6 ms·

This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it. The power advantages of ARM in the server space may not be as significant as in the mobile s

This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it. The power advantages of ARM in the server space may not be as significant as in the mobile space but that doesn't mean they're minuscule. There's a lot of code out there which already compiles to multiple architectures so that's one less objection. The rise of the open-source movement (and source-based distribution) have enabled this to happen on a wide scale. Since the barriers to entry for a new architecture have fallen (and AMD intends to lower them further) it wouldn't surprise me if in a decade x86 is as much of a novelty as ARM was decade ago.

taspeotis 13y ago
> There's a lot of code out there which already compiles to multiple architectures so that's one less objection Yeah and there's a lot of code out there which has already been compiled to x86, the vendor has gone out of business, and isn't getting compiled again.
- k4st 13y ago
  And that's what emulation and binary translation are for! :-P
  - deeviant 13y ago
    And there goes the power efficiency...
- tormeh 13y ago
  Like what? Games? Contrary to enthusiast opinion, games have a pretty short life for most people. Doubt that will be a problem. What kind of enterprise is going to run software without a maintainer? I can't come up with anything else than games for which this is a relevant scenario.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - megablast 13y ago
    You are kidding right? There are loads of old systems that have not been updated, running on MS-Dos or Windows 3.1 systems, stuck in some cupboard in a factory, necessary for continued operation. Stuff that 100 people have ever heard of before.
    - tormeh 13y ago
      Yeah, I know about those. There are industrial control computers that still run on Intel 386 (the original). But once those guys run out of spare parts they won't just upgrade the processor.
      - userbinator 13y ago
        Intersil still makes an 8088, and it's quite expensive too: http://www.intersil.com/content/intersil/en/products/space-and-harsh-environment/-883/microprocessors-and-peripherals/80C88-883.html http://www.intersil.com/content/intersil/en/products/space-a... As the URL suggests, there are applications where an existing, well-characterised CPU is highly preferred over a relatively new one where some previously unknown errata could have catastrophic results.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        Someone 13y ago
        It doesn't even have to be errata. That timing loop someone wrote decades ago might run too fast now. Even if it determines its loop counter at startup, it may fail because it assumes 16 bits is enough for the counter. Conversely, some instructions may have gotten slower over time. For example, I doubt intel worries much about the performance of the original 8087 floating point operations anymore, so they could move them into microcode or even make them illegal instructions, to be emulated in software (I don't they do at the moment because the overhead of decoding the original 8086 instructions is low, but if x86 stays around for a few decades, at some time, I think they will consider doing the latter)
        13y ago
- sjwright 13y ago
  True, but that code isn't exactly a driver of new hardware sales.
  - ithkuil 13y ago
    Never underestimate one powerful and common optimization: buying new hardware.
- dspillett 13y ago
  Yes, but if you are still using such binaries they themselves are a serious risk to your business in other ways. Backwards compatibility is good for transitions, but when you are using it to mitigate risks due to dead companies you are using a technical solution to fix something that is inherently a business/people problem.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 13y ago
I don't think ARM really has any inherent "power advantage" over x86; this paper might be interesting to read: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-power-struggles.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-... Yes, ARM architecture is simpler so AMD might stand a better chance, but I'm not so sure how they'll manage to make ARM cores reach x86-level performance and per-cycle efficiency. Currently in cross-architecture benchmarks like SPEC (which doesn't seem to have any ARMs in it at the moment -- hopefully this will change), x86 is at the top for per-thread, per-clock performance and at least a factor of 2-3 away from the next-best - which was POWER7, if I remember correctly. And given that x86 has tons of intra-instruction optimisation opportunities that Intel are taking advantage of because it's such a rich CISC, and ARM doesn't ("enhanced REP MOVSB" is the first example that comes to mind)... personally, I'm not too optimistic. Either way it will be really interesting to see what happens, particularly the benchmarks.
- Symmetry 13y ago
  Quite true, the one ISA advantage that ARM has it's that it's much easier to decode. That does make a difference, but it's not a huge factor. On the other hand x86 tends to be a bit more compact but not as much as you might think. ISA doesn't make a huge difference here, but Intel currently has a pretty big lead in both process and architecture. Either because of superior research, the ability to impose more constraints than a merchant silicon house can, or both Intel has been reaching new process nodes sooner and getting better performance on them than their competitors. And Intel currently has a big architecture advantage too. Owning the whole PC market gives you the money to hire a lot of good engineers. It might be that there's a second disadvantage to x86 in that it's complicated enough that you need more engineering to get an equivalent architecture. I say this because IBM has managed to keep parity despite the fact that, IIRC, they're able to invest less engineering. Power 7 had higher single threaded performance than anything Intel had when it came out, and it looks like Power 8 is doing a similar leapfrog. If you look at SPEC int_rate and divide by the number of threads you'll find that Intel comes out a factor of 3 better today and 2 when Power 7 came out, but that's due to IBM having 4 threads per core to Intel's 2. In theory there isn't anything preventing an ARM-64 chip from having performance as good as an x86 or POWER chip, but in practice Intel and IBM have a lot of experience in designing high performance chips but ARM doesn't. AMD sort of does, but they haven't been executing well at the high end recently and these will be their first ARM cores. *http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html
ternaryoperator 13y ago
>"This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it." That would require that Intel to stand still with its Atom line. I'm quite sure that Intel, with its well-known corporate paranoia about the marketplace, will continue to compete in low-power x86 technology. Even if AMD delivers on this hybrid with a good product, I expect they'll still have a helluva fight from Intel on their hands.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Just thinking about it superficially (and in general not just server market) it seems ARM is eating Atom's lunch. Atom has to try very hard to cut into mobile market. I can see maybe netbooks, kiosks but how big is that compared to smart phones. Now in the lower power, micro-server/blade market I can see how Atom might be a good competitor to ARM for the software that can't compile to ARM easily. But I am also not sure how big that market is. With virtualization and containerization a large powerful Xeon machine carved into hundreds of containers might be just as good or even better.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
x86 is unlikely to go away any time soon. I could see a world where ARM was more prevalent for consumer devices, but that's only a fraction of computing power. Servers are going to be x86 for a while, there's just too much of a power differential there. And high end workstations and gaming systems, including gaming consoles, are going to be x86 for years and years. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Intel's x86 SoC stuff in the near future. They have the capability to be competitive with ARM, and some mobile devices (like smartphones) are already x86 based.
- neolefty 13y ago
  Are you assuming that an x86 core is more powerful than an ARM core? That may be true historically, but only because ARM implementations were optimized for watts and x86 for compute. I think AMD is talking about optimizing ARM for compute as aggressively as x86, and that should (theoretically) make it slightly faster than x86, because the ARM design is more, having learned the lessons of CISC and RISC and all that.
  - tolle 13y ago
    I wouldn't bet on anyone beating Intel. They are a freaking behemoth. They have pretty much all the best engineers, and if they don't, they have the funds to hire them. If anyone gets close to actually threatening them, they have the means to ramp up their game.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    CISC is dead, it's mostly irrelevant, all modern computers are RISC based. x86 CPUs merely have a micro-op translation system. That imposes some overhead, but in modern CPUs with gigatransistors that overhead isn't that great, and usually not a bottleneck. The lesson of the last 20-30 years is that the ISA is almost entirely tangential to performance. There are some cases where that's not entirely true (like VLIW), but for the most part it still holds. What matters is the core design at a hardware level. And there it would be the height of foolishness to bet against Intel. They've been challenged multiple times by multiple world-class competitors, and they've demolished them. Why is it so hard to imagine a world where multiple competitors have their niches? Look at iphone vs android, who are in the exact same market, for example, there's room for diversity and competition. The only way Intel could "die" is if they stop paying attention and stop caring about competing, and I just don't see that happen. At the end of the day they still have a ton of talent, the best fab capability and capacity in the world, and the ability to execute on projects successfully.
TheCondor 13y ago
Intel is really good. Really really really good, I have a hard time dismissing them but the ability to buy from many vendors and build custom hardware is compelling. I felt this way before about powerpc but there seems to be more compelling community support for arm this time around, the installed base of mobile devices makes a huge difference. It seems to me that intel has been lazy exploiting their performance edge, if amd and others start selling inexpensive lowish power arm 8 and 12 core systems that can legitimately hang with intel then I think they'll have some serious competition. Especially as the niche vendors start making 32 and 64 core chips, assuming they can keep the prices decent. It could be very interesting if a Dell, for example, starts to get in on the game, they're already attempting to be solution vendors. Perhaps targeted arm core start being built, like storage centric designs for SAN type systems and network processors will fall out pretty quickly, all with fundamentally the same isa and just different accelerators for different domains. That something intel has always been against.

taspeotis 13y ago

> There's a lot of code out there which already compiles to multiple architectures so that's one less objection Yeah and there's a lot of code out there which has already been compiled to x86, the vendor has gone out of business, and isn't getting compiled again.

k4st 13y ago
And that's what emulation and binary translation are for! :-P
- deeviant 13y ago
  And there goes the power efficiency...
tormeh 13y ago
Like what? Games? Contrary to enthusiast opinion, games have a pretty short life for most people. Doubt that will be a problem. What kind of enterprise is going to run software without a maintainer? I can't come up with anything else than games for which this is a relevant scenario.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- megablast 13y ago
  You are kidding right? There are loads of old systems that have not been updated, running on MS-Dos or Windows 3.1 systems, stuck in some cupboard in a factory, necessary for continued operation. Stuff that 100 people have ever heard of before.
  - tormeh 13y ago
    Yeah, I know about those. There are industrial control computers that still run on Intel 386 (the original). But once those guys run out of spare parts they won't just upgrade the processor.
    - userbinator 13y ago
      Intersil still makes an 8088, and it's quite expensive too: http://www.intersil.com/content/intersil/en/products/space-and-harsh-environment/-883/microprocessors-and-peripherals/80C88-883.html http://www.intersil.com/content/intersil/en/products/space-a... As the URL suggests, there are applications where an existing, well-characterised CPU is highly preferred over a relatively new one where some previously unknown errata could have catastrophic results.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - Someone 13y ago
        It doesn't even have to be errata. That timing loop someone wrote decades ago might run too fast now. Even if it determines its loop counter at startup, it may fail because it assumes 16 bits is enough for the counter. Conversely, some instructions may have gotten slower over time. For example, I doubt intel worries much about the performance of the original 8087 floating point operations anymore, so they could move them into microcode or even make them illegal instructions, to be emulated in software (I don't they do at the moment because the overhead of decoding the original 8086 instructions is low, but if x86 stays around for a few decades, at some time, I think they will consider doing the latter)
      - 13y ago
sjwright 13y ago
True, but that code isn't exactly a driver of new hardware sales.
- ithkuil 13y ago
  Never underestimate one powerful and common optimization: buying new hardware.
dspillett 13y ago
Yes, but if you are still using such binaries they themselves are a serious risk to your business in other ways. Backwards compatibility is good for transitions, but when you are using it to mitigate risks due to dead companies you are using a technical solution to fix something that is inherently a business/people problem.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 13y ago

I don't think ARM really has any inherent "power advantage" over x86; this paper might be interesting to read: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-power-struggles.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-... Yes, ARM architecture is simpler so AMD might stand a better chance, but I'm not so sure how they'll manage to make ARM cores reach x86-level performance and per-cycle efficiency. Currently in cross-architecture benchmarks like SPEC (which doesn't seem to have any ARMs in it at the moment -- hopefully this will change), x86 is at the top for per-thread, per-clock performance and at least a factor of 2-3 away from the next-best - which was POWER7, if I remember correctly. And given that x86 has tons of intra-instruction optimisation opportunities that Intel are taking advantage of because it's such a rich CISC, and ARM doesn't ("enhanced REP MOVSB" is the first example that comes to mind)... personally, I'm not too optimistic. Either way it will be really interesting to see what happens, particularly the benchmarks.

Symmetry 13y ago
Quite true, the one ISA advantage that ARM has it's that it's much easier to decode. That does make a difference, but it's not a huge factor. On the other hand x86 tends to be a bit more compact but not as much as you might think. ISA doesn't make a huge difference here, but Intel currently has a pretty big lead in both process and architecture. Either because of superior research, the ability to impose more constraints than a merchant silicon house can, or both Intel has been reaching new process nodes sooner and getting better performance on them than their competitors. And Intel currently has a big architecture advantage too. Owning the whole PC market gives you the money to hire a lot of good engineers. It might be that there's a second disadvantage to x86 in that it's complicated enough that you need more engineering to get an equivalent architecture. I say this because IBM has managed to keep parity despite the fact that, IIRC, they're able to invest less engineering. Power 7 had higher single threaded performance than anything Intel had when it came out, and it looks like Power 8 is doing a similar leapfrog. If you look at SPEC int_rate and divide by the number of threads you'll find that Intel comes out a factor of 3 better today and 2 when Power 7 came out, but that's due to IBM having 4 threads per core to Intel's 2. In theory there isn't anything preventing an ARM-64 chip from having performance as good as an x86 or POWER chip, but in practice Intel and IBM have a lot of experience in designing high performance chips but ARM doesn't. AMD sort of does, but they haven't been executing well at the high end recently and these will be their first ARM cores. *http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html

ternaryoperator 13y ago

>"This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it." That would require that Intel to stand still with its Atom line. I'm quite sure that Intel, with its well-known corporate paranoia about the marketplace, will continue to compete in low-power x86 technology. Even if AMD delivers on this hybrid with a good product, I expect they'll still have a helluva fight from Intel on their hands.

rdtsc 13y ago
Just thinking about it superficially (and in general not just server market) it seems ARM is eating Atom's lunch. Atom has to try very hard to cut into mobile market. I can see maybe netbooks, kiosks but how big is that compared to smart phones. Now in the lower power, micro-server/blade market I can see how Atom might be a good competitor to ARM for the software that can't compile to ARM easily. But I am also not sure how big that market is. With virtualization and containerization a large powerful Xeon machine carved into hundreds of containers might be just as good or even better.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

x86 is unlikely to go away any time soon. I could see a world where ARM was more prevalent for consumer devices, but that's only a fraction of computing power. Servers are going to be x86 for a while, there's just too much of a power differential there. And high end workstations and gaming systems, including gaming consoles, are going to be x86 for years and years. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Intel's x86 SoC stuff in the near future. They have the capability to be competitive with ARM, and some mobile devices (like smartphones) are already x86 based.

neolefty 13y ago
Are you assuming that an x86 core is more powerful than an ARM core? That may be true historically, but only because ARM implementations were optimized for watts and x86 for compute. I think AMD is talking about optimizing ARM for compute as aggressively as x86, and that should (theoretically) make it slightly faster than x86, because the ARM design is more, having learned the lessons of CISC and RISC and all that.
- tolle 13y ago
  I wouldn't bet on anyone beating Intel. They are a freaking behemoth. They have pretty much all the best engineers, and if they don't, they have the funds to hire them. If anyone gets close to actually threatening them, they have the means to ramp up their game.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  CISC is dead, it's mostly irrelevant, all modern computers are RISC based. x86 CPUs merely have a micro-op translation system. That imposes some overhead, but in modern CPUs with gigatransistors that overhead isn't that great, and usually not a bottleneck. The lesson of the last 20-30 years is that the ISA is almost entirely tangential to performance. There are some cases where that's not entirely true (like VLIW), but for the most part it still holds. What matters is the core design at a hardware level. And there it would be the height of foolishness to bet against Intel. They've been challenged multiple times by multiple world-class competitors, and they've demolished them. Why is it so hard to imagine a world where multiple competitors have their niches? Look at iphone vs android, who are in the exact same market, for example, there's room for diversity and competition. The only way Intel could "die" is if they stop paying attention and stop caring about competing, and I just don't see that happen. At the end of the day they still have a ton of talent, the best fab capability and capacity in the world, and the ability to execute on projects successfully.

TheCondor 13y ago

Intel is really good. Really really really good, I have a hard time dismissing them but the ability to buy from many vendors and build custom hardware is compelling. I felt this way before about powerpc but there seems to be more compelling community support for arm this time around, the installed base of mobile devices makes a huge difference. It seems to me that intel has been lazy exploiting their performance edge, if amd and others start selling inexpensive lowish power arm 8 and 12 core systems that can legitimately hang with intel then I think they'll have some serious competition. Especially as the niche vendors start making 32 and 64 core chips, assuming they can keep the prices decent. It could be very interesting if a Dell, for example, starts to get in on the game, they're already attempting to be solution vendors. Perhaps targeted arm core start being built, like storage centric designs for SAN type systems and network processors will fall out pretty quickly, all with fundamentally the same isa and just different accelerators for different domains. That something intel has always been against.