Will x86 die?

[Sadman Sajid]

Well I have heard a lot that ARM is going to take over every computers within a decade or two. Can I really believe this matter? And if that happens what AMD and Intel are going to do? Will they die in the CPU market or will they start making ARM CPUs? I am a very big fan of x86. Its robust and way too cool than ARM. I really dont want x86 to die.

[mockedarche]

no......... arm is getting larger but it isn't replacing x86. Low power devices use arm since it tends to be more efficient. Larger devices don't really need to worry about power usage to anywhere near the same degree. Not to mention the effort to rewrite (or atleast compile) for arm. I'm really interested to see how Apple handles the shift but I don't think it will effect windows or linux side tbh.

[Escapenz]

4 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

no......... arm is getting larger but it isn't replacing x86. Low power devices use arm since it tends to be more efficient. Larger devices don't really need to worry about power usage to anywhere near the same degree. Not to mention the effort to rewrite (or atleast compile) for arm. I'm really interested to see how Apple handles the shift but I don't think it will effect windows or linux side tbh.

im with you there. May see some more programs getting set up to run on arm but besides that i can't see ARM taking over

[mahyar]

no think arm as a normal car its small low power and efficient and x86 as truck its big and high power and inefficient but can handel much bigger loads

[Deslumo]

6 minutes ago, mahyar said:

no think arm as a normal car its small low power and efficient and x86 as truck its big and high power and inefficient but can handel much bigger loads

that's the best thing I heard today.

[Enderman]

Either ARM or not ARM, at some point x86 will be replaced by some superior technology.

Probably not for a long time, but you never know.

 

12 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

no......... arm is getting larger but it isn't replacing x86. Low power devices use arm since it tends to be more efficient. Larger devices don't really need to worry about power usage to anywhere near the same degree. Not to mention the effort to rewrite (or atleast compile) for arm. I'm really interested to see how Apple handles the shift but I don't think it will effect windows or linux side tbh.

Larger devices do need to worry about power consumption.

For example supercomputers, where you have so much power consumption that you need special cooling.

[Jurrunio]

Definitely will. In the tech world nothing's irreplacable, only how long something lasts till it's replaced.

[Deslumo]

1 minute ago, Jurrunio said:

Definitely will. In the tech world nothing's irreplacable, only how long something lasts till it's replaced.

tech is volatile [You Suffer by Napalm Death plays]

[GrockleTD]

Will x86 die? At some point. To ARM? Probably not.

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

But ARM processors are a lot different, I mean, they don't even have a BIOS/UEFI afaik, and booting an operating system is a lot different on ARM than x86

BIOS, as in what you have in older PCs, is specifically for x86 IBM PC-compatible systems, so of course you're not going to see that anywhere else. UEFI, on the other hand, does exist for ARM and could be provided for any other CPU-architecture as well. UEFI is not specific to any architecture. As for booting an OS...it's actually not particularly different, if booting from UEFI.

[Jurrunio]

29 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

Larger devices don't really need to worry about power usage to anywhere near the same degree.

They do if the government decides to charge huge power users more. Also you can find x86 on laptops which carry batteries, that means they care about efficiency as well.

[mockedarche]

3 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

They do if the government decides to charge huge power users more. Also you can find x86 on laptops which carry batteries, that means they care about efficiency as well.

 

 

23 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Larger devices do need to worry about power consumption.

For example supercomputers, where you have so much power consumption that you need special cooling.

People keep not understanding what I said. I never said they DIDNT care I said they dont need to worry to the same DEGREE. Yes laptop makers/ cpu makers care about battery life that's why theres laptop cpus and desktop and server. Phone vs laptop is different, one will practically always be cooled passively the other wont not to mention device size (battery size). Im not saying it doesn't matter im just saying generally there different markets which is part of the reason ARM is so popular and x86 is aswell. Apple decided they wanted something more suited towards the offerings of ARM which is why there going that route (not to mention other reasons aswell).

[Kisai]

47 minutes ago, Sadman Sajid said:

Well I have heard a lot that ARM is going to take over every computers within a decade or two. Can I really believe this matter? And if that happens what AMD and Intel are going to do? Will they die in the CPU market or will they start making ARM CPUs? I am a very big fan of x86. Its robust and way too cool than ARM. I really dont want x86 to die.

Not likely. We may hit a wall where x86 can't improve the energy use, but not every use case requires a low-power chip.

 

ARM's strength is energy efficiency. Not performance. Intel has an ARM licence, they can always build their own ARM CPU's, or even CPU's with both x86-64 and ARM low-energy cores, provided an OS can actually use that.

[piratemonkey]

Probably not. I think that if Apple is successful in their ARM roll out, it could create a higher market share and usage of it. X86 has also been around for forever, so for industries or businesses that rely on old software, it'll be around for a decade at least. 

 

I do think that arm represents some of the future, along with RISCV

[straight_stewie]

Eventually, we will move away from Intel Architecture for high performance desktop computing. When we will do that, and what we will switch to, we cannot know.

But the change is coming.

[Aimi]

Yeah, at some point it'll be phased out. But the same can go for ARM as well, it's impossible to say who would last longer.

[Moonzy]

as a consumer, whatever works better for me i guess?

no good reason to prefer one over the other

[WereCatf]

Just now, NZgamer said:

Interesting, I saw somewhere that all operating systems had to be "flashed", and that any sort of UEFI/BIOS configuration had to be done in a config file

No. Like I said, there is nothing about the architecture itself that requires any of that. Mobile-phones are an example of devices that tend to use ARM, but they don't use UEFI. Why? Because there's no need to; they use a different bootloader to load up Android. There is no technical reason for why one couldn't port UEFI to them, it's just that the manufacturers have no good reason to.

 

As for flashing...it's a misnomer; it's literally nothing else than writing the files/data to a storage-media. Typically when people talk about "flashing" a microSD-card or similar, they just mean writing an OS-image to it. Making a bootable USB-stick for your PC from the Windows ISO-image is no different, it's literally the same thing.

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

What I do care about is that the CPU is socketed. I want to be able to buy or build a PC, then replace the CPU with a top-of-the-line one for that socket 5 years down the line when I can buy the CPU on ebay for cheap.

Hm. I don't know how I feel about the situation. I tend to always upgrade both the mobo and the CPU anyways, so it mostly doesn't matter, if they're socketed or not. On the other hand, I have upgraded my older, second-hand gear a couple of times, if I've found a better mobo or a better CPU on the cheap.

 

If soldering the CPU down meant significantly better cooling and significantly lower costs, I suppose I'd lean towards that, but at the moment neither of those things apply, so I am kinda left sitting on the fence.

[Enderman]

45 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

People keep not understanding what I said. I never said they DIDNT care I said they dont need to worry to the same DEGREE. Yes laptop makers/ cpu makers care about battery life that's why theres laptop cpus and desktop and server. Phone vs laptop is different, one will practically always be cooled passively the other wont not to mention device size (battery size). Im not saying it doesn't matter im just saying generally there different markets which is part of the reason ARM is so popular and x86 is aswell. Apple decided they wanted something more suited towards the offerings of ARM which is why there going that route (not to mention other reasons aswell).

Uh, power design in supercomputers is MUCH more importat than in a phone or laptop...

There's a reason why all the top supercomputers use ARM or other non-x86 architectures.

In a phone you can have the CPU run at 80 or 90 degrees and it will just throttle down frequency.

In a supercomputer the CPU cannot get anywhere near those temps because it needs to operate 24/7 at full speed even if it's producing megawatts of heat.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, CircleTech said:

 

 

Intel, AMD, VIA, and Power PC all used to be competitors in the CPU space fighting for your hard-earned money. Not only that, but all four of these CPUs were usually compatible with the same motherboard! Yeah, Imagine if you could buy just any brand of motherboard, and plunk an AMD or Intel CPU in the same board. 

 

Are you sure about that? Only Socket 7 allowed Cyrix (later Via) and AMD work on the same Intel, and third party chipsets. Eventually Intel wouldn't give Acer and Via chipset licences, and that was the end of it after socket 370/Slot 1. There were a few other competitors in this space before they went extinct, like WinChip made 233Mhz chips that fit socket 7 to extend the life of that platform. 

 

PowerPC NEVER operated on Intel platform boards, and as far as I know no expansion board with one was ever made either, because they didn't even speak the same byte order.

 

ARM and Intel speak the same byte order, so it's theoretically possible to make a "ARM chip" that works on an Intel Chip... provided you implemented everything the Intel chip does, but that is only something Intel would do, and could do if they really wanted to. However the firmware blobs would not work since the instruction sets are different.

 

You might be thinking of the Amiga. The Amiga had expansion boards to add either x86 Intel or PPC accelerator boards. Here's the x86 board:

 

Note both the Intel 80386SX CPU and Cyrix FPU. This is a Commodore part for the Amiga.

 

PPC boards for the Amiga exist and existed for long past the lifetime of the Amiga.

 

I knew about the existance of this board since I had a relative that had an Amiga that could boot DOS, though it wasn't as amazing as I'd give it credit for as basically these things were an entirely separate computer that used the same I/O of the Amiga. It's closer to the SuperGameBoy in the SNES, or the GBA in the Gameboy Player for the Gamecube. 

 

At any rate, the x86 has survived largely because other choices were more expensive. Never has anything come close until ARM arrived on the scene, but ARM parts only wound up in low-power devices. 

 

Like if I wanted to make a long-shot prediction, I'd say Intel will start producing ARM parts once they're done with 7 or 5nm, because chip foundries are not sure they will be able to do 3nm as it is, and that wall would be hit around 2025-2028.