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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

#61

Post by loup-vaillant »

derleth wrote: post #42
Pinhedd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that most of the perceived lag on a modern desktop is not due to the CPU, but inefficient I/O to the hard disk or network Most perceived lag on a modern desktop comes from excessive abstraction which results in poor coding practices. You could certainly argue that IO bottlenecks or a lack of system resources will certainly have an impact but that impact wont be realized until the environment is somewhat satura…

Most perceived lag on a modern desktop comes from excessive abstraction which results in poor coding practices. This is worthless without actual numbers, which I doubt you have. Hardware people blame software, software people blame hardware, as it has always been, so mote it be, amen.

Indirectly related: the size of current systems: a typical desktop system is written in about 200 millions lines of code (about 10K books, or a library). http://vpri.org/ (co-founded by Alan Kay) is trying to make a roughly equivalent system in 20K LOCs, or about one single book. And it looks like they can do it (5 years in the project, 1 more year to go).

Let's say it is possible. That would mean current systems are about ten thousands times bigger than they could be. That's 4 orders of magnitude. And even if it isn't 4 full orders of magnitude, I'm willing to bet on 3.

It is not yet about raw speed, or latency. But when a system is at least 3 orders of magnitudes bigger than it could be, it does mean that something there vastly suboptimal. And runtime performance could very well be part of that "something".

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

#62

Post by lmm »

nextparadigms wrote: post #22
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…

Things are a lot different now than they were back then. The fact that ARM keeps growing at a very fast rate is very real. ARM will be in billions of smartphones and tablets and who knows what other kind of devices in a few years. If people start using those devices more and more instead of x86 PC's (including ARM PC's), then it's over for Intel. ARM doesn't have to beat Intel in raw performance. They just need to ma…

I love my transformer, but you can get a "normal person" ultrabook for the same price with better performance and maybe half the battery life. For "normal desktop" use that's probably a good tradeoff.

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

#64

Post by Mordor »

plq wrote: post #53

There are many reasons why the current status quo won't change so soon and an important one is because ARM still lacks 64-bit addressing. Servers have long made the jump to 64-bit, so has most of the consumer-grade computers. Without 64-bit support from its competitors, Intel doesn't have much to fear, especially in the datacenter space, where performance per watt is a powerful selling point.

ARMv8 64-bit instruction set architecture announced last month, designs due next year. When should Intel become afraid?

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

#65

Post by ippisl »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #59
CPlatypus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SP…

Who cares what the top supercomputers are powered by, what matters is the market. I'm fairly certain that numerical simulation systems do not dominate the high-end computer market. Instead, it's still all about servers that spend most of their time shuffling data around, which intel platforms still do quite well at. Additionally, intel still has plenty of time to get up to pace in the mobile market. The tablet market…

Assuming tablets will run android , i would be surprised if intel made much money from atom processors on the tablet, considering the competition.

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

#66

Post by fredsanford »

Pinhedd wrote: post #38
andrewmunn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm the author of this article. I do not have a degree in electrical or computer engineering. I'm merely stating the trends I've seen in the PC industry over the last few years. I am, however, a Software Engineer. I know that most of the perceived lag on a modern desktop is not due to the CPU, but inefficient I/O to the hard disk or network. One must only look at the iPad 2 too see that's very possible to make…

I know that most of the perceived lag on a modern desktop is not due to the CPU, but inefficient I/O to the hard disk or network Most perceived lag on a modern desktop comes from excessive abstraction which results in poor coding practices. You could certainly argue that IO bottlenecks or a lack of system resources will certainly have an impact but that impact wont be realized until the environment is somewhat satura…

It strikes me funny how AMD couldn't compete in a market with Intel and maybe Via, but somehow they think they can compete in a market with 3+ strong competitors.

This feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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

#68

Post by 4ad »

Mordor wrote: post #64
plq wrote: post #53

There are many reasons why the current status quo won't change so soon and an important one is because ARM still lacks 64-bit addressing. Servers have long made the jump to 64-bit, so has most of the consumer-grade computers. Without 64-bit support from its competitors, Intel doesn't have much to fear, especially in the datacenter space, where performance per watt is a powerful selling point.

ARMv8 64-bit instruction set architecture announced last month, designs due next year. When should Intel become afraid?

Absolutely never solely because of this. Intel makes ARM CPUs. It's a very important player in the ARM market.

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

#69

Post by Retric »

wtallis wrote: post #25
stephenjudkins wrote: post #15

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 In…

One rule of thumb I've seen writers on Anandtech express several times is that any given microarchitecture can cover at most about one order of magnitude for power consumption. This leads to laptop/desktop-oriented microarchitectures that can scale at most from about 13W to 130W by tweaking clock speeds and voltage. More recently, the high end has dropped down to at most about 95W for non-server chips, but it still m…

95W / 10 = 9.5W which is a problem but 1/4th the cores = 2.4W which is reasonable.

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

#70

Post by yvdriess »

brudgers wrote: post #51
andrewmunn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm the author of this article. I do not have a degree in electrical or computer engineering. I'm merely stating the trends I've seen in the PC industry over the last few years. I am, however, a Software Engineer. I know that most of the perceived lag on a modern desktop is not due to the CPU, but inefficient I/O to the hard disk or network. One must only look at the iPad 2 too see that's very possible to make…

> "Unless you know something I don't." Based upon history, reports of the x86's death have been greatly exaggerated - since the late 1980's. Here's a nice 1999 article from Ars: [ http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html ] and the archive.org version for those without IE4 or Netscape Navigator: [ http://web.archive.org/web/19991129051550/http://arstechnica... ] Floating Point operations are an example of…

I just want to point out that the RISC/CISC term is anachronistic, it doesn't really apply anymore to the desktop and server world. Intel's x86 processors are RISC micro-instructions but with a CISC-like interface for example, effectively blending both. It's what allowed them to race ahead of all competitors in the first place.

edit: My excuses, I couldn't access the cited arstechnica article.

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