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Comment by firebaze | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if Intel will be able to turn tides in time before mainstream opinion follows reality. AMD is quite far ahead, ARM (not just with Apple M1) is a generation ahead, and Microsoft dominance (i.e. x86 dominance) is fading.

Either Intel has a fully new architecture ready and is just waiting for the best time to unveil the beast in the making, or they're starting to be part of history.

Reminds me a bit of Boeing in the face of SpaceX and Airbus. Maybe a bit unfair, since Intel is innovating, just apparently without much luck until today.

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Intel is not called Chipzilla for no reason. AMD's been working like crazy to keep up, but Intel still has a lot of cash reserves and innovation. And though I prefer AMD as a company, I cannot deny that advances that have come from Intel and also from the AMD/Intel rivalry. It's better for both of them, and even more players, to succeed.

What is not right is for one or more players to use their market dominance to stifle innovation from competitors. I would be upset if AMD did the same thing (though they'd have to do it a lot, i.e., to the same level, before I would feel the same as I do about Intel).

Edit: Fixed typo.

ARM really isn't a generation ahead. Put a good x86 core on 5nm, and it might be slower but that's not a generation. Especially if you take generation to be like, pentium to pentium pro kind of leap.

Intel should have an escape plan off x86, but people are way way too stuck on the idea that x86 is a dead end when a good microarchitectural leap could offset it.

> a good x86 core on 5nm

But that is actually Intel's problem, you can not "just" put a good x86 core on 5nm (technically) and you need 5nm production capacities to.

But what is 5nm, ARM is just an ISA, was my point.

At the end of the day, modern x86 cores are essentially high performing RISC cores with a vdry intelligent CISC decoder. An ARM core just has to be a high performing RISC core.

ARMv8 is not fully "RISC" insofar as that means anything. x86 is only "CISC" because "CISC" is defined as whatever x86 does.

If we are talking servers and IoT ARM is a generation ahead. Low energy, like 100x better.

But also in pure CPU the latest aarch64 chips blow away Intel with its overly slow energy management, icache bloat and insecurity by design.

How could you offset it when you have no power budget to work with? The charger for my M1 is 30 watt. That can run the machine /and/ charge the battery.

Even if a comparable intel machine can get that down to 45 watt, they still need a much bigger battery for the same operating hours, which means a heavier computer (or better battery tech, but a fundamental shift in the battery to e.g carbon based batteries is something I would expect from either Samsung or Apple).

In a mobile world, power is what matters.

>and Microsoft dominance (i.e. x86 dominance) is fading.

What?

The dominance of x86 PCs, which are Microsoft's bread and butter (the "Wintel" platform), is fading, as more people are using ARM devices as their main or only computing device. Arguably. I think that's what they meant, anyway.

What I meant is: a few years ago, Windows was set - either you used Windows (usual) or MacOS (you got spare money), or you probably used Linux or something else (geek).

In Server-Space, you mostly used either Linux or Windows ASP. Nowadays, not so much anymore. Linux prevails (and doesn't care if x86 or ARM) and Windows is losing grounds week by week (even MS itself seems to favor Linux for server-side stuff, or technology-agnostic NPM etc.).

Even on laptop and desktop machines Linux is gaining momentum (but is still far behind Microsoft), but that market is getting smaller and smaller.

So, my personal opinion is that the x86 dominanace is fading. Not Azure, not Microsoft as a whole, but the presence of its desktop operating system, as it seems to me, definitely is losing importance fast.

I'd not be surprised if MS offers a linux window manager which emulates windows, so to speak.

Indeed. The big boys all made their own CPUs, and the growth market has been mobile. And x86 isn't there. The architecture is still big, but under pressure from both sides.

I'm not really sure what to make of that. On one hand, yes, more and more things are being done in browsers, and possibly on phones, which in theory de-emphasizes the importance of x86 and Windows.

On the other hand, especially when it comes to laptop market share diminishing, I don't even know how many times and over how many years I've heard people say that laptops will become obsolete because of phones.

Hasn't happened, at least for people who use their devices for almost any kind of work. For finding a repair shop for whatever you need repaired? Sure, most people will probably use their phone for that, and people who only need an internet device for things like that might not bother with more than a phone. Writing a report or a plan? Not so much.

I honestly don't think the market for laptops is going to diminish that much when jobs become more and more white-collar.

With Apple's non-negligible market share and their using a different CPU architecture, combined with the emphasis on web and browsers, x86 will probably become less of a de facto standard. But it would take a lot to topple the inertia of Windows in the consumer on non-tech work market.

I didn't want to argue laptops are becoming obsolete. In fact I think they'll become more important - the share of desktops + laptops is shrinking, but laptops are gaining disproportionally over desktops.

Nevertheless, the importance of the OS shrinks in my opinion. Either you use windows, then you're (still) bound to x86 (yes, Windows technically supports other platforms, but this is mostly history), or you're using a Mac (BSD-based OS, doesn't really care which architecture) or something else (i.e. Linux, which also doesn't care).

Microsoft isn't stupid by far. As soon as the market doesn't favor Intel/x86 anymore they'll pivot to providing a linux window manager (earning money with telemetry and their office platform).

I'm convinced Intel has to play a big card soon (and I'm quite sure they will), or they're history, comparable to IBM in 2000-2010.

Laptop sales grew slightly in 2019 and massively in 2020, desktop sales have dropped for the past 10 years every year, tablets were big in 2013-15, but dropped about 25% since then.

These days you have to cover 5 platforms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Web, so most people, including Microsoft, pick Web first and everything else is based on that web version.

I will be on a laptop/desktop always, because they are just better.

That said I can also see the business savings from switching to something like an iPad or a Chromebook. Excellent battery times, no need to manage the devices and if they are lost or stolen you just grab a new one from storage. As a company you are using cloud based stuff anyway (Microsoft or Google, it doesn't really matter).

There might be some specialized stuff that you can't do on a Chromebook (software development comes to mind) but for sales, business and everything else?

As for personal stuff? I can see more students buying an iPad or a Chromebook and just typing out their essays on that.

I agree, it seems many consumers no longer use Windows. For many people today their primary computer is a smartphone or tablet running Android or iOS.

It used to be almost all non-technical businesses used Windows and other Microsoft products for almost everything. I don't know if you're younger but you may not be able to appreciate how much their dominance has faded in the last twenty years, due several shifts after each other, but most recently to the comprehensive switch to software-as-a-service.

Windows is down to 75% desktop usage share worldwide and 60% usage share in the United States. Still a majority, but a far cry from the days where it held 90%+ usage share. It's usage share has gradually and very quietly eroded.

Nevermind that the desktop/laptop OS market itself is no longer as important as it was in the 2000s.

And I guess almost all of those Windows servers in the back offices of small businesses running Active Directory and Exchange are now also gone.

Or just running the same way they were set up a decade ago with no security patches or anything

I think the better metric is the size of Microsoft's moat. How many applications are left that people depend on that only run on Windows? I could switch to Mac today and not miss anything. Linux, not so much, but a lot of normal, non-techie people find it's enough.

Everyone I know is buying new M1 macs. There is simply no competition currently for the price and performance. I hate Apple, but I am considering getting one too. I am tired of my Intel laptop constantly spinning loud fans.

My old MacBook Pro is in desperate need of an upgrade, but I'll probably wait for the next iteration on the M1 (probably due sometime this fall) before I upgrade. Far too much stuff I use comes from outside the Apple RDF, and is likely to drag its feet for as long as possible before bothering to make a native build. (Plus I still occasionally have reason to fire up VMware, but I'll soon offload that job to a separate machine.)

Thankfully I've always treated my laptop as a secondary machine, and my current one only gets painful (or really just hot and poor on battery life) when I'm trying to run modern video codec stuff on it.

>Everyone I know is buying new M1 macs.

Where?

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