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Never Bet Against x86

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Re: Never Bet Against x86

#31

Post by mjg59 »

mifydev wrote: post #22

I'm quite concerned about x86 future, but the article has a point if you read it past the title. It says that x86 is highly standardised - even with different combinations of chips, peripherals and motherboards you know it will work just fine. It's not the case for ARM systems - can you even have something similar to IBM PC with ARM? I personally know that adding support for ARM devices on Linux is a huge and manual…

There's a standard like ACPI for Arm devices - it's called ACPI, and it's a requirement for the non-Devicetree SystemReady spec (https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...). But it doesn't describe the huge range of weirdness that exists in the more embedded end of the Arm world, and it's functionally impossible for it to do so while Arm vendors see devices as an integrated whole rather than a general purpose device that can have commodity operating systems installed on them.

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#32

Post by expedition32 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #8

I don't think my gaming PC will ever use an ARM core. When you want true "big iron" you want x86. Intel and AMD have a duopoly on high-performance, no-TDP-spared chips, and they aren't sharing that market with anyone. The reason ARM is making inroads in the server market is we've reached the point where cooling is a significant cost factor in server farms, so lowering TDP is starting to become a relevant factor in to…

Yeah things like heat and energy use don't matter much for gamers. Most of that comes from the GPU anyway.

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#33

Post by mjg59 »

cardanome wrote: post #29
davidkwast wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V can be essential for this open future

As far as I understand RISC-V has the same lack of standardization that ARM has, no?

If anything, worse - there's much wider variety in the set of CPU extensions available.

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#34

Post by shmerl »

creatonez wrote: post #9
trvz wrote: post #2

Seems like a silly thing to say right when x86 is getting pummelled to death by Apple and Valve, maybe slowly, but steadily, while the rest of the gang also watches on.

> Valve This is a funny thing to say when Valve hasn't actually released any ARM device yet, and the Steam Deck is still fully reliant on x86. The ARM hardware they do plan to release relies on x86 emulation, which is something that historically usually doesn't pan out.

Steam Frame is using ARM. Not sure exactly what was the reason for them to do it there.

They also use emulation backing this project: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #5
trvz wrote: post #2

Seems like a silly thing to say right when x86 is getting pummelled to death by Apple and Valve, maybe slowly, but steadily, while the rest of the gang also watches on.

I'd add AWS + Gravitron to that list as well.

Lately I've made making some AWS Lambda functions to do some simple things in Python and chose to use the ARM-based instances because there wasn't any reason not to.

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#38

Post by klelatti »

The point about the difficulties with Arm may be fair comment but the positioning and outlook of this post is decidedly weird. It seems to pretend that competitive desktop Arm processors already exist and ignores the existence of Arm ACPI.

On the conclusion - x86 didn't eventually win in smartphones.

And of course having a choice of processor designs from precisely two firms is absolutely something that we should continue to be happy with (and the post ignores RISC-V).

Re: Never Bet Against x86

#40

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Zeetah wrote: post #36

I wonder if we'll still be running x86 code a hundred years after it came out (according to Wikipedia, it came out in 1978). We are already 48 years in.

Really when people say x86 now tho they don't mean that. They really mean the variant introduced with the 386 which has a linear memory model, memory protection, etc. Or x86_64 which is philosophically akin to the 386 but really a new ISA.

So it's really more like mid-80s or early 2000s, not late 70s.

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