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x86 is dead, long live x86

engineering.mercari.com

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Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#151

Post by harpratap »

re-thc wrote: post #146
harpratap wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud world is really slow. Imagine writing about Zen3 Milan in Aug 2023 when AMD has already announced Zen4c Bergamo. Actually we were "ahead of the curve" since we got access to T2D before it was made publicly available in Tokyo region, and even then it took several months to get enough capacity in Tokyo to fully migrate our production Kubernetes cluster. I really wish we could test out RISC-V SoCs from the likes o…

> Cloud world is really slow. Imagine writing about Zen3 Milan in Aug 2023 when AMD has already announced Zen4c Bergamo. AWS has Zen 4 in preview. Azure and Oracle have Zen 4 available. It's only Google cloud that's been behind this release. The cloud world isn't slow.

It takes very long time for going from preview to actual production usage for anyone. We had T2D preview access more than a year ago, it took several months to get enough stock in Tokyo region (US always gets preference in such cases whenever a new machine type comes out). GCP already has Zen4 in preview for some US customers. Also, us being one of the largest GCP customers in Japan made things even slower

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#152

Post by Incipient »

mlindner wrote: post #133
tracker1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the new 128-core AMD server parts are on-par with ARM in terms of power efficiency and capable of more raw compute, it may even grow a bit. I think there's lots of room for ARM, Risc-V and x86_64 in the future. There's reasons to support any of them over the others. And given how well developer tool are getting support across them all, it may actually grow a lot. I think the down side is a lot of the secondary…

> I think the down side is a lot of the secondary compute accelerators, such as what intel is pushing and what the various ARM and Risc-V implementations include in practice. I’m curious why this is a downside. The current trends in computing is that we’re long past the point of single threaded compute. The first step of that was multi processor and multi core and that’ll continue with more and more dedicated and spe…

I'm not a hardware designer, so quite possibly wrong.

My understanding for the push for energy efficiency is not for cost reasons, but for performance and stability. At a certain power level, the chips just can't dissipate enough energy, especially on smaller nodes.

If amd could double the performance at double the power, they would.

Cost is obviously a marketing/client-value thing too.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#153

Post by x-complexity »

netr0ute wrote: post #24

Why do these kinds of articles essentially refuse to admit RISC-V exists?

> Why do these kinds of articles essentially refuse to admit RISC-V exists?

Because as much as I like RISC-V myself, it hasn't built up the scale needed to supplant x86/64 or ARM. It's still a long way to go before the following are achieved:

- Similar/better performance to x86/64 or ARM, with at least 80% of their performance

- Similar/lower prices compared against x86/64 or ARM

- A win in either price-to-performance or power-to-performance against x86/64 or ARM at some point.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#154

Post by duskwuff »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #55
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…

Are 6502 chips still used? What's the application?

> Are 6502 chips still used?

Largely, no. I'm sure there's a few out there, but it's unusual.

Embedded 8051 cores, on the other hand... we're probably never going to fully escape those.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#155

Post by senttoschool »

parineum wrote: post #66
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.

If your dev environment is meant to be multiplatform, it's sounds a lot more like the other developers are checking in things that don't work on anything but macs. Your Linux devs are just used to dealing with it.

>If your dev environment is meant to be multiplatform

Why would this be the case?

Dev environments should concentrate on a single platform as much as possible.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#156

Post by oynqr »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #75
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…

>chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now) Also 8051 cores can still be found in modern products

Ah yes, the three essential building blocks of electronics: NAND, NOR, 8051.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#157

Post by dean2432 »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #55
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…

Are 6502 chips still used? What's the application?

I was surprised to learn a few months ago that 6502's are still in production, so there must be some use for it. Perhaps replacement parts for industrial equipment from the 70s-90s?

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#158

Post by pjmlp »

harpratap wrote: post #62
amusingimpala75 wrote: post #61

I would just like to point out that that is not how the saying goes. When Queen Elizabeth died it would have been “the queen is dead, long live the king”, as the dead thing is the predecessor and the living thing is the one that follows it

The dead thing is Intel (x86) and the successor is AMD (x86) as opposed to ARM in our case. Isn't it correct?

If we forget about the Intel patents AMD also needs to produce their own x86 flavour.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#159

Post by pjmlp »

netr0ute wrote: post #24

Why do these kinds of articles essentially refuse to admit RISC-V exists?

Because in the great scheme of the universe, it doesn't matter.

It is an architecure cheered by FOSS folks, that ignore cloud offerings will be just as closed, and no one is selling RISC-V computers at the shopping mall down the street.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#160

Post by pjmlp »

cardanome wrote: post #23
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.

Apple products are only dominant the US. For the rest of the world they are more of an luxury item. That said, I am not terribly interested in ARM-based laptops for now. Yes, they may be more energy efficient and all but that hardly matters to me compared to just having the same x86 architecture I run on my desktop and servers. That sweet binary-compatibility means less headache. People underestimate the advantages t…

> People underestimate the advantages that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year.

People also oversell it, I never had any problem developing software for Windows 2000/NT, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Symbian, from my x86 desktop.

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