41–50 of 124 posts
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.
ARM is a complete jungle by comparison. Each ARM manufacturer licenses a different UART, different USB, different PCIe (or none at all), different SATA, different GPU, different audio even if it's just I2s, different I2c, different SPI, different GPIO controller, different MMC/SDHCI, etc. etc. And each one needs, of course, a different driver!
The big mistake ARM (the company) made was to design only CPUs, not complete SoCs with peripherals, or at least require standard I/O addresses. And now they're trying to patch it up with UEFI and ACPI: closed-source ring -2 blobs that will never be updated or bug-fixed by any manufacturer.
This feels like a take from 10 years ago, when Intel was struggling to deliver 10nm but a lot of people assumed it would all shake out in the end. I could see a defensible case for betting on x86 then, and most of the author’s bullet points seem tailored for that era. But now? I can’t think of a single segment where x86 is doing well. Its out of mobile entirely, it’s slowly getting squeezed out of servers as e.g. Gra…
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…
Hardcore gamers are not a big enough market segment to sustain x86. If everyone else switches to ARM/RISC-V, games will too, eventually.
x86 will lose to ARM/RISC in gaming only if those chips provide a better gaming experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The Mac silicon is nice in that it has partial x86 emulation in that it can work in x86 memory store mode. Since they had control over the hardware, they could punt on one of the hard parts of Rosetta and bake it into Silicon. Understanding the memory ordering requirements from binary without source and without killing performance by being overly conservative (and hell, the source itself probably has memory ordering…
It is hard, but Microsoft came up with a hack to make it easier. MSVC (since 2019) annotates x86 binaries with metadata describing the codes actual memory ordering requirements, to inform emulators of when they need to be conservative or can safely YOLO ordering. Obviously that was intended to assist Microsoft's Prism emulator, but the open source FEX emulator figured out the encoding (which I believe is undocumented) and implemented the same trick on their end.
Emulators still have to do it the hard way when running older MSVC binaries of course, or ones compiled with Clang or GCC. Most commercial games are built with MSVC at least.
This feels like a take from 10 years ago, when Intel was struggling to deliver 10nm but a lot of people assumed it would all shake out in the end. I could see a defensible case for betting on x86 then, and most of the author’s bullet points seem tailored for that era. But now? I can’t think of a single segment where x86 is doing well. Its out of mobile entirely, it’s slowly getting squeezed out of servers as e.g. Gra…
And in terms of squeezing out of servers, this is happening way more slowly than you're implying.
I say this as a person running an NVIDIA Spark as my daily driver. We're not there yet.
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…
RISC-V can be essential for this open future
Any competent computer engineer can design a much better ISA than RISC-V.
The problem is that designing a CPU ISA is easy and it can be done in a few weeks at most. On the other hand, writing all the software tools that you need to be able to use an ISA, e.g. assemblers, linkers, debuggers, profilers, compilers for various programming languages etc. requires a huge amount of work, of many man-years.
The reason why everybody who uses neither x86 nor Arm tends to use RISC-V is in order to reuse the existing software toolchains, and not because the RISC-V ISA would be any good. The advantage of being able to use already existing software toolchains is so great that it ensures the use of RISC-V regardless how bad it is in comparison with something like Aarch64.
The Intel ISA, especially its earlier versions, has also been one of the ugliest ISAs, even if it seems polished when compared to RISC-V. It would be sad if after so many decades during which the Intel/AMD ISA has displaced other better ISAs, it would eventually be replaced by something even worse.
As one of the main examples of why RISC-V sucks, I think that any ISA designer who believes that omitting from the ISA the means for detecting integer overflow is a good idea deserves the death penalty, unless the ISA is clearly declared as being a toy ISA, unsuitable for practical applications.
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…
Modern PCs are NOT open platform anymore. Not since signed bootloaders, UEFI, secure boot. ARM on the other hand, as long as they don't require signed bootloaders (like phones) or a closed source driver for GPU or something, are in fact open.
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.
You can't run a COM program today. Not without emulation. Recent PCs can't even run DOS EXE because they're missing the BIOS interrupts most DOS programs use.