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Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

theregister.com

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Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#41

Post by solarkraft »

pseudosavant wrote: post #35
trynumber9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. Qualcomm isn't on that level - they're only on par with AMD and Intel without emulation. The market won't move from the x86 duopoly to Apple's walled garden because they have a fast chip. It's on ARM to make a licensable core that's so much faster than the x86 options that people actually move to it.

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. I'd modify that to: Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive, period. All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, just maybe more efficient. It is the reason Windows has continued to fail on ARM, because they have to use the same slow off-the-shelf c…

> just maybe more efficient

Isn’t efficiency all that matters nowadays? It’s exactly what gives Apple the crazy battery life and allows them a lot of thermal headroom to drive the chips with high power.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#43

Post by marmaduke »

pseudosavant wrote: post #35
trynumber9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. Qualcomm isn't on that level - they're only on par with AMD and Intel without emulation. The market won't move from the x86 duopoly to Apple's walled garden because they have a fast chip. It's on ARM to make a licensable core that's so much faster than the x86 options that people actually move to it.

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. I'd modify that to: Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive, period. All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, just maybe more efficient. It is the reason Windows has continued to fail on ARM, because they have to use the same slow off-the-shelf c…

> All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86

I don’t think top cpu perf is relevant. I was working on some C code for science stuff inside Termux on a Pixel 7a, and would’ve been perfectly ok having that perf on a standard format laptop. I even noticed some branch prediction was better than x86. It’s more an issue that no one is making a decent arm in laptop format with nvme, enough ram etc.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#45

Post by CamperBob2 »

akira2501 wrote: post #27
rdudek wrote: post #3

I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. If there is something that still needs it, x86 emulation is very efficient nowadays. Just look what Apple has done with this ARM architecture. Even now, Qualcom's ARM processors running Windows are doing a fantastic job emulating x86 as needed.

No one "needs" a particular architecture. It's just that some of them are better suited to certain problems than others. If you really want to get rid of something and "move on" why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has? Far more valuable than worrying about how instruction bits are arranged in a stream.

why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has?

Because almost no one but cloud-computing providers have a threat model that justifies the performance hit (and, not coincidentally, the carbon footprint) associated with crippled CPUs.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#46

Post by pizza234 »

sedatk wrote: post #39

After 40+ years, finally :) I really want x86 and ARM to push each other for better power efficiency and performance instead of one side winning out. I’m using an ARM laptop nowadays and the battery life is so impressive.

Very surprisingly, x86 can be competitive (and in some cases, even winning) in terms of power efficiency; see https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-ampereone/5.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#47

Post by kimixa »

maximilianroos wrote: post #9
rdudek wrote: post #3

I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. If there is something that still needs it, x86 emulation is very efficient nowadays. Just look what Apple has done with this ARM architecture. Even now, Qualcom's ARM processors running Windows are doing a fantastic job emulating x86 as needed.

Move on to what? ARM? Is ARM better in every way than x86? (genuine question)

Apple have shown that you can get x86-tier performance, but it generally costs a similar amount of silicon and engineering effort as those x86 devices.

The lack of other competitors managing this suggest the arm ISA isn't "fundamentally" better at delivering that performance, it doesn't seem easier in engineering effort or silicon cost. The Apple products tend to outperform in perf/watt though, but that's hard to really compare as they're focusing on a slightly different market that favors that over "Peak Server Performance".

Is ARM better from a license POV? I also don't think so. Some people claim they want away from the "monopoly" of x86 copyright and license shenanigans from Intel and AMD, but I'd argue ARM control their ISA to a similar degree - you need to buy it off ARM to use it, and they have the right to revoke that license. See the Qualcomm/Nuvia legal mess, and that was when both companies were paying ARM already.

So in many ways I see ARM vs x86 as the "Coke v Pepsi" of ISAs, they seem pretty similar from the outside, serving pretty much the same use case (even if how they go around serving that use case is different), but some people online have rather dramatic opinions they confuse with "Proven Objective Fact".

RISC-V might be a good path away from just repeating the same "Single company controls all licensing" problem, but that's similar to how arm was 15 years ago - there's not really any proven high-performance cores approaching common "desktop" use cases yet, and at least ARM had to do a pretty clean re-write to go from then to now in armv8. Some of the things they "fixed" were very non-obvious until you actually tried to make a large, superscaler speculative implementation too - and who knows what pitfalls there may be in current ISA designs that trip over the "next" performance increasing techniques. Maybe they've managed to avoid all them for the near future, but like many things in R&D we don't really know until we get there.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#49

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Remnant44 wrote: post #37

This is hopeful. Whatever the ARM enthusiasts would like, x86 is going to stick around for a long time, and working together to evolve the ISA extensions in a more cohesive manner would go a long way. In particular, I'd really like AMD and Intel to get on the same page in terms of avx10 / avx512 support. Many people correctly note that avx512 support is not super relevant today, but this can be laid heavily at the fe…

honestly, as exciting as proper AVX-512 support will be, I am probably at least as excited for APX (16->32 general purpose registers). It brings x86 inline with ARM and RISCV, and just generally makes it a lot easier for compilers to not spill registers to the stack.

Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

#50

Post by layer8 »

solarkraft wrote: post #41
pseudosavant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. I'd modify that to: Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive, period. All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, just maybe more efficient. It is the reason Windows has continued to fail on ARM, because they have to use the same slow off-the-shelf c…

> just maybe more efficient Isn’t efficiency all that matters nowadays? It’s exactly what gives Apple the crazy battery life and allows them a lot of thermal headroom to drive the chips with high power.

It’s not clear to what extent this is necessitated by the ISA as opposed to caused by the implementation. Recent x86 chips have caught up a lot in terms of efficiency.
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