Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

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The classic moat metaphor that the OP article and others use needs to be fleshed out to match Intel's predicament.

A moat protects a castle that adversaries want to take over. The presence of the castle defines what can and cannot be done with the surrounding landscape. But if the castle ceases to protect what people care about, or make meaningful additions to the environment, it becomes irrelevant and the presence of the moat makes no difference.

Intel's problem isn't that competitors want to storm the castle and achieve domination over the landscape that x86 controls. It's that the competition have built their own castles on the other side of the river, and a lot of the peasants are tilling the lands around Castle ARM and Chateau NVIDIA.

To put it another way, Intel thought the castle was "control of computing" and the moat was "leadership in x86" but irrelevance comes a little closer with each passing chip generation. It is fortunate for Intel that corraling an ecosystem into existence around the alternatives to x86 is an insanely difficult task, but it has been done with ARM, it has been done (albeit for a niche) with NVIDIA and it can be done again with whatever comes next.

>Intel's problem isn't that competitors want to storm the castle and achieve domination over the landscape that x86 controls.

IMO it's both. While the importance x86 is declining, AMD is aggressively eating what ever part of it is left. I also think that in the long term, as intel and amd build better x86 chips, the value proposition of ARM will slowly fade in favor of something like risc-v

Asking because I don’t know: what is the value proposition of ARM?

The value of ARM is that anyone with enough money can license Arm cores and incorporate them in their own products, which can be optimized for some custom applications.

The level of customization possible with an x86 CPU is much less. You must buy a complete computer board or module and incorporate it in your product.

While for custom applications it is easy to create a superior solution with Arm cores, for general-purpose computers it is hard to compete with the Intel and AMD CPUs. All the computers with Arm cores have worse performance per dollar than similar x86 computers. (For instance there was recently a thread on HN about a credit-card-sized computer with an Intel N100 CPU and with the same price or lower as a Raspberry Pi, but with a much higher performance.)

AMD does offer custom x86 - see the steam deck, surface laptops and Xbox and PS4 and 5. Given there aren't a ton of small fish making custom parts they are excellent at what they are made for.

AMD is pushing x86 to Apple ARM levels that keep power use low enough (best I've seen is 16 hour battery life on a device - I think MacBooks best this still) but performance per watt I haven't seen ARM really top charts. They are awesome and I want arm and risc-v to really shine in laptops but the only player on the PC side is Qualcomm who was told to destroy their only flagship by ARM.

> AMD does offer custom x86

Not the same thing. On X86 you have to pay AMD or intel to design something for you.

In arm, you get to decide who design your chip or even have your own in house CPU design team.

These sorts of processors are available from Intel as well (if anything, more available, as you can buy low-end 5w processors with modern e-cores in them, eg. N95/N97). The commenter above is referring to these, and they are common in Mini-Pcs with 8-16GB of RAM and cost <200USD. These sorts of processors crush the ARM competition at the same level right now (ie. the pi).

In fact, AMD doesn't seem to have anything in the same segment currently, although they do exist in the higher tiers alongside Intel with their laptop processors.

Radxa X4 low-cost, credit card-sized Intel N100 SBC goes for $60 and up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007348

You’ve missed out one of Arm’s central value propositions which is power efficiency and the reason why it has more than 99% of the smartphone market.

There have been tons of proprietary CPU architectures with the same power efficiency as Arm. Only the x86 architecture is an outlier that requires an unusually complicated instruction decoder, which may degrade a little the energy efficiency.

Arm has eliminated most of the competing CPU architectures not by providing better power or energy efficiency, but by its business model of being licensable to anyone.

The ARM ISA was somewhat better than MIPS and SPARC, both of which have been handicapped by including some experimental features that have been later proved to be bad ideas. However there have been many other RISC ISAs more or less equivalent with ARM. Only the business model has extracted ARM from the crowd, not its technical advantages.

You're conflating the characteristics of the ISA with the value proposition offered by the designs using it. Not the same at all.

Other historical architectures typically targeted higher performance.

Arm specifically went after low-power applications, which continues today when we see the priorities in the design of Arm and x86 cores, for example.

Arm "specifically went after low-power applications" only in comparison with x86 or in comparison with a few other architectures restricted to workstations and servers, like DEC Alpha or Intel Itanium.

Before 2000, there were at least a dozen CPU architectures that went for the same low-power applications as Arm. There were a lot of microcontroller or processor vendors and each one of them had at least one proprietary ISA, if not 2 or 3 or even more different proprietary ISAs.

More than 20 years ago, I have redesigned various kinds of communication equipment, in order to replace many other kinds of CPUs, for example Motorola MC683xx or ColdFire or IBM PowerPC CPUs, with Arm CPUs.

In none of those cases the Arm CPUs had a lower power consumption or any other technical advantage. In fact in all cases the Arm CPUs were technically inferior to the CPUs replaced by them, which has required the implementation of various hardware and software workarounds.

There was only one reason why the Arm CPUs had been selected to replace their predecessors with different architectures, and that was the lower price. Their lower price was in great part due to the fact that there already were many competing vendors of Arm CPUs, so if you did not like one of them it was easy to replace it with another vendor.

I get it that you don’t like Arm but that doesn’t change the fact that low power was and is central to their value proposition - and this latter fact doesn’t preclude other firms having low power offerings.

It's been said many time and the correlation between ISA and power efficiency have been debunked many time. ARM is power efficient because most ARM implementation are power efficient. Right now x86 AMD strix are about on par with qualcom x elites

Agreed. That power efficiency is still a central part of the Arm value proposition though. Others are competing with real designs on this with Arm in laptops but not in - for example - smartphones.

(simplifying) ARM provides verified, tested, standardized, reasonably well designed chips (logic circuits) that your company can purchase a license for and then send that chip design / logic circuit to be etched on a wafer, cut, encapsulated, and soldered to a printed circuit board.

Those ARM CPUs support a standard (but ARM-flavored) assembly programming language. (Formally: Instruction Set Architecture)

Designing your own chip previously was risky because you might have logic or hardware bugs in your chip that were very hard to debug, and then you hope that someone will bother to write assembly code that works on your chip. Since you probably designed your own assembly language that co-evolved with your chip, those assembly code developers are going to be sinking a lot of time into understanding your chips and assembly code quirks to wring performance out of them.

RISC-V standardizes a RISC-V flavored assembly code (ISA) and also provides some certification test packages to prove that "this particular chip design" can execute the RISC-V assembly language according to specifications.

In PCs, ARM CPUs perform just as good or better than AMD64 but have much better battery life. In the cloud, ARM CPUs are much cheaper (ca. 25% less) for the same or better performance.

Not quite. I think we need to split the value of ARM the instruction from specific implementation.

1 - In term of pure efficiency, nothing magical about ARM. Looking at AMD latest strix laptop platform they are about on par with qualcomm new arm laptop chips.

Apple M* CPU are still better. However, a lot of that efficiency is platform derived.

2 - The lower cost in the cloud is a function of the middle man being removed. Amazon is selling graviton cheaper simply because they don't have to pay the markup of AMD or Intel.

AMD's stormed the castle with Ryzen long ago and planted their flag, but since everyone's still asleep at Castle Intel they haven't really noticed.

There's sorrow and confusion at intel that the server and desktop markets are shrinking. People just aren't buying as many computers any more. Not to worry though, they'll probably want more in the future.

The rest of the world has noticed that people are buying lots of computers. This doesn't seem to cause any cognitive dissonance for intel though. Perhaps "computer" means "thing intel sells" and excludes the work of the heathen outsiders. It makes for some quite confused reporting from the financial press.

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