4 ms·

Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?

by IshKebab 11mo ago

tracker1 11mo ago
Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.
izacus 11mo ago
20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it. So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.
fulafel 11mo ago
Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base. Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.
- IshKebab 11mo ago
  To be clear if x86 is ever as unpopular as SPARC or PowerPC I would consider that to be obliterated. I was thinking more like if it falls to 10% of desktop/laptop/server market share, which is still waaaaaay more then the nearly-dead architectures you listed.
  - fulafel 11mo ago
    Couldn't resist picking at semantics here: Things that have < 10% market share - macOS - all car manufacturers except Toyota Things that history considers obliterated: - The city of Pompeii - districts of Hiroshima within the bomb's blast radius
Keyframe 11mo ago
In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why would it? Mature gallery of software to be ported from TSO to weak memory model is a soft moat. So is avx/simd mature dominance vs neon/sve. x86/64 is a duopoly and a stable target vs fragmented landscape of ARM. ARM's whole spiel is performance per watt, scale out type of thing vs scale up. In that sense the market has kind of already moved. With ARM if you start pushing for sustained high throughput, high performance, 5Ghz+ envelope, all the advantages are gone in favor of x86 so far. What might be interesting is if let's say AMD adds an ARM frontend decoder to Zen. In one of Jim Keller's interviews that was shared here, he said it wouldn't be that big of a deal to make such a CPU for it to be an ARM decoding one. That'd be interesting to see.
- philistine 11mo ago
  > In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why would it? Laptops. Apple already owned the high margin laptop market before they switched to ARM. With phones, tablets, laptops above 1k, and all the other doodads all running ARM, it's not that x86 will simply disappear. Of course not. But the investments simply aren't comparable anymore with ARM being an order of magnitude more common. x86 is very slowly losing steam, with their chips generally behind in terms of performance per watt. And it's not because of any specific problem or mistake. It's just that it no longer makes economic sense.
zzzoom 11mo ago
Why would the market jump from one proprietary ISA to another proprietary ISA?
- IshKebab 11mo ago
  Ask Apple.
  - zzzoom 11mo ago
    Apple's A4 was launched 4 years before RISC-V.
    - IshKebab 11mo ago
      So what? Are you suggesting that Apple would have switched to RISC-V? I like RISC-V (it's my job and I'm very involved in the community) but even now it isn't ready for laptops/desktop class applications. RVA23 is really the first profile that comes close and that was only ratified very recently. But beyond that there are a load of other things that are very much work in progress around the periphery that you need on a laptop. ACPI, UEFI, etc. If you know RISC-V, what does mconfigptr point to? Nothing yet! Anyway the question was why would anyone switch from one proprietary ISA to another, as if nobody would - despite the very obvious proof that yes they absolutely would.
tester756 11mo ago
>Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years? Lunar Lake shows that x86 is capable of getting that energy efficiency Panther Lake that will be released in around 30 days is expected to show significant improvement over Lunar Lake So... why switch to ARM if you will get similar perf/energy eff?
fweimer 11mo ago
It seems to me that interest in AArch64 for on-promise general-purpose compute workloads has largely waned. Are Dell/HPE/Lenovo currently selling AArch64 servers? Maybe there is a rack-mounted Nvidia DGX variant, but that's more focused on GPU compute for sure.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?

Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.

izacus 11mo ago

20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it. So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.

fulafel 11mo ago

Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base. Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.

IshKebab 11mo ago
To be clear if x86 is ever as unpopular as SPARC or PowerPC I would consider that to be obliterated. I was thinking more like if it falls to 10% of desktop/laptop/server market share, which is still waaaaaay more then the nearly-dead architectures you listed.
- fulafel 11mo ago
  Couldn't resist picking at semantics here: Things that have < 10% market share - macOS - all car manufacturers except Toyota Things that history considers obliterated: - The city of Pompeii - districts of Hiroshima within the bomb's blast radius

Keyframe 11mo ago

In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why would it? Mature gallery of software to be ported from TSO to weak memory model is a soft moat. So is avx/simd mature dominance vs neon/sve. x86/64 is a duopoly and a stable target vs fragmented landscape of ARM. ARM's whole spiel is performance per watt, scale out type of thing vs scale up. In that sense the market has kind of already moved. With ARM if you start pushing for sustained high throughput, high performance, 5Ghz+ envelope, all the advantages are gone in favor of x86 so far. What might be interesting is if let's say AMD adds an ARM frontend decoder to Zen. In one of Jim Keller's interviews that was shared here, he said it wouldn't be that big of a deal to make such a CPU for it to be an ARM decoding one. That'd be interesting to see.

philistine 11mo ago
> In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why would it? Laptops. Apple already owned the high margin laptop market before they switched to ARM. With phones, tablets, laptops above 1k, and all the other doodads all running ARM, it's not that x86 will simply disappear. Of course not. But the investments simply aren't comparable anymore with ARM being an order of magnitude more common. x86 is very slowly losing steam, with their chips generally behind in terms of performance per watt. And it's not because of any specific problem or mistake. It's just that it no longer makes economic sense.

zzzoom 11mo ago

Why would the market jump from one proprietary ISA to another proprietary ISA?

IshKebab 11mo ago
Ask Apple.
- zzzoom 11mo ago
  Apple's A4 was launched 4 years before RISC-V.
  - IshKebab 11mo ago
    So what? Are you suggesting that Apple would have switched to RISC-V? I like RISC-V (it's my job and I'm very involved in the community) but even now it isn't ready for laptops/desktop class applications. RVA23 is really the first profile that comes close and that was only ratified very recently. But beyond that there are a load of other things that are very much work in progress around the periphery that you need on a laptop. ACPI, UEFI, etc. If you know RISC-V, what does mconfigptr point to? Nothing yet! Anyway the question was why would anyone switch from one proprietary ISA to another, as if nobody would - despite the very obvious proof that yes they absolutely would.

tester756 11mo ago

>Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years? Lunar Lake shows that x86 is capable of getting that energy efficiency Panther Lake that will be released in around 30 days is expected to show significant improvement over Lunar Lake So... why switch to ARM if you will get similar perf/energy eff?

fweimer 11mo ago

It seems to me that interest in AArch64 for on-promise general-purpose compute workloads has largely waned. Are Dell/HPE/Lenovo currently selling AArch64 servers? Maybe there is a rack-mounted Nvidia DGX variant, but that's more focused on GPU compute for sure.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]