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 quality emulation available until the end of the human race as we know it.
Sure, we've probably lost most of the software ever written on it, but a whole lot of interesting artifacts from a key transition point for our species still remain locked up in this architecture.
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 compute accelerators, such as what intel is pushing and what the various ARM and Risc-V implementations include in practice.
The further from a common core you get, the more complex porting or cross platform tooling gets. Even if for big gains in some parts. For example, working on personal/hobby projects in ARM boards that aren't RPi is sometimes an exercise in frustration, with no mainline support at all.
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 specialized computing sub-processors. Energy prices are more and more becoming a major determining factor as is the area needed for cooling. By having more separated subprocessors you get both efficiency and easier ability to cool the parts.
There's lots of complications to address there (strict x86 memory ordering versus loose ARM ordering, for instance) but I expect they're solvable.
Also 8051 cores can still be found in modern products
The 32-bit ARM and RISC-V cores are small enough and easier to program.
Turns out a 8051 core was included (iirc clocked @ ~30 MHz, to control jobs like light busy LED on card read/write ops, some bus arbitration / priority settings, power management or the like).
Made total sense to encounter an ancient, 'fast', tiny 8-bit core there, even though unexpected.
There must be (and will be) an endless list of products including tiny CPU cores like that (eg., RFID tags come to mind).
I think this is the critical part. If humanity (as we know it) only lasts 10 more years, then sure x86 will still be around somewhere.
If we last a million years, it will probably be gone long before that. Even in a thousand years it's probably gone a long time ago.
“And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”
But the cynical operator in my head could just laugh. We as a tech community are still running MS-DOS productively. Just wait, someone will run the door controls of our first space ships on some x86 chip. Or some similar system you just need, but that never gets time to be updated properly. Just wait, the new cruise liner spaceship of the milky way republic is going to run some x86 emulator for their window control.
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.
In this case, the article is implying that Intel (x86) is dead to them and AMD (x86) is the successor. Whether Intel is dead or not is up for debate (I doubt they are), but the saying is used correctly.
No. Intel isn't dead. They may be behind (for now) but they're definitely catching up and have in a way on the desktop.
It's not certain that Intel will die and AMD will for sure win. Competition is great.
And if a freshly dead king is replaced by a new king, it's "the king is dead, long live the king".
The predecessor and the living thing doesn't have to be of the opposite sex, or use a different term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_th...!
It's a very famous idiom.
yes, in a particular circumstance, if there happens to be a queen involved (rarer within agnatic primogeniture), then it would be spoken as you say, but that's not "the saying" that people generally quote.
Rarer still, but 2 Queens would have the same form as the saying, "the queen is dead, long live the queen", which I mention to mention, when the king is dead, if it's "long live the queen", it's not generally the king's spouse even if she was styled "queen", but would be some direct blood relative of the king such as his daughter. I think his wife would become Dowager Queen. The Dowager queen might rule as Regent if her children were not adults yet.
Single thread performance blow my mind with scores like 4000.
Without change a single line of code = performance was 10x than before.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+7600&id...
What exactly is this number 4000? What does it mean? Where can I read more about this scoring system?
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+7600&id...
We eventually switched to m-instances since that fits our compute/memory usage better when we’re at limits.
But since ISA doesn't imply perf. characteristics itself, then x86 will be alive.
The hard part in changing hardware's stuff is getting software to adjust.
I really wish we could test out RISC-V SoCs from the likes of tenstorrent, but it's a long journey
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.
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.
Veyron releases later this year. Ascalon next year.
It's going to get exciting.
But worry not, RISC-V is inevitable.
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.
If you just bother to open your eyes just a little bit wider you would notice that there is a huge market for Chromebooks, budget laptops, gaming laptops, mobile workstations, ultrabooks for students, gamers, business people, bankers etc. New things are happening every month. We are seeing more efficient laptops from Intel and AMD. Companies like Framework are doing actual innovations in the decade old laptop area. And there are workflows that can only be done on Windows.
Your claim is completely unfounded.
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.
Yep! For me, it's the same ARM64 architecture I run on my desktop and servers[1]. :-)
Hetzner's offering is very competitive, cheaper than their already rock-bottom x86 offerings. Then there's AWS Graviton, Oracle with their free tier (not sure how expensive that gets if you actually have to load it) and both Azure and Google also have ARM offerings.
[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2023/05/setting-up-hetzner-arm-i...
People also oversell it, I never had any problem developing software for Windows 2000/NT, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Symbian, from my x86 desktop.
1. Apple's chips are so far beyond everything else that it makes obvious sense for Apple only. Snapdragon is at least 30% slower single core while having worse Performance per watt.
2. Apple wasn't playing fair with their translation layer. The Rosetta layer cheats a little because apple also made the chip. The secret sauce is that the M1 has a hardware compatibility mode (That technically breaks ARM spec) for x86 memory order that basically gives near 1:1 performance.
3. Microsoft heavily botched their ARM rollout (again. Hello, Windows RT). The translation layer on W10/11 is just bad, not because of bad coding but just the technical limits of what they were trying to do.
4. Google is in a great place with ARM compatibility in Chrome OS as the only consumer-facing apps are either built-in or on the play store...which was designed for ARM in the first place. Problem is that nobody will give them a good chip for ChromeOS and the focus is on low end, so Mediatek is just cruising.
ARM is a great arch...but right now it is Apple VS x86, not ARM.
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/a20230217VL209/amd-arm-digiti...
It doesn't seem like a Rosetta 2-like effort is making it into mainline Linux anytime soon, if ever.
On Windows, ARM products just suck. The product is just bad because there is no reason to use it. The chips available are worse than x86 and then the software issue is bad due to a whole set of reasons that Microsoft can't change on their own..\ Google has that last 10% probably, ChromeOS moves ARM devices all day, every day. Just cheap ones.
- 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.
I work for a large financial services company and receive a MacBook Pro for my work.
My work laptop battery can handle all-day IntelliJ & web browsing without charging, I've never heard the fan and the laptop stays cool. It has a Geekbench multicore score of 13,649.
My personal laptop also lasts that long and stays cool, and doesn't even have a fan.
EDIT: It's funny to see this downvoted. I'm literally speaking of my particular use case and needs! Are there people who believe Apples are better in all scenarios?
I haven't needed an ethernet port on a laptop since the mid 2000s troubleshooting why my newly installed stack of Cisco switches weren't working, and that sort of use cases is rare enough that having a dongle seems fine.
Conversely, about 80% of the people I know use Apple laptops for work.
I don't see ethernet ports making a comeback on thin laptops anytime soon though. They are handy for LAN parties, so bulky gaming laptops will keep shipping with them, but for everyone else it makes more sense to leave that functionality to a dock.
On a desktop (which these days isn't a tower) I do want some of those features, and I get them.
* except kbd, and I find the apple kbds just fine -- I even survived a couple of rounds of the infamous "butterfly" kbds. But I know some people were unhappy and eventually Apple got their act together.
The only thing it is actually missing from your list is Ethernet and usb a
Yes because no one that you know buys an Apple laptop that must mean that Apple isn’t selling any…
> Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I find the lack of self awareness…amusing.
Because no one you know uses a Mac laptop, that must mean no one uses one.
Well my anecdote from working at the second largest employer in the US that the vast majority of technical people prefer Macs even though they can choose Macs or Windows.
Furthermore their market share has never been over 20% of units shipped[1]
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...
I guess like me I like macbook 12 and that is what you use for non-desktop like notebook.
It's impossible to find a use case for the thing. I might have to sell it.
And that's why x86 is good.
