by twelvenmonkeys on 12/18/21, 4:35 PM with 53 comments
Is x86 dead?
by gjsman-1000 on 12/18/21, 5:36 PM
- Andrew Tanenbaum arguing with Linus Torvalds in 1992 that Linux was obsolete because it was (at the time) built only for x86, and that x86 was dead.
by Matthias247 on 12/18/21, 7:40 PM
The current transition is more about some more PCs and servers also considering to use ARM.
I don't think x86 is dead. As long as x86 CPU manufacturers can keep up on pricing, performance and power consumption it will stay alive. And there's a lot more to that race than just the instruction set. Intel had a lot of weak years, but AMD showed that x86 doesn't have to stagnate.
by caslon on 12/18/21, 5:49 PM
Apple's transition to ARM worked because they have absolute control over their ecosystem. This is the same reason the PPC-Intel transition worked; they were able to destroy all of the wonderful lineage of PPC Mac software in two releases (Tiger, Lion).
Microsoft does not.
I don't like x86_64 either, and I also don't use Microsoft, but there's hope and there's delusion. It still has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.
by xt00 on 12/18/21, 7:18 PM
Personally I would chalk this up to chip companies doing what is called "value based selling".. instead of saying, hey how much do we need as a company to be profitable at a level we are happy with, to continue to invest in our tech, grow and pursue high end goals, they basically said, hey.. how much is this chip worth to the customer? And, if we buy up all of our rivals such that they essentially have zero options besides us, then we can charge essentially whatever we want to charge -- or maintain our current pricing with no hope for the customer to get a price improvement over time.
When you get to be the size of the big trillion dollar tech companies, you say, ok yea, I'm tired of this game where you spend lots of time trying to figure out how much money I make from your chips and basing your pricing on that.. I'll just make the chips myself...
by asgeirn on 12/18/21, 5:50 PM
- Both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X use x86 processors.
- MacBook market share is around 10%, so the majority of new laptops are still x86.
- The majority of cloud compute instances are also x86.
by warrenm on 12/18/21, 4:59 PM
ARM has its place
RISC-V has its place
Along with myriad other architectures out there
by smoldesu on 12/18/21, 5:15 PM
A more likely theory is that we've now entered the big.LITTLE era. Intel has already begun to pivot their desktop line to the big.LITTLE design, and while AMD's next line won't follow suit, they've discussed bringing the architecture to the CPUs after that. x86 has still got quite a bit of gas left in the tank, and now that RISC-V is getting taped out, a lot of people are starting to realize that a more modular approach to RISC CPUs is probably smarter than how ARM exists in it's current iterations. Plus, ARM is still proprietary (arguably moreso than x86), whereas RISC-V is fully open for anyone to use and manufacture. Simply from a technical side, I think RISC-V is going to eat ARM's lunch within the decade, and I also think traditional architectures like x86 aren't going away any time soon. Time will tell.
by ksec on 12/19/21, 7:21 PM
The importance of making 100% ( not 98% or 99,9% ) compatibility on business software and business PC, which represent 750M Windows user will be worth to keep x86 alive. Of course Microsoft being the key factor here, but I dont see them making any dramatic moves, and even if they did, it will take a long for those effect to be distributed.
Again, it is worth point out. The word "dead" means different thing to different people. On HN ( and in fact everywhere on the internet ) they often state Ruby is dead, when they meant Ruby is dying. No one uses COBOL, or COBOL is dead, when in fact majority of our underlying infrastructure are still running on it. Mainframe is dead... etc etc and I could continue forever.
Without a proper definition of dead, any of these discussions are meaningless.
by alfor on 12/18/21, 5:47 PM
x86 will stay alive for legacy systems but will become more and more expensive as they loose economy of scale and constant effort to keep up with performance.
Then only the expensive legacy system will keep paying the x86 tax
by sriram_sun on 12/18/21, 5:52 PM
by darksaints on 12/18/21, 5:28 PM
by rektide on 12/18/21, 7:33 PM
How many phones can drive a 4k 144Hz monitor? how many have more than a single 5gbit usb3 jack? how many arm laptops have more than two bare basic usb3 host ports? hiw many chios offer a dozen lanes or more of pcie?
i really really think usb4 is excellent, especially with thunderbolt pcie which is not that much more complexity. gazing at my crystal ball i'd expect two more years before we see arm start to show up here, and likely at the flagship level devices only. it's an indicator to me that arm is an unserious competitor. the ecosystem is a couple massive players, who seemingly are in cahoots to keep from pushing each other to advance much. even the archtecture moves at a crawl. a53 was around for almost a decade and a55 was barely a double digit % speed boost- abysmal, arm, abysmal.
i also think arm is hampered by having such a relationship oriented ecosystem. anyone can go out and buy x86 chips and make a computer. companys like chuwi build super interesting low cost boxes that run rings around most arm chips (not apple). innivation is open. by compare, try getting chips from qualcomm or mediatek or any other modern offering, without being an estaished player shipping dozens of millions of units a year. arm is a much more closed ecosystem, now supported by massive massive margins on $800+ devices, with well defined product niches. x86 is a much less entrenched & much more diverse environment, with much higher general expectations (apple's chips somewhat the exception).
at the high end, in servers, i think arm stands a chance. but these will be chips you cant actually buy, built by hyperscalers, or just phenomenally expensive high margin $6000 servers. if you need compute im expecting workstation chips (hdet) to be higher value, but if you also need io, then there may be some modest value proposition ein over x86. for hyperscalers though they will be saving bank.
by politelemon on 12/18/21, 5:46 PM
There are simply multiple eras ongoing at the same time. The ARM era stated a long time ago, not when you bought your laptop.
by Turing_Machine on 12/18/21, 6:07 PM
If Microsoft will release a version of Visual Studio that runs on ARM, I'll be able to do everything on one machine (there's already an ARM version of Windows, but for whatever reason Visual Studio isn't supported yet... I can kinda understand why, as it needs to do debugging-type stuff that's more hardware-dependent).
I'm extremely pleased with the M1 iMac. Fast and silent. Back in the day I had a dual Athlon, which, while fast for its time, sounded like I had a couple of Dustbusters running under my desk.
by jvanderbot on 12/18/21, 7:09 PM
Don't think about the era, think about what it means for you.
Either we are entering the Arm era, or we aren't.
If we are, it won't matter. all the s/w in the world,languages, libraries,expertise, applications, etc aren't going to disappear, so it won't matter much. Programmers will switch compilers and learn new tricks, and consumers march on. I still buy games, play them, and code for a living.
If we are not, same story, just not as many new compilers.
by mhh__ on 12/19/21, 8:37 AM
I hope they stick the landing (i.e. make Linux work great on M1 rather than just booting) but if the only competitive ARM cores available to consumers are from Apple, only running Apple software then I'm not all that convinced we'll see a real changing of the guard.
by maxharris on 12/18/21, 5:05 PM
The only exception is my wife's work laptop, an x86 MacBook Pro. (It'll be replaced by an ARM-based one in a year or two.)
It's quite safe to say that x86 is dead.
by mukundesh on 12/18/21, 5:42 PM