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Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA

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

#81

Post by nerdjon »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #38
nerdjon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for most 'general' computing, yeah Arm is fine. It has been that way for a while with smart phones and tablets being the primary device many people use now. Either you can run it through a compatibility layer like Rosetta 2 or it shifts to native. The performance hit is unlikely to really be felt for something like Word. But the traditional gaming market (not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not t…

This. I understand web devs can just use whatever runs Google Chrome but the real world is a bit more complex. CS2 has over 900k online on Steam right now... Where people push the game to 200fps plus. A PC that can do that can also do anything else. Dev work, VMs, Docker, whatever. Why switch to ARM? Because their soy starbuxx latte workplace gets 2-3h more in battery life? But I have to disagree on >With consoles of…

> Consoles used to be MIPS, POWERPC and stuff and PCs where x86 "back then".

True, but at those times it was far more common for games to ship on one console or skip PC entirely. Even during the Xbox 360 generation which was still powerpc based.

My point there is less that they won't move to ARM for consoles, just that at this point I would be shocked if they were moving to ARM for the 9th gen and we don't start hearing rumors about it now.

And that doing so would have an impact on developers.

> Nobody on Mac is actually a gamer.

I always hated this generalization, Mac is my preferred OS but because I can't really game on it (despite it being quite powerful hardware) I have my custom build desktop. I would much prefer to have just my MBP.

> I will btw. I do not understand why people here love mobile games. No wait I do. They are easy, quick and P2W. They are busy adults or kids or pajeets with no money.

I agree with you mostly here. But the reason I mention this is I have gotten in an argument about what is "real" gaming and people love to point out how much mobile games make as if that is the important metric.

I think there are just 2 different forms of gaming. Neither are necessarily wrong, but they are fundamentally different.

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

#82

Post by tenebrisalietum »

immibis wrote: post #69
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Not in this day and age. Most of that software can be recompiled - hopefully no one is writing stuff in assembly, at least not to the point where it can't easily be ported. With many-core CPUs cheap and common, everything is fast. Hardware drivers matter less in the 2020s - there is far less diversity of hardware than there was in the 1990s. x86 "know-how" is vendor lock-in, not a benefit.

Will you recompile the proprietary Nvidia driver for a GTX260? (not a typo)

No but Nvidia can with all their money.

GPUs are really the only thing requiring their own hardware drivers that's commonly installed. Everything else common and meaningful to the masses is pretty much USB, an old-school serial port, a network interface, or a block device. Bus/interconnect drivers like NVMe, SATA and all that are very standardized and your x86 know-how doesn't buy you any advantage.

Certainly there may be some issues with the trash heap that is ACPI/UEFI; and DTB can go ahead and steamroll that dumpster fire along with the rest of the x86 cruft - there was an x86 world before ACPI after all.

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

#83

Post by MadnessASAP »

marmaduke wrote: post #43
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…

> 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 nv…

> I was working on some C code for science stuff inside Termux on a Pixel 7a

I don't want this to come across as rude or condescending, but who hurt you?

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

#84

Post by nerdjon »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #54
nerdjon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for most 'general' computing, yeah Arm is fine. It has been that way for a while with smart phones and tablets being the primary device many people use now. Either you can run it through a compatibility layer like Rosetta 2 or it shifts to native. The performance hit is unlikely to really be felt for something like Word. But the traditional gaming market (not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not t…

> If consoles did it, it would most likely mean a break in backwards compatibility or a lot of investment in emulation. Consoles tend to break compatibility every like couple of generations anyway. The PS5 is only compatible with PS4, for example, because the PS3 used the PowerPC-based Cell. Also, Nintendo has been using ARM since like, the Gameboy Advance (Fun fact is that in handhelds nintendo tended to use the pre…

> Consoles tend to break compatibility every like couple of generations anyway.

True, generally with an architecture change. (Nintendo being the exception because... well Nintendo).

Recently though, especially with digital stores, companies have been getting more flack for it. There was a lot of concern over Sony being non-commital about the PS5 before release regarding PS4 compatibility.

Xbox was celebrated when they started their initiative last gen to add support for Xbox 360 and OG xbox games (while limited, it was something).

I am just not convinced that gamers are going to be as forgiving of it happening again in the digital age as they were before.

> I agree with you on the custom PC market, but that has to be pretty small compared to consoles.

Oh for sure, but I think it also tends to be a very vocal group. There is a reason `pcmr` is a thing.

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

#85

Post by afr0ck »

tliltocatl wrote: post #65

Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…

What you wrote doesn't make any sense. Arm has DTB [1]. Most SoCs re-use a lot of hardware IP blocks and they require very little modifications to DTB files in the kernel and device drivers to get them working. PCIe and USB support discoverability so no issue from that side.

Arm ecosystem is cleaner in my experience and learned from the mistakes of the past. Arm CPUs are still not as fast as high-end x86 chips, but it's just a matter of time before that market is also eaten by Arm.

[1] https://community.arm.com/oss-platforms/w/docs/525/device-tr...

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

#86

Post by epcoa »

immibis wrote: post #70
CamperBob2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Laptops could do with the power use reduction.

Speculative execution like almost every modern CPU performance trick decreases power use.

Mobile SoCs have OOO.

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

#87

Post by janice1999 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #75
sidewndr46 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box store and buy any AMD or Intel laptop I can throw whatever kernel and userspace I want on it in a few minutes. The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. If x86 dies we will wind up with a bunch of devices where step 1 is "run this code…

> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.

That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1].

[1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html

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

#88

Post by janice1999 »

afr0ck wrote: post #85
tliltocatl wrote: post #65

Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…

What you wrote doesn't make any sense. Arm has DTB [1]. Most SoCs re-use a lot of hardware IP blocks and they require very little modifications to DTB files in the kernel and device drivers to get them working. PCIe and USB support discoverability so no issue from that side. Arm ecosystem is cleaner in my experience and learned from the mistakes of the past. Arm CPUs are still not as fast as high-end x86 chips, but i…

x86 has a a mature open source driver system especially for graphics. Although there are great reverse engineering efforts (Collobra and others), with ARM SOCs you can find yourself dependent on blobs for graphics and locked into ancient and insecure Android and Linux images.

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

#89

Post by MBCook »

sedatk wrote: post #67
emn13 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That statement strongly suggests it's the implementation of the ISA that matters more than the ISA, whether that be due to process node, skill and investment by the manufacturer, or perhaps a bit of luck. By good ARM, do you mean specifically (and only) Apple? Given their budgets (both financial and transistor), their very long history and investment into their chips, their deep integration of stuff like memory and G…

I think parent means "Ampere" being a bad ARM implementation, and Snapdragon X or Apple M-series being the good ones. It's mentioned in the article too. Ampere performs really poorly on idle (101W vs EPYC's meager 19W). I haven't witnessed that problem on my Snapdragon X laptop. I'm not saying Ampere is bad myself though. It's obviously very competitive being a relatively new player and all. But, it's not as polished…

19W at idle seems extremely high to me.

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

#90

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

janice1999 wrote: post #87
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. ? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.

That is not necessarily true, especially for older Chrombooks. Distros like GalliumOS existed for a reason - many Chromebooks needed drivers not available upstream for things like touchpads. Not all have UEFI Firmware support either. There is a great resource though for people who want to boot regular Linux - MrChromebox[1]. [1] https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/known-issues.html

It's true that you'd need drivers for your hardware, but that's not really special; I own plenty of normal x86 PCs with hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for. That said, AIUI Google is generally pretty good at pushing drivers upstream these days.

And the aftermarket UEFI is a great thing - it means that Chromebooks are probably the easiest+cheapest way to have a coreboot machine - but you don't actually need that; the default firmware will, in developer mode, boot any properly-formed image, which is a touch annoying but does in fact let you boot any OS that handles that boot system without replacing the firmware. One of my main machines right now is an ARM chromebook that runs postmarketos on the stock firmware.

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