Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

So Intel is now resorting to threats, is it a dying gasp for x86? Wow we'll all need to recompile. Thank goodness for Linux.

Article is written by the Intel General Counsel...

> Only time will tell if new attempts to emulate Intel’s x86 ISA will meet a different fate. Intel welcomes lawful competition... However, we do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intel’s intellectual property rights.

View on HN

> Dying gasp for x86? Wow we'll all need to recompile.

ARM uses a weak memory model. x86 has a strong one. Also code containing optimized SIMD code (e.g. via compiler intrinsics) is a lot more complicated to port.

I've ported a lot of code back and forth and I've never encountered any difficulties related to weak vs. strong memory model.

It might matter for lock-free data structures and other potentially hardware sensitive code, but it doesn't matter for 99% of code.

Not to mention there are safe, concurrency schemes one can use that are higher abstraction than x86 hardware.

Code containing optimized SIMD will be implemented on a GPU or tensor processor.

I have actually coded for 320 GFLOPS on a Broadwell, so I know how this works, and I can tell you it's a lot easier to get vastly higher performance on a GPU.

Does it get the same price/performance ratio for the Intel CPU vs the competing CPU + GPU? And what work involved for getting to that performance for common cases? I think those are the criteria we'd look at.

What's the problem with this?

you forgot to quote a threat.

EDIT: I got downvoted but this is just not a threat. If someone "reminds protestors to demonstrate lawfully", then are they "threatening to call the cops and try to put them in jail"? Of course not. Not what the word threat means. Words have meanings and this one isn't this.

Yeah, right when that future I've been hearing out for like a decade where everyone just uses an iPad for everything comes around then they are in real trouble (I imagine that will be a year or two after the Year of the Linux Desktop).

Outside of certain kinds of work, but especially as an every day sort of casual home computer? It actually works great already. And with the new stuff in iOS 11 it will be even better.

You have to try it for a while to get used to it and sort of understand how to do it since it's slightly different… But it works SURPRISINGLY well. And the amazing size/weight/battery life of an iPad as well as the cost relative to most Apple laptops makes it attractive.

Yeah, but it's become clear that the PC isn't going anywhere at this point, and why should it, given the miserable experience of trying to do real work on a tablet?

People use PCs for more than 'work'. And even when you're in 'work' for a lot of desk jobs it works just fine with the keyboard attachment.

Since I got a good iPad I really do rarely touch my Mac at home. Mostly for games that aren't on consoles.

I'm not sure why people are so hostile to iPads. For what a TON of people use computers for they are easily past 'good enough'.

I'm not hostile to iPads per se, but I think at this point we have to acknowledge that the supposed revolution where people would never buy PCs anymore because of tablets never materialized. It's another category with a somewhat narrower niche and it works great for some tasks, but not for others.

Also, phablets have eaten into some of the demand for them.

I strongly think this is the future we're heading at.

Especially with the new iOS 11 changes. I mean, the only thing keeping me from using an iPad for everyday use is I can't do any code in it.

Aside from that, everybody is already using their phones more than their desktops, and even when they do use their desktops, it's to access the slightly uglier version of Youtube on Chrome...

Probable future will be entreprise and schools using Chromiums/Windows 10 (very closed platform, but that's not a bad thing), and iPad/iPhone (or not iOS) for every other use.

> everybody is already using their phones more than their desktops, and even when they do use their desktops, it's to access the slightly uglier version of Youtube on Chrome...

Here I say: "[citation needed]". It surely is rather the complete opposite of how I use the devices (phone: about 0 hours (I don't own a bugging device with telephony functions), PC - hell a lot).

Tablet sales sputtered and people quit talking about this. They're horrible for trying to do productive work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com