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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 proces
by 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 agoThe 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 agoNah. 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 agoWill you recompile the proprietary Nvidia driver for a GTX260? (not a typo)
- anthk 2y agoNvidia would. Most of the work it's in the firmware blob after all.
- tenebrisalietum 2y agoNo but Nvidia can with all their money. GPUs are really the only thing requiring their own hardware drivers that's commonly installed. Everything else common and meaningful to the masses is pretty much USB, an old-school serial port, a network interface, or a block device. Bus/interconnect drivers like NVMe, SATA and all that are very standardized and your x86 know-how doesn't buy you any advantage. Certainly there may be some issues with the trash heap that is ACPI/UEFI; and DTB can go ahead and steamroll that dumpster fire along with the rest of the x86 cruft - there was an x86 world before ACPI after all.
- immibis 2y agoIrrelevant. Nvidia WON'T.
- anthk 2y agoNvidia has libre drivers and a firmware blob. Once you stick a PCIE card on a Risc-V port, all the FUD goes away.
- snvzz 2y agoIt's easier to stick an AMD card tho. Unlike NVIDIA, AMD open source drivers are actually excellent.
- tenebrisalietum 2y agoAlso irrelevant as well really. x86 isn't making Nvidia refuse to do it.
- anthk 2y agoFor high-tier environments consider GNU/Linux and *BSD already ported. On the rest, for office tasks either they run on the browser, Java or C# or fast enough Win32 shims.
- sph 2y agoWhat about the rest of the software?
- anthk 2y agoThe legacy one will run with library hooks and CPU traps.
- Sakos 2y agoYou're on Hacker News. We don't care about anybody except users of open source software.
- anthk 2y agoEither fast userspace emulation or hooks. Adobe did it twice or trice. Microsoft did that under DOS-Windows and then X86->ARM.