Ask HN: Is it me or are we entering an ARM era?
With the Macbook M1, billions of smartphones running ARM and less and less sales of Intel chips, will we see the sudden rise of Linux and Windows desktops / laptops also switching to ARM?
Is x86 dead?
Is x86 dead?
- Andrew Tanenbaum arguing with Linus Torvalds in 1992 that Linux was obsolete because it was (at the time) built only for x86, and that x86 was dead.
"Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for this term. But if you do real well on the final exam, you can still pass the course."
Turns out x86 had at least 30 years and counting of life left in it, regardless of what the academics thought...
That's hilarious.
It may also be of note that guesstimates from that era to the early 2000s were usually wildly wrong. Some compiler books from the era say, "Of course, we can count on a [large]% speed increase per-year".
https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 Intel (apparently) thought they would have 10GHz by 2005!!!!
The current transition is more about some more PCs and servers also considering to use ARM.
I don't think x86 is dead. As long as x86 CPU manufacturers can keep up on pricing, performance and power consumption it will stay alive. And there's a lot more to that race than just the instruction set. Intel had a lot of weak years, but AMD showed that x86 doesn't have to stagnate.
Apple's transition to ARM worked because they have absolute control over their ecosystem. This is the same reason the PPC-Intel transition worked; they were able to destroy all of the wonderful lineage of PPC Mac software in two releases (Tiger, Lion).
Microsoft does not.
I don't like x86_64 either, and I also don't use Microsoft, but there's hope and there's delusion. It still has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.
Personally I would chalk this up to chip companies doing what is called "value based selling".. instead of saying, hey how much do we need as a company to be profitable at a level we are happy with, to continue to invest in our tech, grow and pursue high end goals, they basically said, hey.. how much is this chip worth to the customer? And, if we buy up all of our rivals such that they essentially have zero options besides us, then we can charge essentially whatever we want to charge -- or maintain our current pricing with no hope for the customer to get a price improvement over time.
When you get to be the size of the big trillion dollar tech companies, you say, ok yea, I'm tired of this game where you spend lots of time trying to figure out how much money I make from your chips and basing your pricing on that.. I'll just make the chips myself...
- Both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X use x86 processors.
- MacBook market share is around 10%, so the majority of new laptops are still x86.
- The majority of cloud compute instances are also x86.
If people are actually using ARM for development, it also makes sense to use ARM for CI and production servers, since maintaining support for two architectures is just not feasible in the long run.
Recently, I've been testing ARM on CircleCI, and in my experience builds and test runs are about 20-25% faster on ARM vs x86, which to me seems like a big win.
You are forgetting ChromeOS, though it only adds ~%1
ARM has its place
RISC-V has its place
Along with myriad other architectures out there
Apart from IP issues I'm not seeing much reason for a computer builder to go with RISC-V even if the hardware existed.
The ARM ISA and more importantly all the support i.e. documentation and compilers etc. just seems more appealing to me than RISC-V even if RISC-V is pretty clean. I don't think there's all that much in it, but at least with ARM you have a singular entity to sue if something goes wrong, whereas RISC-V is kind of a risk in that regard.
I want one, but I have no expectation of ever owning a proper RISC-V desktop machine.
As it is, there's not really a "singular entity to sue" even in the ARM world - all the licensees out there might be lawsuit targets (if they really blundered something horrifically), but ARM Holdings isn't going to be a serious target
And, based on how most people use their mobile devices, ARM supplanted x86 for most people a long time ago
A more likely theory is that we've now entered the big.LITTLE era. Intel has already begun to pivot their desktop line to the big.LITTLE design, and while AMD's next line won't follow suit, they've discussed bringing the architecture to the CPUs after that. x86 has still got quite a bit of gas left in the tank, and now that RISC-V is getting taped out, a lot of people are starting to realize that a more modular approach to RISC CPUs is probably smarter than how ARM exists in it's current iterations. Plus, ARM is still proprietary (arguably moreso than x86), whereas RISC-V is fully open for anyone to use and manufacture. Simply from a technical side, I think RISC-V is going to eat ARM's lunch within the decade, and I also think traditional architectures like x86 aren't going away any time soon. Time will tell.
Also, we've heard these arguments before with Intel i960, IBM PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and Sun SPARC. At the end of it, x86 is still around.
DEC Alpha was more performant than Pentiums, but they caught up eventually. Pentiums were far, far cheaper, however.
Power efficiency wasn't really a thing back then. The original Pentium was an 8 watt part, the common DEC Alpha (21164 in '95) was a 30-50w part.
IBM shipped a lot of PowerPC machines also. I think they still have some current machines on that architecture.
> Power efficiency wasn't really a thing back then.
If I remember right, that was what caused Apple to switch to Intel. IBM just couldn't get the heat and power consumption on the G5 down to a level that would make it feasible for laptops.
And yes, I think that's right about not being able to get the heat down for laptop parts. That's still over a decade after the PowerPC 601 that competed with the Pentium (P54C). By 2006 it was pretty obvious that x86 had 'won'. DEC Alphas were discontinued, Sun was well into financial difficulties, and SGI (MIPS) was in serious financial trouble, and Apple was moving to Intel.
Side note: A lot of these arguments really happened over 20 years ago. This has actually been a really nice walk down memory lane.
Once we get OSs capable of understanding "this task should be executed on cores 0-7, and these others can be on 0-15", it's a much smaller step to "this task can only be executed on cores 0-7 and will be literal gibberish on the other cores". Over time, you skew the core distribution until x86-64 is a legacy product and you install a separate accelerator that has a couple of cores on it if you still have x86 software that can't be emulated efficiently.
What worries me about ARM and RISC-V is that the diversity of SoC design that makes them great for embedded systems, makes them awful for a desktop PC where third-party software and peripherals matter. In that sense, any attempt to ask "will ARM/RISC-V replace x86/x86-64" has to be followed up with "which ARM/RISC-V".
We'd need someone that could unite the industry around some standards for an ARM/RISC-V desktop. I worry that may end up being Microsoft, because they have a unique potential gatekeeping position with their closed-source portfolio. They can say "this is the right memory map/device tree for Windows ARM/RISC-V" and actually exert leverage on manufacturers. (If a Linux/BSD product tries the same, vendors can always patch around it).
The alternative is chaos. Even in x86 land, with only two meaningful players and huge installed bases of each, we had various instruction sets that took forever to get adopted, or just withered entirely (3DNow!) because people didn't consider them part of the least common denominator.
The importance of making 100% ( not 98% or 99,9% ) compatibility on business software and business PC, which represent 750M Windows user will be worth to keep x86 alive. Of course Microsoft being the key factor here, but I dont see them making any dramatic moves, and even if they did, it will take a long for those effect to be distributed.
Again, it is worth point out. The word "dead" means different thing to different people. On HN ( and in fact everywhere on the internet ) they often state Ruby is dead, when they meant Ruby is dying. No one uses COBOL, or COBOL is dead, when in fact majority of our underlying infrastructure are still running on it. Mainframe is dead... etc etc and I could continue forever.
Without a proper definition of dead, any of these discussions are meaningless.
x86 will stay alive for legacy systems but will become more and more expensive as they loose economy of scale and constant effort to keep up with performance.
Then only the expensive legacy system will keep paying the x86 tax
How many phones can drive a 4k 144Hz monitor? how many have more than a single 5gbit usb3 jack? how many arm laptops have more than two bare basic usb3 host ports? hiw many chios offer a dozen lanes or more of pcie?
i really really think usb4 is excellent, especially with thunderbolt pcie which is not that much more complexity. gazing at my crystal ball i'd expect two more years before we see arm start to show up here, and likely at the flagship level devices only. it's an indicator to me that arm is an unserious competitor. the ecosystem is a couple massive players, who seemingly are in cahoots to keep from pushing each other to advance much. even the archtecture moves at a crawl. a53 was around for almost a decade and a55 was barely a double digit % speed boost- abysmal, arm, abysmal.
i also think arm is hampered by having such a relationship oriented ecosystem. anyone can go out and buy x86 chips and make a computer. companys like chuwi build super interesting low cost boxes that run rings around most arm chips (not apple). innivation is open. by compare, try getting chips from qualcomm or mediatek or any other modern offering, without being an estaished player shipping dozens of millions of units a year. arm is a much more closed ecosystem, now supported by massive massive margins on $800+ devices, with well defined product niches. x86 is a much less entrenched & much more diverse environment, with much higher general expectations (apple's chips somewhat the exception).
at the high end, in servers, i think arm stands a chance. but these will be chips you cant actually buy, built by hyperscalers, or just phenomenally expensive high margin $6000 servers. if you need compute im expecting workstation chips (hdet) to be higher value, but if you also need io, then there may be some modest value proposition ein over x86. for hyperscalers though they will be saving bank.
There are simply multiple eras ongoing at the same time. The ARM era stated a long time ago, not when you bought your laptop.
If Microsoft will release a version of Visual Studio that runs on ARM, I'll be able to do everything on one machine (there's already an ARM version of Windows, but for whatever reason Visual Studio isn't supported yet... I can kinda understand why, as it needs to do debugging-type stuff that's more hardware-dependent).
I'm extremely pleased with the M1 iMac. Fast and silent. Back in the day I had a dual Athlon, which, while fast for its time, sounded like I had a couple of Dustbusters running under my desk.
Don't think about the era, think about what it means for you.
Either we are entering the Arm era, or we aren't.
If we are, it won't matter. all the s/w in the world,languages, libraries,expertise, applications, etc aren't going to disappear, so it won't matter much. Programmers will switch compilers and learn new tricks, and consumers march on. I still buy games, play them, and code for a living.
If we are not, same story, just not as many new compilers.
I'm not complaining though; we're entering a new golden age for people who like learning the intricacies of ISA's and microarchitectures!
I hope they stick the landing (i.e. make Linux work great on M1 rather than just booting) but if the only competitive ARM cores available to consumers are from Apple, only running Apple software then I'm not all that convinced we'll see a real changing of the guard.
The only exception is my wife's work laptop, an x86 MacBook Pro. (It'll be replaced by an ARM-based one in a year or two.)
It's quite safe to say that x86 is dead.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/arm/its-happening-arm-se...
And heat, which makes cooling cheaper, has a good chance at reducing noise in the datacentre, etc.
Seriously though, I think AWS making the price/perf advantageous towards ARM is probably doing more to push ARM in the cloud than anything else. I know I have moved all our Linux workloads to Graviton2 where I could for the cost savings.