Feels like one of the signs of the apocalypse :-) And it is a pretty stunning "conclusion" to a war that started 20 years ago with the introduction of Sledgehammer and the AMD64 instruction set. For me though it really emphasizes how much of a threat ARM (and presumably RISCV) architectures are to these two companies.
I was wondering about this as well. What do Intel and AMD gain from protecting x86? Why not just adopt RISC-V themselves and make the best processors and process for that? Wouldn’t that get them what they want (in terms of their company’s strategy)? There’s not really value in the architecture itself as much as the real products they sell, right (the actual processors)?
The value of the ISA is the huge volume of existing software for it, including hardware drivers. The whole x86-using industry migrating away from x86 would be a multi-decade and costly process. In addition, this would just mean more competition for Intel and AMD, as they would lose the moat of their x86 know-how. Why would they do that?
For high-tier environments consider GNU/Linux and *BSD already ported.
On the rest, for office tasks either they run on the browser, Java or C# or fast enough Win32 shims.
Nah. Not in this day and age. Most of that software can be recompiled - hopefully no one is writing stuff in assembly, at least not to the point where it can't easily be ported. With many-core CPUs cheap and common, everything is fast. Hardware drivers matter less in the 2020s - there is far less diversity of hardware than there was in the 1990s. x86 "know-how" is vendor lock-in, not a benefit.
Will you recompile the proprietary Nvidia driver for a GTX260? (not a typo)
Nvidia would. Most of the work it's in the firmware blob after all.
Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…
The annoying thing is that it doesn't need do be like this; as you note, ARM & RISC-V are perfectly capable of doing UEFI et al., but everyone apparently prefers to save a tiny bit of money and just not bother.
Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…
I'm pretty fearful of the death of x86 because it probably implies the death of easily accessible hardware for general purpose computing. If I go to a big box store and buy any AMD or Intel laptop I can throw whatever kernel and userspace I want on it in a few minutes. The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off. If x86 dies we will wind up with a bunch of devices where step 1 is "run this code…
> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off.
? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.
Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…
Doesn't RISC-V computers have something akin ISAAPIC? And yes, ARM it's a clusterfuck all-in-one were every device it's bound to a kernel version and good luck upgrading the kernel with free devices. The device-tree it's a light Tivoization.
Everyone is commenting on "let x86 die" and I would agree if it was just about ISA. But the problem is that x86 has some-sorta-total-disaster-of-a-standard for peripherals and configuration (ACPI, UEFI and so on) and you can actually buy a computer that is compliant and will run Linux out of the box, even if with some glitches. ARM is a handful of totally incompatible SoCs and you are totally dependent on SoC integra…
Yeah, PC was also supposed to be like the other ecosystems, but IBM got fooled by Compaq in a clever way they failed to prevent.
PS2 and MCA architecture was a kind of attempt to recover control over the PC, but it was too late.
I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. If there is something that still needs it, x86 emulation is very efficient nowadays. Just look what Apple has done with this ARM architecture. Even now, Qualcom's ARM processors running Windows are doing a fantastic job emulating x86 as needed.
>I wish we could just get away from x86 "standard" and move on. But actually why? is there reason that isn't licensing? Because perf or perf/watt is not the reason
The best reason I can think of is aesthetic: x86 is the ugliest (extant?) ISA.
Nobody wants to read, write, or think about x86 assembly. Most RISCs are easy and enjoyable to read, reason about, and write by hand.
> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation. My big problem is Rosetta 2 doesn’t emulate AVX which more and more software uses. I work in an AI platform team. I’m not actually trying to do machine learning stuff under it, but I just want to start the Docker containers to test some unrelated functions on my laptop. And that happens to start Tensorflow and pgvector, even t…
> My big problem is Rosetta 2 doesn’t emulate AVX which more and more software uses. You can probably blame that on patents. Base x86-64, which includes SSE2, is old enough that all relevant patents have already expired (the x86-64 ISA documentation was first published by AMD 24 years ago, see https://web.archive.org/web/20000829042324/http://www.x86-64... ). Other ISA extensions are newer, and might still be threate…
Maybe patents are involved, but there's a bigger issue too: the Apple chips don't have support for the equivalent Arm instructions (SVE/SVE2) nor wide enough vectors in their SIMD units. Any AVX/AVX2 emulation is going to be dog slow, even if it isn't encumbered by patents.