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Seems like a silly thing to say right when x86 is getting pummelled to death by Apple and Valve, maybe slowly, but steadily, while the rest of the gang also wat
by trvz 7mo ago
Seems like a silly thing to say right when x86 is getting pummelled to death by Apple and Valve, maybe slowly, but steadily, while the rest of the gang also watches on.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- skydhash 7mo agoI believe it’s more from the point of view of Kernel, Compiler, and Driver developers, not from manufacturers and users. Standards, while not very flexible, are good for building ecosystems.
- michaelbuckbee 7mo agoI'd add AWS + Gravitron to that list as well.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoLately I've made making some AWS Lambda functions to do some simple things in Python and chose to use the ARM-based instances because there wasn't any reason not to.
- TYPE_FASTER 7mo agoYeah, we migrated a bunch of compute to Graviton a few years ago at a previous employer and the result was better performance at a lower price point.
- samuelknight 7mo agoWhat does Valve ship without x86?
- jsheard 7mo agoNothing yet, but the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is ARM based. The relevant detail is they're bankrolling the open source FEX x86 emulator, with the goal of bringing the whole Steam back-catalogue to ARM systems.
- TomatoCo 7mo agoNow that Google and Apple have to (more-or-less) allow other app stores, I wonder if Valve is bankrolling FEX with the intent of selling games on mobile?
- invl 7mo agoThe Steam Link was ARM-based.
- creatonez 7mo ago> Valve This is a funny thing to say when Valve hasn't actually released any ARM device yet, and the Steam Deck is still fully reliant on x86. The ARM hardware they do plan to release relies on x86 emulation, which is something that historically usually doesn't pan out.
- beagle3 7mo agoWorked very well for Apple in their transition to Apple Silicon.
- i_am_a_peasant 7mo agofor real, rosetta is crazy good
- jmalicki 7mo agoThe Mac silicon is nice in that it has partial x86 emulation in that it can work in x86 memory store mode. Since they had control over the hardware, they could punt on one of the hard parts of Rosetta and bake it into Silicon. Understanding the memory ordering requirements from binary without source and without killing performance by being overly conservative (and hell, the source itself probably has memory ordering bugs if it was only tested on x86) sounds next to impossible.
- jsheard 7mo ago> Understanding the memory ordering requirements from binary without source and without killing performance by being overly conservative (and hell, the source itself probably has memory ordering bugs if it was only tested on x86) sounds next to impossible. It is hard, but Microsoft came up with a hack to make it easier. MSVC (since 2019) annotates x86 binaries with metadata describing the codes actual memory ordering requirements, to inform emulators of when they need to be conservative or can safely YOLO ordering. Obviously that was intended to assist Microsoft's Prism emulator, but the open source FEX emulator figured out the encoding (which I believe is undocumented) and implemented the same trick on their end. Emulators still have to do it the hard way when running older MSVC binaries of course, or ones compiled with Clang or GCC. Most commercial games are built with MSVC at least.
- gaigalas 7mo agoThat is actually addressed in the article. Several architectures "pummelled" x86 before. PowerPC, for example. They did not stood the test of time though.
- beagle3 7mo agoWhat they did not win was the popularity contest, mostly thanks to Windows - the Wintel market was just too massive to compete with. But that’s changed somewhat - Apple has managed a larger mind and market share (while switching into ARM). The vast majority of uses are now available on the web, which is CPU agnostic, and there is a huge amount of open source software available. The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve.
- gaigalas 7mo agoservers
- wolrah 7mo ago> The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve. You've missed a huge segment: Random in-house apps or niche vertical market apps that are closely tethered with a business workflow to the point that replacing them is a massive undertaking, where the developers at best aren't interested in improving anything and at worst no longer exist.
- beagle3 7mo agoNo I did not miss it. That has moved to web, either directly Or through an RDP/VNC interface where the actual windows virtual machine is hidden. Embedded/hardware is the last segment still not replaced by web.
- p_ing 7mo agoHow? x86 leads on performance. It's reasonably low power now, too; perhaps not the best, but it's not aughts-era power consumption.
- cedws 7mo agoAnecdotally at work (SME) we are pretty much all in on ARM. MacBooks with M-series, AWS Graviton instances, even our CI runners are now ARM to match local development.
- pjmlp 7mo agoPeople should look into consumer market share numbers before commenting.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoAnd the article explains why they'll never "win."