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x86 is dead, long live x86

engineering.mercari.com

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Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#111

Post by gumby »

jimmaswell wrote: post #7
retskrad wrote: post #4

x86 lives on desktop now. Windows, Intel, AMD and Nvidia have more or less thrown in the white flag and given the laptop market to Apple.

Based on what? I would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either. The Windows "gaming laptop" I got a few years ago for game dev is perfectly adequate and has features missing from Macbooks: - ethernet port - hdmi port - multiple usb A and C ports - solid keyboard Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.

That's what's so great about capitalism: I'm not interested in any of those features on a laptop, so Apple is great for me.* You do, and several other companies compete for your business.

On a desktop (which these days isn't a tower) I do want some of those features, and I get them.

* except kbd, and I find the apple kbds just fine -- I even survived a couple of rounds of the infamous "butterfly" kbds. But I know some people were unhappy and eventually Apple got their act together.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#112

Post by mjevans »

hedgehog wrote: post #98
Dylan16807 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll always need tiny cores, but it's worth noting that RISC-V can squeeze down to pretty small sizes and is so much nicer to use. Notably you can go smaller than a 68k or 8086.

I suspect 32-bit RISC-V cores will become the minimum unit of processor for new designs. Not a meaningful cost increase over say a 6502 (or ARM) to build, but the convenience of having mainstream compiler support and that kind of thing does make a difference in the cost of building a product.

Less transistors does mean less power too. I could see applications where that matters.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#113

Post by trashtester »

slfnflctd wrote: post #32

When I think about how long chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now), it is hard to conceive of a world where there isn't a significant presence of x86 activity for the rest of my life. The majority of 'the market' may go elsewhere, but for a gazillion reasons, x86 will not be disappearing for quite a while. At this point it would honestly surprise me if we didn't at least have high qua…

.... until the end of the human race as we know it.

I think this is the critical part. If humanity (as we know it) only lasts 10 more years, then sure x86 will still be around somewhere.

If we last a million years, it will probably be gone long before that. Even in a thousand years it's probably gone a long time ago.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#114

Post by holbrad »

jimmaswell wrote: post #7
retskrad wrote: post #4

x86 lives on desktop now. Windows, Intel, AMD and Nvidia have more or less thrown in the white flag and given the laptop market to Apple.

Based on what? I would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either. The Windows "gaming laptop" I got a few years ago for game dev is perfectly adequate and has features missing from Macbooks: - ethernet port - hdmi port - multiple usb A and C ports - solid keyboard Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.

Just chiming in to agree, I don't think we have a single mac in our entire company (100's of people). It's all just windows/x86 like every other business I've worked at.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#115

Post by cthalupa »

Clamchop wrote: post #106
cthalupa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a daily Mac user for about 13 years now I have no idea what phenomenon you're talking about. For any program that is open, even if it hasn't been in use for a while, I click it once, and it comes to the forefront immediately. For programs that are not open, I click it once, and then if I wait for it to launch, it appears in the forefront. If I immediately click back over to my web browser and begin using it before…

They might be referring to how clicks don't register with an app until it has focus (the first click being to focus it). On Windows you can, say, click once to pause on a video playing in a browser window that doesn't have focus but is visible. On macOS, it's two clicks, because you have to focus the app first. I don't care for the behavior but it's so minor to me that it carries essentially no weight.

Ah! This does make sense. I mostly run things fullscreen on my laptop and use Mission Control to swap windows so I really only encounter this when my laptop is docked to a larger display.

It doesn't particularly bother me one way or the other to the point I didn't even think of this, despite also being a daily Windows users on my desktop computer.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#117

Post by monocasa »

astrange wrote: post #85
agloe_dreams wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key element to Apple and ARM and why you are right outside the us is this: 1. Apple's chips are so far beyond everything else that it makes obvious sense for Apple only. Snapdragon is at least 30% slower single core while having worse Performance per watt. 2. Apple wasn't playing fair with their translation layer. The Rosetta layer cheats a little because apple also made the chip. The secret sauce is that the M1 ha…

> That technically breaks ARM spec It does not (or it wouldn't be there) and they aren't the only ARM vendor with TSO (Fujitsu also does it.)

Optionally enabling it does break the ARM spec.

Their cores break the ARM spec in other ways too. Added instructions for AMX, new guard privilege modes, HCR_EL2.E2H can't be disabled, GPRs are clobbered on WFI, etc.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#118

Post by ezfe »

oblak wrote: post #51
edgyquant wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in different worlds. All engineers I know have Macs and the ones that don’t have Linux. The one guy on my team who uses windows is a constant problem as he has to find work arounds for every process we have/service we build.

1. Build a pipeline with macOS in mind (because "All engineers I know have Macs") 2. Complain when the macOS-oriented process doesn't work for everyone.

I work on a split team, Windows and macOS. We do straightforward Java work and most of the problems that we have are related to installing command-line software on Windows.

Installing Postgres, Redis, etc. on Windows is wildly complicated compared to on macOS or Linux.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#119

Post by Symmetry »

tracker1 wrote: post #103
Symmetry wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausibly we're headed for a world where feature size decreases stall out but manufacturing improvements continue to lower the price of transistors over time. In a world like that throwing in a few x86 cores even if the dominant ISA shifts might be worth it from a backwards compatibility standpoint even if other ISA become dominant. There's lots of complications to address there (strict x86 memory ordering versus loo…

IIRC, AMD's model for chiplets could already combine x86 and ARM as an example, not sure if any such beasts are in existence, but should be possible.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking something like a socket integrator buying an 8 core chiplet from AMD or Intel to connect via CXL or whatever to the ARM/RISC-V/GPU/Tensor cores in the other chiplets from different manufacturers.
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