Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of x86?

fernstrategy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: The End of x86?

#31

Post by ssp »

The tagline from Innovator's Dilemma is that well-managed companies can get into trouble when they are being disrupted. The reason is that it's normally good business to get rid of low-margin products and focus your resources on the ones that make the most money. And then someone takes over the low end and expands into the high end.

But Intel is not falling for that one. They have made the Atom, a slow, cheap, low-power chip that competes directly with ARM. That's likely a wise move, but Intel now has the problem that low-margin chips are still bad business. They have to have their expensive best-in-industry fabs make low-margin Atoms, when they would much, much rather have them make expensive Xeons.

At one point they made a deal to have Atoms manufactured at TSMC, which would have helped a lot with this problem, but apparently that deal didn't work out. Even if it had worked out, the Atom would no longer have the process advantage, and then backwards compatibility would be the only advantage for x86. With Windows becoming less and less relevant, that's a big problem, considering the technical advantages ARM has over x86.

So fundamentally, Intel has a problem that CPUs are becoming commoditized, which means they will either have to take much lower margins or retreat to the high end. Both scenarios are unpleasant for them.

Re: The End of x86?

#32

Post by dreaming »

tptacek wrote: post #28
pkaler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? I'll bet $5 that the MacBook Air in the future (18-24 months) will switch to ARM once the >2GHz ARM processors start shipping en masse. The Asus Eee PCs running Android with Snapdragon processors already embed the Cortex-A9 MPCores.

You think Apple is going to switch to an architecture that breaks VMWare?

Apple have demonstrated time and again that they are happy to break existing functionality if it suits their aims.

Re: The End of x86?

#34

Post by wmf »

nl wrote: post #19
wmf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Windows Phone is based on NT. Apple and Android have shown that you can build a mainstream platform ecosystem from nothing in 2-3 years, so who needs Windows compatibility?

Neither Apple iOS or Android were "build from nothing in 2-3 years". iOS is based on OS-X, which is based on NeXT, which is based on BSD (~40 years of work) Android is based on Linux (so ~20 years of work)

My point is that they went from zero apps and zero users to lots in 2-3 years. IMO the argument that Windows backwards compatibility is the only way to get the long tail of tens of thousands of apps has been refuted.

Re: The End of x86?

#35

Post by protomyth »

jbrennan wrote: post #23
jbarham wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"4GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody." ARMS's Achilles' heel is that it's only 32-bit, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to a segmented address space any time soon.

That's a great point. Are there any 64 bit ARM chips on the horizon? I don't know much about chips, so maybe it's not even possible given the architecture.

There were a lot of stories in the 2000 time frame, but nothing seems to have been actually done.

Re: The End of x86?

#36

Post by theclay »

jbarham wrote: post #16
pkaler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? I'll bet $5 that the MacBook Air in the future (18-24 months) will switch to ARM once the >2GHz ARM processors start shipping en masse. The Asus Eee PCs running Android with Snapdragon processors already embed the Cortex-A9 MPCores.

"4GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody." ARMS's Achilles' heel is that it's only 32-bit, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to a segmented address space any time soon.

One of the article's contentions is that the vast majority of users are satisfied with Windows and Microsoft programs as they are right now. Most of those programs are 32-bit.

By extension, if they are satisfied with 32-bit programs and don't feel a need to switch, then they won't miss 64-bit architectures.

Re: The End of x86?

#37

Post by theclay »

dreaming wrote: post #32
tptacek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Apple is going to switch to an architecture that breaks VMWare?

Apple have demonstrated time and again that they are happy to break existing functionality if it suits their aims.

And just as important--Apple's customers have demonstrated time and again that they will follow wherever Apple leads.

Re: The End of x86?

#38

Post by protomyth »

jules wrote: post #13

What portion of x86 transistors are dedicated to supporting the bad instruction set design?

I seem to remember from one article that is was the same amount of transistors as the older ARM cores (not the A8 or A9). This is a pretty big anchor to overcome.

previous on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051

Re: The End of x86?

#40

Post by jayphelps »

Great article. As an example, it's fairly obvious Apple is building up it's internal CPU engineering abilities to inevitably put an ARM in a Macbook. But I don't think it will be in the near future due to breaking compatibility with current software, especially those who use SSE instructions. But who knows, maybe they'll create an x86 emulator for the transition like Rosetta. OS XI maybe?
Post reply on HN