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x86 is dead, long live x86

engineering.mercari.com

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Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#21

Post by Andrex »

kens wrote: post #10
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.

ARM has a lot more market share in people's minds than in actual numbers. One research firm says that ARM has 15% of the laptop market share in 2023, expected to increase to 25% by 2027. (Surprisingly, Apple only has 90% of the ARM laptop market.) In the server market, just an estimated 8% of CPU shipments in 2023 were ARM. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/arm-based-pcs-to-nearly... https://www.digitimes.com/news…

I keep meaning to research this, and maybe this isn't the right place, but how are things going for Linux executables? Last I tried Linux on ARM it seemed like application-level support for ARM was very spotty.

It doesn't seem like a Rosetta 2-like effort is making it into mainline Linux anytime soon, if ever.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#22

Post by katbyte »

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.

MacBooks now post 2019 have a great keyboard, hdmi and multiple usb c ports, as well sd card and headphone jack.

The only thing it is actually missing from your list is Ethernet and usb a

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#23

Post by cardanome »

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 that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year. Maybe one day I am going to run an ARM laptop or even RISC-V.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#25

Post by shortrounddev2 »

edgyquant wrote: post #11
jimmaswell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Every company I've worked for provided a macbook to us, and all my coworkers use a macbook. When I have the option, I pick PC. My last company gave me a choice between mac or PC, and I picked the thinkpad. My current company gave me a macbook pro, but I opted to use my personal Windows machines instead.

I'm the guy who has to come up with a workaround, but it's never a problem for others. Usually I'm translating some bash command into powershell, which takes maybe 2 minutes. Everything else runs just fine, and I don't even need to use WSL. Windows is a perfectly viable development platform, if you give a shit about learning the differences between a unix-like environment and windows instead of just copping out and using WSL

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#26

Post by xcdzvyn »

netr0ute wrote: post #24

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

Because it essentially doesn't? At least when I tried looking a few months ago, it was really hard to find any commercially available RISC-V SoCs, let alone high performance ones. Sure there's little hobbyist boards going for $200>, but that's about it.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#27

Post by shortrounddev2 »

redwall_hp wrote: post #18
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.

Yep. I work in an entire office of engineers with only Macs (mostly ARM ones now) and I only have a Mac at home, besides a very old ThinkPad running Ubuntu. (Aside from FFXIV on MacOS, I've moved any gaming to PS5 and Switch.) I haven't actively used Windows since 2008. It's such an obnoxious OS to use, and I have never seen a Windows laptop with quality in the same zip code as a Mac. There's always a terrible touch…

I like the aluminum bodies of macs, but I hate the flat keyboards. In my view, no laptop brand has had a good keyboard since the Thinkpad T420.

In terms of build quality, apple laptops are pretty good, but I can't stand macOS and apple keeps fucking with their ports.

My Inspiron 16 has a good glass screen and a pretty solid aluminum body. It's got all the ports I want (HDMI, USB-A 3.0, SD card reader, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack). Personally, the macbook pro my company issued me is one of my least favorite laptops I've ever used. I also had compatibility or performance problems with x86 based software when I got my first M1 macbook, I don't know if they're improved anything since then

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#28

Post by jsheard »

netr0ute wrote: post #24

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

Probably because the article is looking at silicon that's actually available today, and big-iron RISC-V silicon akin to Xeon/EPYC/Graviton/Ampere is more of a hypothetical at this point.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#29

Post by arp242 »

Andrex wrote: post #21
kens wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM has a lot more market share in people's minds than in actual numbers. One research firm says that ARM has 15% of the laptop market share in 2023, expected to increase to 25% by 2027. (Surprisingly, Apple only has 90% of the ARM laptop market.) In the server market, just an estimated 8% of CPU shipments in 2023 were ARM. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/arm-based-pcs-to-nearly... https://www.digitimes.com/news…

I keep meaning to research this, and maybe this isn't the right place, but how are things going for Linux executables? Last I tried Linux on ARM it seemed like application-level support for ARM was very spotty. It doesn't seem like a Rosetta 2-like effort is making it into mainline Linux anytime soon, if ever.

For open source applications it's generally pretty good. Closed source: not so much.

qemu-x86_64 is probably the closest there is to Rosetta; it works fairly well and I think conceptually it's identical or similar to Rosetta, but I don't really know what the performance is like, and it's of course not as integrated/automatic as Rosetta.

Re: x86 is dead, long live x86

#30

Post by harpratap »

jeffbee wrote: post #13
harpratap wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. But in cloud our hands our tied, we cannot really switch from one one generation to another so easily. GCP has so far never launched a new chip while keeping the price same or lower. We did same cost/perf analysis on newer generation chips like Ice Lake from Intel and even Milan from AMD in the form of N2D, but both are quiet expensive for the performance uplift they provide. The unique thing about T2D…

I get what you mean. For the record, here's a GCP engineer holding forth on price/performance ratios who also concludes that T2D is optimal. https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-cpu-pe... ETA: Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3, so the go compiler generates code using AVX2, BMI2, LZCNT, etc.

Thanks, that's a really insightful article!

> Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3

That's actually a long pending open issue in our backlog :)

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