a standard than IBM for example will get involved and they definitely know how to design a chip. But this really looks like another industry shift like when businesses all moved to Unix, or when unixes all moved to business, or homes consolidated on Wintel, each time moving to a more open commodity platform. RISC-V and (to a lesser degree) ARM are much more commodity than the duopoly.

ConanRus 2y ago

[dead]

Remnant44 2y ago

This is hopeful. Whatever the ARM enthusiasts would like, x86 is going to stick around for a long time, and working together to evolve the ISA extensions in a more cohesive manner would go a long way. In particular, I'd really like AMD and Intel to get on the same page in terms of avx10 / avx512 support. Many people correctly note that avx512 support is not super relevant today, but this can be laid heavily at the feet of Intel's process troubles and a terrible decision to use ISA for market segmentation purposes. Zen4/zen5 show that it is possible to implement wide vector units on a cpu in an extremely beneficial way - even if you're running reduced width execution units under the hood, the improved frontend performance is really useful - and also actually saves power, as the decoders and schedulers account for a fair chunk of power consumption these days.

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
honestly, as exciting as proper AVX-512 support will be, I am probably at least as excited for APX (16->32 general purpose registers). It brings x86 inline with ARM and RISCV, and just generally makes it a lot easier for compilers to not spill registers to the stack.
- Remnant44 2y ago
  Agreed.. in a lot of ways, APX is like AVX(512) for scalar code. Double integer register count, three-operand instructions, improved predication support including conditional load/stores.. If I remember correctly, they actually implement it by having the scalar instructions use the EVEX prefix introduced with avx512. I would really love to seem them settle on APX + AVX10/512 as a next-generation x86 baseline.
emn13 2y ago
Phoronix has a specific benchmark subset that tries to tease out (at least for zen5) a hint of how much the wider data-path matters vs. how much the frontend/ISA extension itself, by disabling those selectively on an epyc zen5 chip: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9755-avx512 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9755-avx512 It's pretty clear that the ISA/frontend is much more impactful than the data-width on this set of workloads, and that also seems to jive with more indirect evidence from performance patterns more broadly. i.e. it's the new instructions (and potentially register width) that matter significantly more than the actually wider data-path.

sedatk 2y ago

After 40+ years, finally :) I really want x86 and ARM to push each other for better power efficiency and performance instead of one side winning out. I’m using an ARM laptop nowadays and the battery life is so impressive.

pizza234 2y ago
Very surprisingly, x86 can be competitive (and in some cases, even winning) in terms of power efficiency; see https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-ampereone/5 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-ampereone/5.
- hggigg 2y ago
  If you compare a good x86 to a crap ARM yes. Laptops are populated mostly with crap x86 and good ARM (apart from snapdragon which is a crap ARM)
  - emn13 2y ago
    That statement strongly suggests it's the implementation of the ISA that matters more than the ISA, whether that be due to process node, skill and investment by the manufacturer, or perhaps a bit of luck. By good ARM, do you mean specifically (and only) Apple? Given their budgets (both financial and transistor), their very long history and investment into their chips, their deep integration of stuff like memory and GPU, and their tendency to be a process node ahead of their competitors, Apple is a particularly hard example to interpret when it comes to ISA impact. Hard to imagine another company making all those choices, since they all have costs too, which many won't be willing or able to bear, and some of those costs (like the lack of flexibility due to the deep integration) are possibly a non-starter for many niches.
    - sedatk 2y ago
      I think parent means "Ampere" being a bad ARM implementation, and Snapdragon X or Apple M-series being the good ones. It's mentioned in the article too. Ampere performs really poorly on idle (101W vs EPYC's meager 19W). I haven't witnessed that problem on my Snapdragon X laptop. I'm not saying Ampere is bad myself though. It's obviously very competitive being a relatively new player and all. But, it's not as polished for desktop/laptop workloads as it seems.

rasz 2y ago

Start with optional fixed instruction size mode.

anthk 2y ago

Let it die, adopt RISC-V. X86 is built on cruft over cruft.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I was wondering about this as well. What do Intel and AMD gain from protecting x86? Why not just adopt RISC-V themselves and make the best processors and process for that? Wouldn’t that get them what they want (in terms of their company’s strategy)? There’s not really value in the architecture itself as much as the real products they sell, right (the actual processors)?
- layer8 2y ago
  The value of the ISA is the huge volume of existing software for it, including hardware drivers. The whole x86-using industry migrating away from x86 would be a multi-decade and costly process. In addition, this would just mean more competition for Intel and AMD, as they would lose the moat of their x86 know-how. Why would they do that?
  - tenebrisalietum 2y ago
    Nah. Not in this day and age. Most of that software can be recompiled - hopefully no one is writing stuff in assembly, at least not to the point where it can't easily be ported. With many-core CPUs cheap and common, everything is fast. Hardware drivers matter less in the 2020s - there is far less diversity of hardware than there was in the 1990s. x86 "know-how" is vendor lock-in, not a benefit.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Will you recompile the proprietary Nvidia driver for a GTX260? (not a typo)
      - anthk 2y ago
        Nvidia would. Most of the work it's in the firmware blob after all.

bewaretheirs 2y ago

Odd that the article makes no mention of intel's APX extensions (which add more integer registers, 3-operand variants of most 2-operand instructions, and assorted other tweaks).

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Feels like one of the signs of the apocalypse :-) And it is a pretty stunning "conclusion" to a war that started 20 years ago with the introduction of Sledgehammer and the AMD64 instruction set. For me though it really emphasizes how much of a threat ARM (and presumably RISCV) architectures are to these two companies.

imchillyb 2y ago
TPM was the sign. This is a symptom. The apocalypse countdown began with IMNVN. > https://www.dechert.com/knowledge/onpoint/2021/2/occ-confirms-authority-of-national-banks-to-use-independent-node.html https://www.dechert.com/knowledge/onpoint/2021/2/occ-confirm... Here's a fun little aside: Somark Innovations' Lab Stamp is a 'beast mark.'

tliltocatl 2y ago

Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integrator providing support (hopefully in the form of throw-over-the-fence-and-forget Linux kernel headers, but more common are just kernel binaries) to run it at all. In theory UEFI supports ARM, but can I buy a desktop ARM processor that does? And this is going to be worse with RISC-V because hardware vendor are not interested in providing platform compatibility. So we would be back in pre-PC era platform-wise. There is no replacement for x86, not because it is impossible to replace, but because no vendor is interested in making one.

sidewndr46 2y ago
I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box store and buy any AMD or Intel laptop I can throw whatever kernel and userspace I want on it in a few minutes. The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. If x86 dies we will wind up with a bunch of devices where step 1 is "run this code to exploit a buffer overflow to bypass the locked bootloader. Only works on v1.2 PCB revision 7"
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.
  - janice1999 2y ago
    That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1]. [1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html

bcrl 2y ago

The prior rumours that Jim Keller had AMD develop the K10 core with the option of using an ARM front end would have created an extremely interesting way to compare the merits of the 2 instruction sets. x86 has constraints that make it far more programmer friendly than ARM (weak memory ordering models make my brain hurt!), yet performance has been pushed ahead through techniques that were only dreamed of decades ago. I really wonder what Intel and AMD could come up with using the ARM64 instruction set combined with the knowledge gained from decades of pushing x86 and x86-64 to the limit.

ytch 2y ago

As the news mentions, I hope it is the time pushing x86s Architecture[1] to real world. [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

ksec 2y ago

Finally. I hope Intel and AMD allows a clean, may be slightly backward incompatible subset of x86-64 that is open for all to implement. Lets call the new institutions set AE86. It is old, but fast around corners.