Intel and AMD form advisory group to reshape x86 ISA • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by immibis » Wed, Oct 16, 2024, 8:14 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #82

immibis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Irrelevant. Nvidia WON'T.

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

#122

Post by anthk » Wed, Oct 16, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #121

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Irrelevant. Nvidia WON'T.

Nvidia has libre drivers and a firmware blob. Once you stick a PCIE card on a Risc-V port, all the FUD goes away.

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

#123

Post by snvzz » Wed, Oct 16, 2024, 11:04 PM UTC

tliltocatl wrote: post #109

snvzz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. Note that neither RISC-V nor aarch64 are any worse in that regard. If anything, they're doing much better platform standardization wise.

On paper, yes. But how many desktop-suitable systems out there that actually implement it?

Show me one (1) desktop-capable RISC-V system that does not follow the specs that were available at the time it was designed.

As far as I am aware, it does not exist.

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

#124

Post by afr0ck » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 12:28 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #112

afr0ck wrote: post #85

Earlier 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…

DTB it's hell. A lot of devices today only work with obsolete kernel releases.

Yes, when support is not upstream.

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

#125

Post by tliltocatl » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 5:57 AM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #123

tliltocatl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On paper, yes. But how many desktop-suitable systems out there that actually implement it?

Show me one (1) desktop-capable RISC-V system that does not follow the specs that were available at the time it was designed. As far as I am aware, it does not exist.

That's because there are not many RISC-V systems out there yet (VisionFive2, MILK-V and Lichee Pi, are there any more?). aarch64, on the other hand, it is hard to pick find one that is does. And as incentives of RISC-V vendors are not going to be different from those of aarch64 vendors, we can assume they will behave similarly.

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

#126

Post by snvzz » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:40 AM UTC

tliltocatl wrote: post #125

snvzz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me one (1) desktop-capable RISC-V system that does not follow the specs that were available at the time it was designed. As far as I am aware, it does not exist.

That's because there are not many RISC-V systems out there yet (VisionFive2, MILK-V and Lichee Pi, are there any more?). aarch64, on the other hand, it is hard to pick find one that is does. And as incentives of RISC-V vendors are not going to be different from those of aarch64 vendors, we can assume they will behave similarly.

RISC-V is not ARM. Let's try and not extrapolate from ARM's failings.

They were quite late with everything platform related, and suffer from it.

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

#127

Post by ksec » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

Finally. I hope Intel and AMD allows a clean, may be slightly backward incompatible subset of x86-64 that is open for all to implement.

Lets call the new institutions set AE86. It is old, but fast around corners.

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

#128

Post by sidewndr46 » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #90

janice1999 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

What hardware does Linux not have drivers for? I'm not counting WiFi cards connected via USB or PCI-E slots. Those don't have anything to do with x86. Also the reason why those commonly don't work is because the underlying hardware is crap.

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

#129

Post by tenebrisalietum » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #121

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Irrelevant. Nvidia WON'T.

Also irrelevant as well really. x86 isn't making Nvidia refuse to do it.

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

#130

Post by westtan » Fri, Oct 18, 2024, 7:00 AM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #33

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.

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…

Although some companies are trying to promote ARM hardware for gaming, current efforts still seem to be focused on mobile devices. Overall, the transformation of the traditional gaming market will take time, and more obvious changes may be seen in the next few generations of consoles.