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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.
by 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 agoDon’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 agoARM 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 agoBoth 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 agoThere 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- FeepingCreature 2y agoThis is outdated.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 agoAnd 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 agoM4 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 agoYou 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
- Moto7451 2y agoYou’re comparing the wrong computer to the high end of x86. Apple is doing it with Desktop M2 Ultra/M3 Max series chips and AWS with Graviton vs server chips. Apple has already caught Intel in single core. If power didn’t matter to Apple they could surely optimize for pure performance, but they’re not competitive in the spaces where power does not matter and we will never see them being that chip to market. There are always trade offs at the exotic tier and someone will always win one benchmark over the other, but you can’t say that ARM is being laughed at by Intel. If they were laughing they wouldn’t be partnering with AMD. While I don’t think Intel is super worried about Apple since it’s an Apples to Windows/Linux comparison, I do think they’re worried about Qualcomm and AWS catching Apple and actually eating into their market share.
- Wytwwww 2y ago> Apple has already caught Intel in single core. If power didn’t matter to Apple they could surely optimize for pure performance But that's Apple, not ARM. AFAIK Neoverse/Gravitron's main advantage is price (not having to pay Intel/AMD "inflated" duopoly prices) rather than actual performance.
- leptons 2y ago>You’re comparing the wrong computer to the high end of x86. Apple has nothing that comes close to the top-tier x86 CPUs. It just doesn't. Not in the ipad, not in any of their hardware. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Go ahead and search for an ARM CPU... they are nowhere near close to the top. >Apple has already caught Intel in single core. I don't care. If your workload runs fine a single core, then good for you. The fact is that Apple doesn't have a chip that can compete with the top x86 CPUs overall performance, simply because Apple doesn't care about that market at all. All they care about is selling the cheapest made computer to people who won't notice that their computer isn't all that fast - the average consumer. They don't care about power users. You'll never, ever see Apple silicon beating the top chips from AMD or Intel in total processing power. Nothing wrong with that, but my point still stands, ARM is nowhere near x86 in terms of processing power. > you can’t say that ARM is being laughed at by Intel. Yes I absolutely can, and I specifically said that about available software. ARM has nowhere near the available software that x86 does. x86 absolutely laughs at ARM where available software is the concern.
- 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 agoAt 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 agoYeah, 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 agoIsn't ARM's main and most visible advantage that its implementations are usually energy-efficient?
- Wytwwww 2y agoIs 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 agoOf 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 agoNo, 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 agoYup, 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 agoMany 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 agoOh 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 agoRISC-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.