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To me it looks like the two finally decided to cooperate because it's in their common interest to stop (or rather, delay) the x86 architecture's slide into irre

by rob74 2y ago

To me it looks like the two finally decided to cooperate because it's in their common interest to stop (or rather, delay) the x86 architecture's slide into irrelevance?

burnte 2y ago
People have been talking about the irrelevance of x86 since the 80s. I remember the early 90s when "Intel is doomed" was daily news and opinion fodder.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  Don’t you think this time things may be different though? Many new computers, cloud platforms and even the iPad I’m typing on right now have/are switching to ARM and away from x86.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    ARM should be more worried about getting usurped by China!RISC-V than x86 getting usurped by, well, anything. x86 still powers most of how we actually get stuff done.
    - echelon 2y ago
      Both should worry about getting usurped by RISC-V. x86 is getting cornered by ARM in consumer and data center. RISC-V is gunning for ARM. While ARM is open-ish, RISC-V is more open than both. When you're not the market leader, that's the strategy to become market leader. And it certainly helps that a major world power is putting in enormous energy to make their architecture the dominant alternative to "Western" architectures.
  - leptons 2y ago
    There still aren't ARM chips that can compete with the processing power of the highest-end x86 chips, if power consumption isn't an issue. It's nice that your iPad has an ARM chip in it, but nobody is going to be using an iPad for real workloads. And when it comes to available software, x86 just laughs at ARM.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      This is outdated. The M3 Max is right there with Intel i9 on singlethreaded PassMark, and does so while pulling a lot less power.
      - bhouston 2y ago
        And M4 is even faster. Intel i9: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900ks https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900... M4: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953
        leptons 2y ago
        M4 isn't even close to the highest performing x86 CPUs. Apple doesn't have anything close. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Search for "M4", it's not anywhere near the top of the list.
        bhouston 2y ago
        You are showing multi-core benchmarks and it is correct the M4 does not have many cores. I was referring primarily to single-threaded performance. And remember that the only scores you see for M4 CPUs in the CPUBenchmark website from iPads which are definitely thermal constrained. The MacBook benchmarks are not yet available on this benchmark - they will exceed the performance then of the M3 scores I suspect: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
        leptons 2y ago
        That's nice and all but my original comment was specifically about "processing power of the highest-end x86 chips" far exceeding that of any ARM CPU.
        2y ago
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    > even the iPad I’m typing When did it switch to ARM from x86. I don't really see any reasons why can't x86 and ARM just coexist long-term. Porting software is relatively easy or not even necessary these days and ARM main advantage (that companies other than Intel/AMD can use it) is entirely non-technical (development + licensing costs) so as long as Intel/AMD can keep up they have no incentives at all to switch. Amazon's and Ampere's ARM server chips are significantly slower and less power efficient than the equivalent AMD chips (for Ampere at least, note sure if Amazon is sharing their power usage data but I doubt it's massively lower..) they are also 30-40% cheaper because you don't have to pay for AMD/Intel's oligopoly margins.
    - jitl 2y ago
      At least as an AWS customer, switching from x86 to ARM looks quite appealing on the balance sheet! Same perf, many less $$$. Certainly there’s a large financial discount incentive for many workloads. A lot of stacks already have good support for ARM64 since a fair amount of developers run on macOS, so it’s pretty much just inertia keeping many on x86.
      - Wytwwww 2y ago
        Yeah, but presumably mainly because it's just much cheaper for Amazon to make their own (technically inferior but it doesn't matter if you don't care about single-core perf) chips than having to pay for Intel/AMD's margins. Of course from the end-user perspective it doesn't matter. But long-term it might less lead to less competition allowing them hike up prices in the future. Of course other hyperscalers can and presumably are doing the same. However everyone else will be left out unless Ampere (or somebody else?) steps up.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      Isn't ARM's main and most visible advantage that its implementations are usually energy-efficient?
      - Wytwwww 2y ago
        Is it? e.g. EPYC 9754, the equivalent to Neoverse ARM servers seems to have significantly better performance/power than Ampere's chips. Gravitron 4 seems to be slightly faster than the AmpereOne A192-32X, I don't know how much power it uses but I doubt it's significantly different. https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12#:~:text=The%20Ampere%20Altra%20Max%20M128%2D30%20could%20sip%20as%20little,just%2010%20Watts%20at%20idle https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12#:~:tex.... Of course the Ampere chip is significantly cheaper which I think is the main and most visible advantage ARM has for servers at least.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Of course there will come a time when things are different. No king rules forever and all that. But the people predicting x86 death in the past would've said that those were the times when it was different too, and they would've been wrong. These kinds of change are hard to predict in advance.
  - burnte 2y ago
    No, I don't think this time is different. We've seen ARM CPUs outselling x86 CPUs for a decade or more, the problem isn't the hardware, it's the software. x86 has better backwards compatibility than any other CPU that has ever been created. It runs so much software that it's got another decade of life in it at a minimum. I do think this is actually the first time we'll see really strong sales of competing ISAs in the non-mobile space and that's exciting, but the inertia of the excellently supported x86 ecosphere is massive and cannot turn on a dime. Plus, 20 years ago people said x86 could never hit power and performance targets that today are the norm. Everyone talks about x86 like the actual hardware is the same year after year. It's not. The underlying CPUs are amazing and both Intel and AMD have done amazing work keeping the ISA competitive. I don't see that changing any time soon.
- Moto7451 2y ago
  Yup, and instead 68k, PA-RISC, Alpha, PPC, and others all fell to x86. ARM is clearly here to stay and took some of the 68k, PPC, MIPS, and low end/embedded x86 use cases. Since the industry loves the idea of displaced incumbents we’ll see a lot of RISC-V articles for years to come.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > Yup, and instead 68k, PA-RISC, Alpha, PPC, and others all fell to x86. All of these came before Linux dominated the server space. Back then, being able to run Windows was needed to escape the narrow Unix niche.
- usrusr 2y ago
  Many deaths have been preceded by a large number of premature announcements. We tend to overestimate the predictive value of extrapolating from a series of wrong predictions in the past.
  - burnte 2y ago
    Oh absolutely, I agree and yes x86 will eventually die. When? No one has any idea but it's not anytime in the next decade.
- LeFantome 2y ago
  RISC-V is not going anywhere as it is not a single player. If it disappears, it will be because it has been replaced by a better alternative. ARM is not going anywhere for a while. It dominates the mobile and embedded markets and is making in-roads in others. If it eventually gets displanted, it will be by RIsC-V or its successor. X86 is vulnerable, more vulnerable than the other two. Taking it down is going to take a lot though. I would not bet against it. The biggest problem is that it is master of an ever shrinking empire. Even if they never lose it, they may matter less over time.
throwaway48476 2y ago
It's more that computers aren't getting faster the same way they did in the 90s and the advancements come from new accelerators and instruction sets which fragment the platform.

by rob74 2y ago

To me it looks like the two finally decided to cooperate because it's in their common interest to stop (or rather, delay) the x86 architecture's slide into irrelevance?

burnte 2y ago

People have been talking about the irrelevance of x86 since the 80s. I remember the early 90s when "Intel is doomed" was daily news and opinion fodder.

joshdavham 2y ago
Don’t you think this time things may be different though? Many new computers, cloud platforms and even the iPad I’m typing on right now have/are switching to ARM and away from x86.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  ARM should be more worried about getting usurped by China!RISC-V than x86 getting usurped by, well, anything. x86 still powers most of how we actually get stuff done.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Both should worry about getting usurped by RISC-V. x86 is getting cornered by ARM in consumer and data center. RISC-V is gunning for ARM. While ARM is open-ish, RISC-V is more open than both. When you're not the market leader, that's the strategy to become market leader. And it certainly helps that a major world power is putting in enormous energy to make their architecture the dominant alternative to "Western" architectures.
- leptons 2y ago
  There still aren't ARM chips that can compete with the processing power of the highest-end x86 chips, if power consumption isn't an issue. It's nice that your iPad has an ARM chip in it, but nobody is going to be using an iPad for real workloads. And when it comes to available software, x86 just laughs at ARM.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    This is outdated. The M3 Max is right there with Intel i9 on singlethreaded PassMark, and does so while pulling a lot less power.
    - bhouston 2y ago
      And M4 is even faster. Intel i9: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900ks https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900... M4: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953
      - leptons 2y ago
        M4 isn't even close to the highest performing x86 CPUs. Apple doesn't have anything close. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Search for "M4", it's not anywhere near the top of the list.
        bhouston 2y ago
        You are showing multi-core benchmarks and it is correct the M4 does not have many cores. I was referring primarily to single-threaded performance. And remember that the only scores you see for M4 CPUs in the CPUBenchmark website from iPads which are definitely thermal constrained. The MacBook benchmarks are not yet available on this benchmark - they will exceed the performance then of the M3 scores I suspect: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
        leptons 2y ago
        That's nice and all but my original comment was specifically about "processing power of the highest-end x86 chips" far exceeding that of any ARM CPU.
        2y ago
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > even the iPad I’m typing When did it switch to ARM from x86. I don't really see any reasons why can't x86 and ARM just coexist long-term. Porting software is relatively easy or not even necessary these days and ARM main advantage (that companies other than Intel/AMD can use it) is entirely non-technical (development + licensing costs) so as long as Intel/AMD can keep up they have no incentives at all to switch. Amazon's and Ampere's ARM server chips are significantly slower and less power efficient than the equivalent AMD chips (for Ampere at least, note sure if Amazon is sharing their power usage data but I doubt it's massively lower..) they are also 30-40% cheaper because you don't have to pay for AMD/Intel's oligopoly margins.
  - jitl 2y ago
    At least as an AWS customer, switching from x86 to ARM looks quite appealing on the balance sheet! Same perf, many less $$$. Certainly there’s a large financial discount incentive for many workloads. A lot of stacks already have good support for ARM64 since a fair amount of developers run on macOS, so it’s pretty much just inertia keeping many on x86.
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      Yeah, but presumably mainly because it's just much cheaper for Amazon to make their own (technically inferior but it doesn't matter if you don't care about single-core perf) chips than having to pay for Intel/AMD's margins. Of course from the end-user perspective it doesn't matter. But long-term it might less lead to less competition allowing them hike up prices in the future. Of course other hyperscalers can and presumably are doing the same. However everyone else will be left out unless Ampere (or somebody else?) steps up.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    Isn't ARM's main and most visible advantage that its implementations are usually energy-efficient?
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      Is it? e.g. EPYC 9754, the equivalent to Neoverse ARM servers seems to have significantly better performance/power than Ampere's chips. Gravitron 4 seems to be slightly faster than the AmpereOne A192-32X, I don't know how much power it uses but I doubt it's significantly different. https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12#:~:text=The%20Ampere%20Altra%20Max%20M128%2D30%20could%20sip%20as%20little,just%2010%20Watts%20at%20idle https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12#:~:tex.... Of course the Ampere chip is significantly cheaper which I think is the main and most visible advantage ARM has for servers at least.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Of course there will come a time when things are different. No king rules forever and all that. But the people predicting x86 death in the past would've said that those were the times when it was different too, and they would've been wrong. These kinds of change are hard to predict in advance.
- burnte 2y ago
  No, I don't think this time is different. We've seen ARM CPUs outselling x86 CPUs for a decade or more, the problem isn't the hardware, it's the software. x86 has better backwards compatibility than any other CPU that has ever been created. It runs so much software that it's got another decade of life in it at a minimum. I do think this is actually the first time we'll see really strong sales of competing ISAs in the non-mobile space and that's exciting, but the inertia of the excellently supported x86 ecosphere is massive and cannot turn on a dime. Plus, 20 years ago people said x86 could never hit power and performance targets that today are the norm. Everyone talks about x86 like the actual hardware is the same year after year. It's not. The underlying CPUs are amazing and both Intel and AMD have done amazing work keeping the ISA competitive. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Moto7451 2y ago
Yup, and instead 68k, PA-RISC, Alpha, PPC, and others all fell to x86. ARM is clearly here to stay and took some of the 68k, PPC, MIPS, and low end/embedded x86 use cases. Since the industry loves the idea of displaced incumbents we’ll see a lot of RISC-V articles for years to come.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > Yup, and instead 68k, PA-RISC, Alpha, PPC, and others all fell to x86. All of these came before Linux dominated the server space. Back then, being able to run Windows was needed to escape the narrow Unix niche.
usrusr 2y ago
Many deaths have been preceded by a large number of premature announcements. We tend to overestimate the predictive value of extrapolating from a series of wrong predictions in the past.
- burnte 2y ago
  Oh absolutely, I agree and yes x86 will eventually die. When? No one has any idea but it's not anytime in the next decade.
LeFantome 2y ago
RISC-V is not going anywhere as it is not a single player. If it disappears, it will be because it has been replaced by a better alternative. ARM is not going anywhere for a while. It dominates the mobile and embedded markets and is making in-roads in others. If it eventually gets displanted, it will be by RIsC-V or its successor. X86 is vulnerable, more vulnerable than the other two. Taking it down is going to take a lot though. I would not bet against it. The biggest problem is that it is master of an ever shrinking empire. Even if they never lose it, they may matter less over time.

throwaway48476 2y ago

It's more that computers aren't getting faster the same way they did in the 90s and the advancements come from new accelerators and instruction sets which fragment the platform.