Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia would. Most of the work it's in the firmware blob after all.
Nvidia obviously wouldn't.
Nvidia's drivers are semifree today.
Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
111–120 of 132 posts
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#112Everyone 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…
DTB it's hell. A lot of devices today only work with obsolete kernel releases.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#113Give us some riscv instruction decoders on the x86 cpus, let us pick per-process what ISA we use
Why would Intel and AMD put a hole in the wall that guards their duopoly? Justifiably it wouldn't be a sales booster in the short term and in the long term it's a threat.
Intel used to sell some embedded ARM CPU's too back in the day. They could adapt to RISC-V in few years.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Graphics is "fixable" as you can stick a PCIe video card into an ARM or RISC-V system that has PCIe and it will work. Integrated graphics is a mess, that's true. But then so is NVIDIA drivers (Do they ever care for graphics any more or is it just LLMs go brrr for them?).
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#115Everyone 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…
I've recently discovered it isn't just per SoC. It's per device. You can't even buy a new laptop with an existing SoC without first checking how far along the manufacturer of that specific device is with mainlining the device tree for that specific device and providing tbds and whatever else. And then they have to do that for every kernel version or you'll be stuck with a device that can't be updated beyond 6.11 forever. Just what.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
For high-tier environments consider GNU/Linux and *BSD already ported. On the rest, for office tasks either they run on the browser, Java or C# or fast enough Win32 shims.
What about the rest of the software?
You're on Hacker News. We don't care about anybody except users of open source software.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the rest of the software?
You're on Hacker News. We don't care about anybody except users of open source software.
Either fast userspace emulation or hooks. Adobe did it twice or trice. Microsoft did that under DOS-Windows and then X86->ARM.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#118Everyone 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…
Yeah, PC was also supposed to be like the other ecosystems, but IBM got fooled by Compaq in a clever way they failed to prevent. PS2 and MCA architecture was a kind of attempt to recover control over the PC, but it was too late.
Yup. Microchannel had higher performance than ISA, but you were locked in to IBM. People instead wanted lower cost and the freedom to be able to use all the existing cards.
This was a fundamental misunderstanding by IBM. The PC exploded, not because it was from IBM, but because it was not locked down. IBM wanted to re-create their locked-down world; the market was never going to go where IBM wanted it to.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would Intel and AMD put a hole in the wall that guards their duopoly? Justifiably it wouldn't be a sales booster in the short term and in the long term it's a threat.
Intel used to sell some embedded ARM CPU's too back in the day. They could adapt to RISC-V in few years.
That was a side hustle. That was expanding their markets. They also tried with the Atom and the Xeon Phi, but this is now other architectures moving into their heartland. Sure, if RISC-V takes over then of course Intel will adapt, but right now they have the duopoly that they share with AMD. If RISC-V becomes a standard than IBM for example will get involved and they definitely know how to design a chip.
But this really looks like another industry shift like when businesses all moved to Unix, or when unixes all moved to business, or homes consolidated on Wintel, each time moving to a more open commodity platform. RISC-V and (to a lesser degree) ARM are much more commodity than the duopoly.
Re: Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA
#120Everyone 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…
I'm suspicious of those trying to "kill" x86 in the same way I'm suspicious of proprietary messaging apps trying to "kill" email.