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X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

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Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#11

Post by haberman »

This reads like a person who has been saying "RISC beats CISC" since the Apple-on-PowerPC days because of ideological opinions about elegance, and is looking for any excuse to re-express that viewpoint.

Look, I still think microkernels are better than monolithic kernels, but you don't see me claiming Linux is doomed just because the L4 microkernel is running on 300 million mobile phones worldwide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Kernel_Labs).

Monolithic kernels aren't going anywhere, and neither is x86.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#12

Post by feralchimp »

"Performance per watt" is great, but when I step within 2 meters of a power outlet I want "performance." And many machines (including laptops) spend their lives within 2 meters of a power outlet.

At what point did "consumer" start meaning "low end" or "handheld"? The 27" quad-core i7 iMac is a consumer computer. Gaming PCs are consumer computers.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#13

Post by pbharrin »

CPlatypus wrote: post #10
jfpoole wrote: post #2

I'm excited about ARM processors for low-power applications but I can't see ARM replacing x86 processors (even in the consumer space) until ARM performance is comparable to x86 performance. Right now the slowest MacBook Air is 6x faster than the iPad 2; until the difference is 2x or less I just can't see companies or consumers switching to ARM.

6x the performance . . . for 8.5x the TDP. It's pretty easy to see why ARM designs are already preferable for almost anything that has a battery, and laptops are outselling desktops already. Sure, there will always be applications where single-thread performance will matter more than total performance or performance per watt for many cores - believe me, we learned that lesson at SiCortex - but those applications are…

I will take 6x the performance for 8.5x the TDP. My 3 year old MacBook Pro has plenty of battery life for my use case. You have to look at absolute performance numbers for the application.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#14

Post by dman »

alf wrote: post #3

This is really more AMD throwing in the towel vs. Intel. It's really disappointing to see a competitor leave such an important market. I'm much more disappointed to see the X86 market go from 2 to 1, than I am happy to see the ARM market go from 4 to 5.

If intel manages to beat AMD out of the x86 market then it will be the end of an era. AMD has done a pretty good job of guarding the x86 flanks in critical times - the P4 debacle, the move to 64 bit, operating in low margin parts of the market where intel has few offerings, offering 4 socket servers, currently offering higher number of cores than intel equivalents. Also they do a good job of exploring the design space and have at various times come up with useful innovations. AMD going out would make x86 a much more monolithic entity in the market and much more open to attack from competitors. Even currently AMD's low power brazos designs eke out a segment of the market where Intel has no real offerings ("good" opengl performance on a SOC).

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#15

Post by stephenjudkins »

This is an largely vapid and meaningless prediction by someone who doesn't demonstrate anything but the most superficial knowledge of the microprocessor industry. Perhaps he knows something we don't, but as far as I can tell he's only extrapolating current market trends.

Obviously Intel (once led by Andy Grove, author of "Only the Paranoid Survive") is aware of the threat posed by ARM. If someone could explain how Intel will fail to meet the challenges of getting x86's performance-per-watt to match ARM's, and how this compares to the challenges ARM vendors face in order to get raw performance up to Intel's level, I would love to read it. However, this post offers little such insight.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#16

Post by CPlatypus »

haberman wrote: post #11

This reads like a person who has been saying "RISC beats CISC" since the Apple-on-PowerPC days because of ideological opinions about elegance, and is looking for any excuse to re-express that viewpoint. Look, I still think microkernels are better than monolithic kernels, but you don't see me claiming Linux is doomed just because the L4 microkernel is running on 300 million mobile phones worldwide ( http://en.wikipedi…

X86 is not going away, I agree, but Intel can hardly exercise the kind of dominance they've enjoyed for the last several years when they're facing serious threats at both the low and high end. At the low end, ARM simply beats x86 for anything with a battery. Intel has already lost the phone and tablet markets, and laptops are highly likely to follow.

At the high end, look at the http://top500.org/. #1 is based on SPARC VIIIfx. #10 is based on the PowerXCell 8i. #2 and #4 both derive much of their power from GPUs. Even that understates the situation, because many of the most powerful computers next year - Blue Waters, Mira, Sequoia - will also be based on non-x86 architectures. Then look at what Tilera or Adapteva are doing with many-core, what Convey is doing with FPGAs, what everyone is doing with GPUs. Intel is going to be a minority in the top ten soon, and what happens in HPC tends to filter down to servers.

So Intel has already lost mobile and HPC. Even if Intel keeps all of the desktop market, what percentage of the laptop and server markets could they afford to lose before they follow AMD? Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't, but anybody who can see beyond the "Windows and its imitators" segment of the market would recognize that as a realistic possibility.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#17

Post by fpgeek »

dman wrote: post #14
alf wrote: post #3

This is really more AMD throwing in the towel vs. Intel. It's really disappointing to see a competitor leave such an important market. I'm much more disappointed to see the X86 market go from 2 to 1, than I am happy to see the ARM market go from 4 to 5.

If intel manages to beat AMD out of the x86 market then it will be the end of an era. AMD has done a pretty good job of guarding the x86 flanks in critical times - the P4 debacle, the move to 64 bit, operating in low margin parts of the market where intel has few offerings, offering 4 socket servers, currently offering higher number of cores than intel equivalents. Also they do a good job of exploring the design spac…

Of course, AMD has been in trouble before and those times weren't as significant. I think what could end the era this time is not AMD throwing in the towel as such, but the fact that AMD could throw in the towel because there is somewhere else to go.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#18

Post by CPlatypus »

pbharrin wrote: post #13
CPlatypus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6x the performance . . . for 8.5x the TDP. It's pretty easy to see why ARM designs are already preferable for almost anything that has a battery, and laptops are outselling desktops already. Sure, there will always be applications where single-thread performance will matter more than total performance or performance per watt for many cores - believe me, we learned that lesson at SiCortex - but those applications are…

I will take 6x the performance for 8.5x the TDP. My 3 year old MacBook Pro has plenty of battery life for my use case. You have to look at absolute performance numbers for the application.

Does it still have plenty of battery life when you're doing something besides commenting on Hacker News? Perhaps more importantly, how fast do you need a single instruction stream to be? I'm writing this on my own three-year-old MacBook Pro, but I know that its battery life is mostly contingent on the CPU remaining idle 99% of the time. For any multi-tasking workload, or even for single-task workloads if the software is written correctly, a more efficient CPU architecture with many smaller cores would offer both greater responsiveness and longer battery life even during my most computationally intensive moments. Maybe you're one of the 1% who really need higher single-thread performance, and not just because of crappy multi-core-naive software, but the market is driven by the other 99%.

Re: X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered

#20

Post by da_dude4242 »

pbharrin wrote: post #13
CPlatypus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6x the performance . . . for 8.5x the TDP. It's pretty easy to see why ARM designs are already preferable for almost anything that has a battery, and laptops are outselling desktops already. Sure, there will always be applications where single-thread performance will matter more than total performance or performance per watt for many cores - believe me, we learned that lesson at SiCortex - but those applications are…

I will take 6x the performance for 8.5x the TDP. My 3 year old MacBook Pro has plenty of battery life for my use case. You have to look at absolute performance numbers for the application.

How are they mutually exclusive products?
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