111–120 of 431 posts
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It's not the memory model I'm thinking of but the cache design, ROB size etc. Obviously this is fairly niche but the friction to making something fast is hugely easier locally.
If you use a VM language like Java, Ruby, etc, that work is largely abstracted.
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The demise of x86 isn't something that can be fiated. It could come about, but there would need to be a very compelling reason to motivate the transition. Technologies that form basic business and infrastructural bedrock don't go away just because of one iteration -- look at Windows Vista for example. Even if every PC and server chip manufacturer were to eradicate x86 from their product offerings tomorrow, you'd stil…
Windows Vista's problems were relatively easy to solve though. Driver issues naturally sorted themselves out over time, performance became less of an issue as computers got more powerful, and the annoyances with Vista's security model could be solved with some tweaking around the edges. There wasn't much incentive to jump from the Windows ecosystem, as there was no doubt that Microsoft could rectify these issues in t…
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Well put. People are being their usual teamsport participants on x86 vs ARM. Intel has execution problems in two departments - manufacturing and integration. ISA is not an issue - they can very well solve the integration issues and investing in semiconductor manufacturing is the need of the hour for the US so I can imagine they getting some traction there with enough money and will. IOW even if Intel switched ISA to…
Intel / AMD had a duopoly on desktop / server because of x86 for a large number of years. Loss of that duopoly - even with competitive manufacturing - has profound commercial implications for Intel. M1 and Graviton will be followed by others that will all erode Intel's business.
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>The only comparable data point says that this is a terrible idea. Huh, I would say completely opposite thing. AMD wouldn't have survived if it kept trying to improve their own process instead of going to TSMC.
The problem here is not the success of AMD after splitting, but the complete retreat of Global Foundries from the SOTA process node. If this happens again with an Intel split then we have only TSMC left, off the coast of mainland China in Taiwan, in the middle of a game of thermonuclear tug of war between the West and China. While Capitalism will likely be part of the solution, through subsidizes for Intel or some ot…
I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…
Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…
Do you think that vendor lock in has stopped people in the past (and future)? Thinking about those kinds of things are long term and many companies think short term.
Perhaps now the "Why do people obsess over manufacturing?" question that many tech workers ask when other US industries were decimated will become a bit less quizzical.
It was more economics and political policy wonks, economists and politicians in general, who didn't just ask that question, but thrust forth the prescriptive rhetoric through a large grid of trade agreements, "Globalism is here to stay! Get over it! Comparative Advantage!" This is only the first in a long, expensive series of lessons these people will be taught by reality in the coming decades. I'm guessing this kind…
I had trouble reading this without falling into the cadence of Howl! by Allen Ginsberg.
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Speaking of Itanium, if the x86 dam has truly burst, I'd much rather see something more like the Itanium than RISC-V. Something new. It's a shame the Mill is so secretive, actually, they're design is rather nice.
One of RISC-V's main goals is to be boring and extensible. Think if it as the control-plane core, or the EFI for a larger system. You would take RISC-V and use it drive your novel VLIW processor.
I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…
Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…
Any ARM licensee (IP or architecture) has access to them. They're just NeoVerse N1 cores and can be synthesized on Samsung or TSMC processes.
Feel this piece ducks one of the most important questions - what is the future and value of x86 to Intel? For a long time x86 was one half of the moat but it feels like that moat is close to crumbling. Once that happens the value of the design part of the business will be much, much lower - especially if they have to compete with an on form AMD. Can they innovate their way out of this? Doesn't look entirely promising…
Why are people so hung up about the x86 thing? ARM continues to be sold on because everyone has now understood they don't really matter; they are not driving the innovations, they were simply the springboard for the Apples, Qualcomms and Amazons to drive their own processor designs, and they are not setup to profit from that. ARMs reference design isn't competitive, the M1 is. Instruction set architecture at this poi…
https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...
..a big part of the reason the M1 is so fast is the large reorder buffer, which is enabled by the fact that arm instructions are all the same size, which makes parallel instruction decoding far easier. Because x86 instructions are variable length, the processor has to do some amount of work to even find out where the next instruction starts, and I can see how it would be difficult to do that work in parallel, especially compared to an architecture with a fixed instruction size.