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Future of x86

Pc6777

How much longer does x86 have? I know arm is getting better and is starting to get into laptops. Surely something as massive as x86 won't die overnight so it will take a good while before x86 cpus arnt sold anymore. If there is a transition how will it work, will there be emulation to run legacy x86 games/programs in the future? And will current operating systems be able to run on future cpus? I think the best solution is full backwards compability with older operating systems and programs, it's the only way people would dare make the switch. Maybe hardware based emmulation or a hybrid chip. 

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By my guess, it'll be something around 10-15 years before ARM makes a stay in the higher end desktop market. Part of the reason is that x86 is an absolute work horse of an instruction set. I forget who said it but the best analogy I've heard is this: "ARM is the friend who comes over to help you move and you tell him 'move this here' then wait till he's done and then tell him 'move that there' and so one. x86 is the friend who you can tell 'move this here, move that there, move that thing over there, etc.' and he'll do it without any issue." x86 might not be as efficient, or as performant as ARM, but it makes up for it in sure brute force of running code, as ARM needs code optimized for it to run, or at least special hardware designed to accelerate it to make it usable, x86 can just let it run. In addition, with the way AMD and Intel have been leapfrogging one another in performance, the IPC improvements are starting to show that x86 might outpace the improvements of ARM. While ARM may fully take over laptops, the odds of it taking over desktop any time soon are relatively low.

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I think x86 will be around for a decent amount of time just because it's a lot easier to code and build programs that work well for a unified architechture. Also I'm not sure if it's only the macbook that uses arm but the reason it works so well is because the programs are optimised for the hardware and the os ie. games and apps run better on apple because they have one line of phones (and more popular phones) and that makes it easier for devs to build a os and hardware specific app while on the android side there are a number of operating systems and hardware configs making it much harder to optimise an app to work on all of them resulting in devs often not really ooptimising and just getting it to function such as snapchat not even using the camera just taking a screenshot of the camera feed resulting in much worse image quality. To finish off having a unified base to build a processor off generally helps things just work better. Maybe we'll see a new base architechture possibly not even from intel or amd but to make thing just work in the words of todd Howard it would be better to have some sort of conformity. 

 

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17 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

By my guess, it'll be something around 10-15 years before ARM makes a stay in the higher end desktop market. Part of the reason is that x86 is an absolute work horse of an instruction set. I forget who said it but the best analogy I've heard is this: "ARM is the friend who comes over to help you move and you tell him 'move this here' then wait till he's done and then tell him 'move that there' and so one. x86 is the friend who you can tell 'move this here, move that there, move that thing over there, etc.' and he'll do it without any issue." x86 might not be as efficient, or as performant as ARM, but it makes up for it in sure brute force of running code, as ARM needs code optimized for it to run, or at least special hardware designed to accelerate it to make it usable, x86 can just let it run. In addition, with the way AMD and Intel have been leapfrogging one another in performance, the IPC improvements are starting to show that x86 might outpace the improvements of ARM. While ARM may fully take over laptops, the odds of it taking over desktop any time soon are relatively low.

I would rather have compability than preformance, what's the point in a fast arm cpu if nothing is compatible with it and it's much harder to make programs for. 

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18 minutes ago, pizza69 said:

I think x86 will be around for a decent amount of time just because it's a lot easier to code and build programs that work well for a unified architechture. Also I'm not sure if it's only the macbook that uses arm but the reason it works so well is because the programs are optimised for the hardware and the os ie. games and apps run better on apple because they have one line of phones (and more popular phones) and that makes it easier for devs to build a os and hardware specific app while on the android side there are a number of operating systems and hardware configs making it much harder to optimise an app to work on all of them resulting in devs often not really ooptimising and just getting it to function such as snapchat not even using the camera just taking a screenshot of the camera feed resulting in much worse image quality. To finish off having a unified base to build a processor off generally helps things just work better. Maybe we'll see a new base architechture possibly not even from intel or amd but to make thing just work in the words of todd Howard it would be better to have some sort of conformity. 

 

Well Mac has always been closed, so apple can just optimize their first party apps then get all the devs who have apps on their store to optimize for arm, but a lot of apps on Mac already have a mobile version too so it wouldn't be hard. And have an emmulator for other stuff, that would probably be really slow. 

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On 2/4/2021 at 3:24 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

as ARM needs code optimized for it to run, or at least special hardware designed to accelerate it to make it usable, x86 can just let it run.

I see this touted around all the time.

 

I'm going to go with ... utter bulls***.

 

It probably made sense 10-20 years ago where x86 was required for 5-10% of software specific work and onchip emulation acceleration wasn't explored, however both processors and coding and OS's have evolved.  The fact Apple can almost flawlessly emulate x86 through ARM shows this. The fact the M1 ecosystem operates flawelessly shows this. The fact the phone OS market is emulating expanding shows this.


So far I have not seen any example of anything that ARM cannot do. The only things it struggles with is crappy legacy hardware. But even that if updated would run.

 

Hell, the worlds fastest supercomputer runs ARM. 

 

x86 is Steam. ARM is the ICE (internal combustion engine).

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Amias said:

x86 is Steam. ARM is the ICE (internal combustion engine).

RISC-V is a jet enginge

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16 hours ago, Amias said:

The fact Apple can almost flawlessly emulate x86 through ARM shows this. The fact the M1 ecosystem operates flawelessly shows this. The fact the phone OS market is emulating expanding shows this.

You need to remember they installed specific hardware for the emulation itself. It is very impressive what they've pulled off, and I honestly do see myself owning an ARM powered laptop within the next 5 years (especially since the most intensive thing I do in it most of the time is watch YouTube and open Word Docs). 

 

Also to go back to your analogy (x86 is Steam, ARM is an ICE), Steam power is still used today, it's just evolved into more efficient uses of it (Nuclear, Coal, etc. all generate electric through the steam turbine). It won't disappear. Though while it may become less prevalent and ARM will take over certain aspects of computing, there will probably still be x86 devices kicking around 30 years from now.

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7 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

You need to remember they installed specific hardware for the emulation itself. It is very impressive what they've pulled off, and I honestly do see myself owning an ARM powered laptop within the next 5 years (especially since the most intensive thing I do in it most of the time is watch YouTube and open Word Docs). 

 

Also to go back to your analogy (x86 is Steam, ARM is an ICE), Steam power is still used today, it's just evolved into more efficient uses of it (Nuclear, Coal, etc. all generate electric through the steam turbine). It won't disappear. Though while it may become less prevalent and ARM will take over certain aspects of computing, there will probably still be x86 devices kicking around 30 years from now.

yea, the last 10 years lots of amazing pieces of software and vidioe games came out, people wont just switch over and be fine without all their x86 programs. thats what will probably hold arm back in the computing space, but for other stuff like servers arm could easily dominate. 

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On 2/4/2021 at 4:58 AM, Pc6777 said:

How much longer does x86 have? I know arm is getting better and is starting to get into laptops. Surely something as massive as x86 won't die overnight so it will take a good while before x86 cpus arnt sold anymore. If there is a transition how will it work, will there be emulation to run legacy x86 games/programs in the future? And will current operating systems be able to run on future cpus? I think the best solution is full backwards compability with older operating systems and programs, it's the only way people would dare make the switch. Maybe hardware based emmulation or a hybrid chip. 

Until quantum computers become mainstream  x86 gonna be here with us  holding our hands 😛

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On 2/6/2021 at 3:40 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

You need to remember they installed specific hardware for the emulation itself. It is very impressive what they've pulled off, and I honestly do see myself owning an ARM powered laptop within the next 5 years (especially since the most intensive thing I do in it most of the time is watch YouTube and open Word Docs). 

 

Also to go back to your analogy (x86 is Steam, ARM is an ICE), Steam power is still used today, it's just evolved into more efficient uses of it (Nuclear, Coal, etc. all generate electric through the steam turbine). It won't disappear. Though while it may become less prevalent and ARM will take over certain aspects of computing, there will probably still be x86 devices kicking around 30 years from now.


Interesting take of a simple analogy. My response would only be the analogy was only relevant for transportation. When was the last time you rode on a steam powered vehicle? 

 

But you're right, steam power is utilised within electrical generation through steam turbines. x86 isn't going away. You're absolutely right, it'll be utilised where it's deficiencies (weight (CPU power requirements) and complexity (efficiency/heat)) are not a hindrance.

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On 2/5/2021 at 11:59 PM, papajo said:

Until quantum computers become mainstream  x86 gonna be here with us  holding our hands 😛

Quantum Computers wouldn't become mainstream for the close to the reason that Supercomputers are not Consumer Products, even among Power Users. A Consumer wouldn't be able to use them as there are no Suitable Applications for that Market.

 

Quantum Computers need a powerful PC to control them. A Host System.

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On 2/5/2021 at 5:50 AM, Drama Lama said:

RISC-V is a jet enginge

Yea as much as arm is making the news, I think RISC-V is more the direction to go. I think arm has about 10 years of real invonation left in it, and then they will start to switch over to something like RISC-V. I have no realy defense for this argument besides reading up on how arm and risc-v work. It's just my two cents.

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On 2/3/2021 at 8:58 PM, Pc6777 said:

I think the best solution is full backwards compability with older operating systems and programs, it's the only way people would dare make the switch. Maybe hardware based emmulation or a hybrid chip. 

That's a terrible solution, and it's why x86 is quickly losing favor.

Promising full backwards compatibility relegates you to using old techniques forever. It's also a promise you can't actually keep.

 

3 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Quantum Computers wouldn't become mainstream for the close to the reason that Supercomputers are not Consumer Products, even among Power Users. A Consumer wouldn't be able to use them as there are no Suitable Applications for that Market.

I suspect that, eventually, small quantum annealing processors will make their way into consumer computers. Not as the main processor, but as a unit in the CPU or as an add-in card, or even part of a graphics card. Quantum annealing processors are very good at optimization problems, and that's a very large part of what consumer devices are asked to do, especially if the user is playing games.




As an aside, the greatest asset and biggest liability of ARM and RISC-V is that there aren't any centralized manufacturers of them. Think about it, there are basically two families of x86/64 processors, and so there are only two lines of associated devices (motherboards and such) that people need to know about. With ARM (and eventually RISC-V), there are potentially 100's of different manufacturers, all of them using different pin layouts, power requirements, and features. That will have to be solved and standardized to provide a real path forward to widespread consumer desktop computers.

ENCRYPTION IS NOT A CRIME

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x86 can very well remain being better than ARM.

 

You could squeeze a lot of performance from x86 by getting rid of some backwards compatibility, remove some old rarely used instruction sets, drop some 16bit/32 bit only stuff, tweak registers and stuff. 

It would break programs, like programs no longer running because they were compiled to have mmx support and now it's no longer there. ... but ARM already does that, they have instruction extensions that are not compatible between ARM processors, you'd have to recompile the programs.

 

 

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57 minutes ago, dkoudijs said:

Yea as much as arm is making the news, I think RISC-V is more the direction to go. I think arm has about 10 years of real invonation left in it, and then they will start to switch over to something like RISC-V. I have no realy defense for this argument besides reading up on how arm and risc-v work. It's just my two cents.

the thing about RISC-V is that is actually takes what made ARM so popular and makes it even better. It's even more open and modular your company is not happy with existing core designs? no problem just change it.

 

RISC-V is not a jet enginge it's whatever you want it to be. ARM even updated their licensing to make it easier for universities to experiment with ARM designs in order to not get replaced by RISC-V which is open Source

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hi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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41 minutes ago, mariushm said:

x86 can very well remain being better than ARM.

 

You could squeeze a lot of performance from x86 by getting rid of some backwards compatibility, remove some old rarely used instruction sets, drop some 16bit/32 bit only stuff, tweak registers and stuff. 

It would break programs, like programs no longer running because they were compiled to have mmx support and now it's no longer there. ... but ARM already does that, they have instruction extensions that are not compatible between ARM processors, you'd have to recompile the programs.

Well Intel just by itself has more then money enough to keep improving x86-64 for a very long time. AMD and other hand has light a fire under Intel with Ryzen and Threadripper. Especially by having 6 and 8 core Ryzen CPU as Consumer products.

 

34 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

the thing about RISC-V is that is actually takes what made ARM so popular and makes it even better. It's even more open and modular your company is not happy with existing core designs? no problem just change it.

 

RISC-V is not a jet enginge it's whatever you want it to be. ARM even updated their licensing to make it easier for universities to experiment with ARM designs in order to not get replaced by RISC-V which is open Source

Isn't RISC-V well entrenched at Universities by now?

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I really think that it is Marketing Nonsense by Marketeers. The Ideal that RISC ISAs will utterly replace x86 ISA based CPUs, well the that boat has already Sailed and Sunk.

 

Anyone remember the Advance RISC Computer? This was supposed to be a Common Platform for MIPS ISA based computers to replace the IA32 platform. It was to do the same with the infamous x86 BIOS. Microsoft was one of the founding members.

 

One of reasons it sunk is due to Intel always improving both x86 and their FAB Nodes. And of course both AMD and Cycrix provided the Fire under Intel as well.

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1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

One of reasons it sunk is due to Intel always improving both x86 and their FAB Nodes. And of course both AMD and Cycrix provided the Fire under Intel as well.

Intel needed to license their architecture to some companies (it has to do with military contracts and redundancy the US army wouldnt get into contract with a product that couldn't be  found/sourced aka produced by an alternative source, Intel had to decide where to license their technology, so these companies happened by that time to be AMD and VIA I think maybe there were some others too but I can't remember) 

 

As for the node argument I am not so convinced by that, by that time intel wasn't any huge unbeatable conglomerate RISC CPUs could also have the same focus. 

 

The reason they did not (although surely advancing as well but not in the same pace) was simply because the powers that be* of the time (and rightfully so) decided that x86 was a superior architecture. 

 

*I dont mean the illuminati/government or any such thing I am talking about key computer engineers of the time hardware/computer companies and other organizations that essentially maintain and define standards such as the IEEE

 

And I trust their judgement better than any ARM meme or marketing campaigns 

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1 minute ago, papajo said:

Intel needed to license their architecture to some companies (it has to do with military contracts and redundancy the US army wouldnt get into contract with a product that couldlt found/sourced aka produced by an alternative source, so these companies happened by that time to be AMD and VIA I think maybe there were some others too but I can't remember) 

 

As for the node argument I am not so convinced by that, by that time intel wasn't any huge unbeatable conglomerate RISC CPUs could also have the same focus. 

 

They reason they did not (although surely advancing as well but not in the same pace) was simply because the powers that be* of the time (and rightfully so) decided that x86 was a superior architecture. 

 

*I dont mean the illuminati/government or any such thing I am talking about key computer engineers of the time hardware/computer companies and other organizations that essentially maintain and define standards such as the IEEE

 

And I trust their judgement better than any ARM meme or marketing campaigns 

Well Second Sourcing was common for early Microprocessors.

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2 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Well Second Sourcing was common for early Microprocessors.

for this particular reason, retail market was non-existent or poor (depending on  how far back we are talking) in comparison to government contracts therefore they needed to do that in order to compete for said contracts. 

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Thread cleaned, removed some off topic posts. Stick to the topic please. 

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24 minutes ago, papajo said:

for this particular reason, retail market was non-existent or poor (depending on  how far back we are talking) in comparison to government contracts therefore they needed to do that in order to compete for said contracts. 

A lot of the Major buyers also required Second Sourcing as well to ensure they will have a reliable supply.

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5 hours ago, James Evens said:

Only time can tell what future ARM will have if NVidia manages to get the deal through the anti trust divisions around the globe.

Seeing what they done and do with there GPU business don't expect good for ARM meaning RISC-V will be pushed forward.

im hoping they don't get it, NVidia is already a massive company as it is, they would have far too much power and control over everything imo. 

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