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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

A future with ARM in server CPUs seems more plausible when Intel doesn't have a manufacturing advantage.

Also it is likely that Intel's loss of lead in process is one of the reasons that AMD (e.g. Ryzen) is actually competitive again.

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Ryzen is competitive despite being on an inferior process. Ryzen is competitive because AMD stopped playing in the mud and decided to catch up, that said it's sad/scary just how much core seem to be a head of it's time Intel has been riding the same uarch for over a decade.

The only problem with Ryzen is that it doesn't clock as high as comparable Intel chips, but then again, it runs cooler and uses less power - both of those are because the process GF are using is targeted at lower power mobile CPU's.

It really doesn’t run cooler nor does it consumes less power at the same performance envelope.

Intel calculates the peak max draw TDP AMD uses sustainable average over 2 min.

Zen is built on 14nm LLP it’s not a ulv/ulp process.

s/ARM/RISK-V, and you have instantly nailed a top 1% upvoted post

Problem with RISC-V is exactly what makes it strong. The lack of verified software ecosystem will keep it from being main stream for at least a decade(something that until recently has held back the Arm server market, well, that and not having a reasonable server core..fixed with the ThunderX2). The fact that you can add instructions quickly is another problem, well, that and the lack of a standardized verification suite for the ISA so that software devs know that implementations are up to spec when they write code for them. I can definitely see RISC-V accelerators taking off though, driven by a more stable x86/Arm/Power core. To me, that path for RISC-V makes a lot of sense.

> The fact that you can add instructions quickly is another problem, well, that and the lack of a standardized verification suite for the ISA so that software devs know that implementations are up to spec when they write code for them.

There is a formal specification of both the ISA and the memory model. There are 2 working groups extending the formal models to the standard extensions.

Plus these formal efforts there is also a working group defining a sweet of verification tests that you have to pass in order to be qualified RISC-V.

The standard profile defined for Linux that will primary be used in the server space is RV65GC and most processor in this space will probably not have non-standardised extensions. I would expect a server core to have maybe vector and crypto extensions.

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