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For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM at th

For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM at this point; silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc. The benefits of using amd64 are beyond-compare experience of optimisation, commodity pricing, and legacy compatibility; the costs are negligible. However, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Intel's increasing and complete near-domination of the "not-low-power" CPU market. I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. AMD's struggling with it, but there's plenty of scope for looking at interesting approaches to increasing performance or reducing power use.

melling 13y ago
Intel has dominated for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share In all honesty, beyond the cheap CPU market, most people have gone with Intel for a decade(s).
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Not really. Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
- tkinom 13y ago
  ARM CPU/SOC shipped in billions of units. Latest production ARM in Nexus 5, 7 has 4 cores, integrate GPU, VPU (video processing unit.) Run from battery power. IMO, Intel is losing CPU war to ARM. We are also seeing Qualcomm's 64 bits 8 cores going into the next gen phone soon.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    Intel's position in CPUs is analogous to Apple's position in phones: Less than 15% of the units, but over 50% of the profit. ARM is a commodity market. Nvidia makes its money on GPUs and runs Tegra at a loss. ARM has a huge market cap but barely makes any profit. Samsung makes its money on the phone and other chips. TI found ARM so cutthroat that they've given up and quit. Qualcomm has an enormous market cap (larger than Intel's), but they make almost all of their money on the wireless side. This is why ARM is so dangerous to Intel. While ARM moves upmarket and Intel moves downmarket, Intel is unable to compete on price because the competitors are operating so close to breakeven.
    - hga 13y ago
      Last time I checked, and I can see it changing since then, TI decided play the wireless phone game wasn't worth it, but it was still pursuing other mobile markets, e.g. WiFi SoCs, which at the time were really popular. Has this changed?
      - tanzam75 13y ago
        As TI phrased it in their press release back in 2012, they were focusing on "embedded" instead of "mobile." The way I understood it was that this covered everything mobile: not just phones, but also tablets. In any case, TI makes almost all of its money on analog chips. "Embedded processing" was less than 8% of profits in Q1 2014. And that division includes microcontrollers.
    - hollerith 13y ago
      Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)
      - tanzam75 13y ago
        > Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.) And please don't downvote without fist spending ten seconds to look up the companies' financials. I meant exactly what I wrote: "market cap." Qualcomm had a larger market cap that Intel (at least it did yesterday). It did not and does not have greater revenue than Intel, especially when you strip out the wireless side and only look at CPUs. The point of bringing up market cap is to show how huge these companies are that Intel is competing with. Everyone knows Samsung is enormous, so I didn't bother pointing it out. A lot of people don't realize how huge Qualcomm has gotten. But it's not because of Snapdragon.
- copergi 13y ago
  You are only looking at a tiny subsection of CPUs, which happen to be the niche intel dominates. CPUs are in a lot more devices than just PCs and laptops.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
People still forget how ARM just came out of nowhere to dominate the low power space. Makes me wonder if the CPU wars aren't really over yet.
- protomyth 13y ago
  And I guess a lot of people forget that the PowerPC is in a lot of embedded designs.
  - hga 13y ago
    Yeah, but's that strongly in the direction of the "Zero Cost" category of microprocessors, isn't it? An IEEE I think article laid them out nicely into 4 categories: Zero cost: what you put in microwaves, every cent counts. Zero power: used to be obscure, the mobile market is of course making it very much less so, although those have elements of: Zero time: speed is what counts, and plenty are willing to pay a hefty premium for it. Zero units: say the military needs a CPU for a combat airplane which won't be made in more than 100s of units. Perhaps worth it for the prestige and getting the government to pay you to figure out neat things that might be usable in your bread and butter channels. One modern example, but not with custom designs so much, is radiation hardened CPUs for space applications, a unit cost of say 100K is rather small in the bill of materials, the cost of failure in the high millions at minimum, could top a billion or billions, e.g. it would be very very bad if the computing subsystem(s) of the James Webb Space Telescope fail on its way to the Earth-Sun L2 point....
- rhubarbquid 13y ago
  ARM didn't "come out of nowhere", it's been used in embedded and mobile systems as a low power CPU for decades now. The earliest mobile use I can find is the Apple Newton in 1993. DEC was marketing their StrongARM product as a low power CPU back in 1996.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    I remember that. ARM was doing great with Newton until Intel bought and killed Strong ARM.
willvarfar 13y ago
(Mill mod) Ahem, sorry to those suffering Mill Fatigue on HN, but any conversation about the ISA wars being over is a red rag to a bull with us! :) Hope you like the talks on http://millcomputing.com/docs http://millcomputing.com/docs NOTE: bulls react to movement not colour
- dang 13y ago
  Speaking for myself here – the Mill material is some of the most interesting that's appeared on HN in recent memory and I don't think we're close to being fatigued by it.
- matthewmacleod 13y ago
  Apologies, I shouldn't have been quite so dismissive. I mean that the ISA wars are over in the sense of multiple relatively similar architectures competing against one another for negligible gain. There's still plenty of scope for nontraditional architectures to come in and offer something different. We've already seen that in the more general availability of general-purpose GPU programming. As an architecture nerd, I'm already super-excited by Mill.
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    crikey, you gave me a platform to get Mill into yet another HN thread, and you apologise? Are you mad? I'm the one to thank you :)
  - yuhong 13y ago
    Yea, thinking about it, many of the old UNIX workstation vendors used the same 68K CPUs but then they decided to develop their own RISC architectures, fragmenting the market and reducing the economies of scale.
    - hga 13y ago
      Well, it's hard to say that Motorola had it's heart in the 68K CPUs, it was a wildly diversified and not entirely focused electronics conglomerate back then. And their product plan was very conservative, with the "odd numbered" chips not being great advances on the even numbered ones, e.g. the 68030, which came out the same time as the first SPARC, used the 68020 microarchitecture with a 256 byte instruction cache and used the design shrink to put the MMU on the chip (but not the FPU). The 68040, three years later, wasn't a stunning success, was it? And the 88100, which came out a year after the 68020 certainly sucked up a lot of corporate oxygen, not to mention put into question the company's commitment to the 68K family. And it's very dangerous for a company to depend on another company for one of the most critical components of its products, isn't it? But, yeah, the economies of scale, the much lower unit sales to spread your Non-Recurring Engineering costs over, eventually doomed them to mostly bureaucratic and installed base niches when AMD successfully innovated for a short period and then Intel got its act together due to that threat.
kabdib 13y ago
Agreed. I worked on PPC on the Xbox 360, and rarely had to worry about the underlying ISA, although when you did have to worry about it, things got pretty hairy and ugly, fast (think: DMA, cache coherence and other low-level stuff all ganging up to ruin your day). You also had to worry about the ISA when you were doing something performance intensive (that's when you start taking advantage of multimedia instructions and so forth; ideally you have abstractions for this, but they'll only take you so far).
userbinator 13y ago
> silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc There's one strategy of increasing performance on a CISC that can't really be done with RISC - making existing complex instructions execute faster. This is particularly attractive since it means all existing software gets a boost without any software-level work. So in some sense, having complex instructions that would not be fast at the time the ISA was designed is like future-proofing. And x86/amd64 still has many places where this sort of optimisation can be done. > I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. Absolutely. It's unfortunate that many regard the ISA as being too complex, since it is within that complexity that is hidden a wealth of opportunities for optimisation.

melling 13y ago

Intel has dominated for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share In all honesty, beyond the cheap CPU market, most people have gone with Intel for a decade(s).

rbanffy 13y ago
Not really. Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
tkinom 13y ago
ARM CPU/SOC shipped in billions of units. Latest production ARM in Nexus 5, 7 has 4 cores, integrate GPU, VPU (video processing unit.) Run from battery power. IMO, Intel is losing CPU war to ARM. We are also seeing Qualcomm's 64 bits 8 cores going into the next gen phone soon.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  Intel's position in CPUs is analogous to Apple's position in phones: Less than 15% of the units, but over 50% of the profit. ARM is a commodity market. Nvidia makes its money on GPUs and runs Tegra at a loss. ARM has a huge market cap but barely makes any profit. Samsung makes its money on the phone and other chips. TI found ARM so cutthroat that they've given up and quit. Qualcomm has an enormous market cap (larger than Intel's), but they make almost all of their money on the wireless side. This is why ARM is so dangerous to Intel. While ARM moves upmarket and Intel moves downmarket, Intel is unable to compete on price because the competitors are operating so close to breakeven.
  - hga 13y ago
    Last time I checked, and I can see it changing since then, TI decided play the wireless phone game wasn't worth it, but it was still pursuing other mobile markets, e.g. WiFi SoCs, which at the time were really popular. Has this changed?
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      As TI phrased it in their press release back in 2012, they were focusing on "embedded" instead of "mobile." The way I understood it was that this covered everything mobile: not just phones, but also tablets. In any case, TI makes almost all of its money on analog chips. "Embedded processing" was less than 8% of profits in Q1 2014. And that division includes microcontrollers.
  - hollerith 13y ago
    Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      > Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.) And please don't downvote without fist spending ten seconds to look up the companies' financials. I meant exactly what I wrote: "market cap." Qualcomm had a larger market cap that Intel (at least it did yesterday). It did not and does not have greater revenue than Intel, especially when you strip out the wireless side and only look at CPUs. The point of bringing up market cap is to show how huge these companies are that Intel is competing with. Everyone knows Samsung is enormous, so I didn't bother pointing it out. A lot of people don't realize how huge Qualcomm has gotten. But it's not because of Snapdragon.
copergi 13y ago
You are only looking at a tiny subsection of CPUs, which happen to be the niche intel dominates. CPUs are in a lot more devices than just PCs and laptops.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

People still forget how ARM just came out of nowhere to dominate the low power space. Makes me wonder if the CPU wars aren't really over yet.

protomyth 13y ago
And I guess a lot of people forget that the PowerPC is in a lot of embedded designs.
- hga 13y ago
  Yeah, but's that strongly in the direction of the "Zero Cost" category of microprocessors, isn't it? An IEEE I think article laid them out nicely into 4 categories: Zero cost: what you put in microwaves, every cent counts. Zero power: used to be obscure, the mobile market is of course making it very much less so, although those have elements of: Zero time: speed is what counts, and plenty are willing to pay a hefty premium for it. Zero units: say the military needs a CPU for a combat airplane which won't be made in more than 100s of units. Perhaps worth it for the prestige and getting the government to pay you to figure out neat things that might be usable in your bread and butter channels. One modern example, but not with custom designs so much, is radiation hardened CPUs for space applications, a unit cost of say 100K is rather small in the bill of materials, the cost of failure in the high millions at minimum, could top a billion or billions, e.g. it would be very very bad if the computing subsystem(s) of the James Webb Space Telescope fail on its way to the Earth-Sun L2 point....
rhubarbquid 13y ago
ARM didn't "come out of nowhere", it's been used in embedded and mobile systems as a low power CPU for decades now. The earliest mobile use I can find is the Apple Newton in 1993. DEC was marketing their StrongARM product as a low power CPU back in 1996.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  I remember that. ARM was doing great with Newton until Intel bought and killed Strong ARM.

willvarfar 13y ago

(Mill mod) Ahem, sorry to those suffering Mill Fatigue on HN, but any conversation about the ISA wars being over is a red rag to a bull with us! :) Hope you like the talks on http://millcomputing.com/docs http://millcomputing.com/docs NOTE: bulls react to movement not colour

dang 13y ago
Speaking for myself here – the Mill material is some of the most interesting that's appeared on HN in recent memory and I don't think we're close to being fatigued by it.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
Apologies, I shouldn't have been quite so dismissive. I mean that the ISA wars are over in the sense of multiple relatively similar architectures competing against one another for negligible gain. There's still plenty of scope for nontraditional architectures to come in and offer something different. We've already seen that in the more general availability of general-purpose GPU programming. As an architecture nerd, I'm already super-excited by Mill.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  crikey, you gave me a platform to get Mill into yet another HN thread, and you apologise? Are you mad? I'm the one to thank you :)
- yuhong 13y ago
  Yea, thinking about it, many of the old UNIX workstation vendors used the same 68K CPUs but then they decided to develop their own RISC architectures, fragmenting the market and reducing the economies of scale.
  - hga 13y ago
    Well, it's hard to say that Motorola had it's heart in the 68K CPUs, it was a wildly diversified and not entirely focused electronics conglomerate back then. And their product plan was very conservative, with the "odd numbered" chips not being great advances on the even numbered ones, e.g. the 68030, which came out the same time as the first SPARC, used the 68020 microarchitecture with a 256 byte instruction cache and used the design shrink to put the MMU on the chip (but not the FPU). The 68040, three years later, wasn't a stunning success, was it? And the 88100, which came out a year after the 68020 certainly sucked up a lot of corporate oxygen, not to mention put into question the company's commitment to the 68K family. And it's very dangerous for a company to depend on another company for one of the most critical components of its products, isn't it? But, yeah, the economies of scale, the much lower unit sales to spread your Non-Recurring Engineering costs over, eventually doomed them to mostly bureaucratic and installed base niches when AMD successfully innovated for a short period and then Intel got its act together due to that threat.

kabdib 13y ago

Agreed. I worked on PPC on the Xbox 360, and rarely had to worry about the underlying ISA, although when you did have to worry about it, things got pretty hairy and ugly, fast (think: DMA, cache coherence and other low-level stuff all ganging up to ruin your day). You also had to worry about the ISA when you were doing something performance intensive (that's when you start taking advantage of multimedia instructions and so forth; ideally you have abstractions for this, but they'll only take you so far).

userbinator 13y ago

> silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc There's one strategy of increasing performance on a CISC that can't really be done with RISC - making existing complex instructions execute faster. This is particularly attractive since it means all existing software gets a boost without any software-level work. So in some sense, having complex instructions that would not be fast at the time the ISA was designed is like future-proofing. And x86/amd64 still has many places where this sort of optimisation can be done. > I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. Absolutely. It's unfortunate that many regard the ISA as being too complex, since it is within that complexity that is hidden a wealth of opportunities for optimisation.