this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Intel terminates x86S initiative — unilateral quest to de-bloat x86 instruction set comes to an end (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/hardware
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[–] Alphane_Moon 7 points 3 weeks ago

I suspect the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (that includes AMD and others) will likely come up with something similar to x86S.

x86S actually seemed somewhat reasonable and largely kept compatibility (with the exception of 16-bit addressing; something you probably would want to run in DOSBox); you could still run 32 bit apps.

[–] 9point6 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Why do I get the feeling that Intel is about to licence the ARM architecture?

RISC-V needs to really get rolling with some real volume soon, I'm concerned we're going to end up with a architecture monoculture

[–] horse_battery_staple 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Like we had with x86?

My fear is each chip manufacturer will have their own separate ARM instruction set and lock down the bootloader so you get Apple or Windows or ChromeOS and the licensing subscription to go with it. RISC-V already has linux support and they're getting better all the time.

https://risc-v-getting-started-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/linux-introduction.html

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-are-apples-chips-faster-than-qualcomms-gary-explains-802738/

[–] 9point6 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I'd say we never actually had the x86 monoculture, we did in the desktop space for the most part (though Apple were rocking the 6800/68k/Power architectures for a large chunk of that too). But the server and workstation space was all sorts of weird and wonderful through all of that with Alpha, SPARC, mips, PowerPC hanging around until the 00s. The last SPARC processor was released less than a decade ago by Fujitsu.

Fujitsu's current gen chips are based on ARM.

Apple have moved to ARM

More and more AWS compute workloads are getting deployed to ARM servers

Microsoft are getting closer to making windows on ARM actually useful for most people.

The entire mobile devices market is effectively all ARM.

I know RISC-V is coming along, you can buy Dev boards and it's being deployed in some niche areas. But it needs to blow up like ARM has yesterday, I fear we're rapidly approaching a situation that could be worse than the x86 one ever was.

Though I'm fairly confident it's going to take a long time before Intel actually abandons x86

Edit: typo

[–] Alphane_Moon 6 points 3 weeks ago

Microsoft are getting closer to making windows on ARM actually useful for most people.

I think it's a bit early to claim this. Maybe with the Nvidia / Mediatek WoA devices next year. Snapdragon X Elite devices have little to offer over Lunar Lake / Strix Point devices other than compatibility problems. You need to have better performance (at least for ARM native apps), better battery life or price versus x86 devices for WoA to be useful for average consumers.

[–] horse_battery_staple 3 points 3 weeks ago

So every server I've ever racked has been x86, every laptop I've imaged or deployed was x86, only IOT and embedded have I had to work with a non x86 instruction set.

The x86 monoculture is all I've known and it hasn't been a problem because it's an open platform. I think the "RISC" with ARM is like what I said, locked down bootloaders and architecture. Asahi and Graphene are amazing projects in this space and they give me hope, but the ARM architecture won't be the problem, vendor lock in will be.