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Comment by didip | Hacker News Reader

heh, does Intel have any chance to catch up? They fell so far behind.

I really don't see what they can do. It seems like in the last year they pivoted hard into "ok we'll build chips in the US again!", but it's going to be years and years before any of that pays off or even materializes. The only announcements I've heard from them are just regular "Here's the CEO of Intel telling us how he's going to fix Intel" PR blurbs and nothing else. Best case maybe they just position themselves to be bought by Nvidia...

No. Intel worked out it needs to open its production capacity to other vendors. They will end up another ARM fab with a legacy x86-64 business strapped on the side. That's probably not a bad place to be really. I think x86-64 will fizzle out in about a decade.

I don't feel like ARM has serious technical advantages over x86-64 as an ISA, although it is cleaner and has more security features which is good. Isn't the main advantage just that it's easier to license ARM?

Once enough patents expire all ISAs are eventually equal, I'd think.

I feel much the same way. I've used both pretty extensively at this point, and I'm not sure if I'm a believer in either mentality. I'm hoping that RISC-V will be the one to blow my mind, though.

Spend some time looking at optimised compiler output on godbolt on both architectures. ARM has some really nice tricks up its sleeves.

I’ve been using ARM since about 1992 though so I may be biased.

So does Intel ;)

Yes and no. Look at some of the loop optimisations possible on ARM compared to x86-64. I've had x86-64 run 8 instructions that ARM does in 1 instruction.

This applies equally well, or dare I saw even better, on x86. (Arm tends to catch up because of higher IPC.)

I remember PPC and its rlwinms and co. My ARM isn’t that good, though I can read it.

But some of those x86 instructions take 0.5 cycles and some of them take 0 if they’re removed by fusion or register renaming. It has worse problems, like loop instructions you can’t actually use but take up the shortest codes.

Of course they have a chance to catch up. Only a fool would count Intel down & out. Intel is still larger by revenue than AMD, NVidia, and ARM combined.

This will probably cost them some market share, but they have plenty of cash to weather there current manufacturing issues, they still have world-class CPU design talent which they've proven over and over and over again, and they have some very interesting products & technologies on the roadmap.

ARM offering a fight for the first time ever is not going to be a 1-hit KO against the goliath that is Intel.

The CPUs are designed and made by Apple, the ISA is licensed from ARM. Those are not like ARM Cortex CPUs that are actually designed by ARM.

Where do you see these are Apple designed CPUs? There doesn't seem to be anything indicating that, and that would be massive news.

Err sorry, I thought we were talking about the Apple M1 as in another comment subthread here, but that wasn't this one actually.

But my point still stands I think, isn't this CPU designed by Nvidia, also just with an ARM-licensed ISA? Similarly AMD you mentioned in your list shares its ISA with Intel, and yet the CPUs are completely different.

The CPU is custom but the cores are off-the-shelf Arm cores.

Alright, then my point is indeed gone. I misread the author, thinking I was still in another subthread.

Intel will never catch up because Arm's business model is much better. Intel is not competing with Arm, they're competing with every large tech company, who are all sharing many design costs via Arm and mostly sharing manufacuring costs via TSMC.

Arm has a much more efficient and also much less profitable business model, and Intel will never catch up unless they adopt it. They'll never do that so they'll fade away like IBM.

There are some hints that they are redesigning some server processors to double core count but that may not be visible for 2-3 years. Also keep in mind that Intel has 75% server market share and is only losing ~5 points per year.

There is a very good chance that Intel will catch up. They have money, they have capacity, and from what I understand they still have several more designs researched and those will enter production over the next few years. They are also working on RISC-V stuff (AMD is too).

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