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Comment by xbar | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake.

An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.

Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs, RISC-V...

Windows, MacOS and Linux all run competitively on multiple non-x86 architectures.

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> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.

Incorrect, we have an even greater lack of x86 vendors now than we did in the 80s. In the 80s you had Intel, and they licensed to AMD, Harris, NEC, TI, Chips & Technologies, and in the 90s we had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, National Semi, NexGen, and for a hot minute Transmeta. Even more smaller vendors.

Today making mass market x86 chips we have: Intel, AMD, and a handful of small embedded vendors selling designs from the Pentium days.

I believe what you meant was that x86 is not a monopoly thanks to other ISAs, but x86 itself is even more of a monopoly than ever.

I believe in the 80s all those vendors were making the same intel design in their own fab. I don't think any of them did the design on their own. In the 90s some of them had their own designs.

Some were straight second sources but they all had the license to do what NEC, AMD, and OKI did, which is alter the design and sell these variants. They all started doing that with the 8086. There were variants of the 8086, 8088, and 80186, I'm unaware of variants of the 80188, or 80286 although there were still multiple manufacturers, I had a Harris 286 at 20MHz myself. Then with the 386 there were more custom variants of the 386 and 486. In the Pentium days Intel wouldn't license the Pentium design, but there were compatible competitors as AMD also began 100% custom designs that were only ISA compatible and pin compatible with the K5 and K6 lines.

At what point do we call a tweak to an original design different enough to count it... K5 and K6 where clearly new designs. The others were mostly intel with some changes. I'm going to count the rest as minor tweaks and not worth counting otherwise - but this is a case where you can argue there the line is and so others need to decide where they stand (if they care)

The NEC V20/30 series were significant advances over their Intel equivalent (basically all the 186 features plus more in an 8086/8 compatible package).

C&T had some super-386 chips that apparently barely made it to market (38605DX), and the Cyrix 5x86 (most of a 6x86) is substantially different from the AMD one (which is just a 486 clock-quadrupled)

I called the K5 and 6 new designs, I said they were only ISA and pin compatible, but not the same design.

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.

I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are going through something really interesting right now after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86. This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out of and back into unified packages, and a continued downward push from commoditization forces that are affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late 80s and 90s, but something's in the air.

It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide.

Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.

I remember when I was a senior in undergrad (1993) the profs were quite excited about the price/performance of 486 computers which thoroughly trashed the SPARC-based Sun work stations that we'd transitioned to because Motorola rug-pulled the 68k. Sure we were impressed by the generation of RISC machines that came out around that time like SPARC, PA RISC, POWER PC and such but in retrospect it was not those RISC machines that were fast it was 68k that was dying, but x86 was keeping up.

> It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

A lot of companies killed off their in-house architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.

The bandwagon was actually an Ice Cream truck run by the old lady from the Sponge Bob movie.

Intel had just wiped the floor with x86 servers, all the old guard Unix vendors with their own chips were hurting. Then Intel makes the rounds with a glorious plan of how they were going to own the server landscape for a decade or more. So in various states of defeat and grief much of the industry followed them. Planned or not, the resulting rug pull really screwed them over. The organs that operated those lines of businesses were fully removed. It worked too well, I am going to say it was on accident.

Intel should have broken up its internal x86 hegemony a long time ago, which they have been trying since the day it was invented. Like the 6502, it was just too successful for its own good. Only x86 also built up the Vatican around itself.

X86 is more than just the ISA. What’s at stake is the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem. It was a fluke of history that made it happen, and it would be sad to lose it.

PCI-e is the culmination of that ecosystem, and like PCI before it, is available on all architectures to anyone who pays PCI-SIG.

PCIe is great, yes.

Sadly with the rise of laptops with soldered-in-everything, and the popularity of android/iphone/tablet devices, I share some of layer8's worries about the future of the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem.

On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

Hacking on that level is very different from building and upgrading PCs, being able to mix and match components from a wide range of different manufacturers. You won’t or can’t build a serious NAS, Proxmox homelab, gaming PC, workstation, or GPU/compute farm from Raspberry Pis or FPGAs.

We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.

Today sure. If you want to custom make "serious" system then x86 is likely your best bet. But this isn't about today, you can have that system right now if you want, it's still there, so this is about the future.

All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.

Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.

You can't really build a PC with parts other than x86. The only other platform you can really build from parts is Arm, with the high end Ampere server chips. Most other platforms are usually pretty highly integrated, you can't just swap parts or work on it.

What about the POWER9-based Talos II systems? Extraordinary niche, I know, but aren't they PC-ish?

Why not? Ram is ram, storage is storage.

You can't just buy an ARM or POWER motherboard from one place, a CPU from another place, some RAM sticks from another place, a power supply, a heatsink/fan, some kind of hard drive (probably NVMe these days), a bunch of cables, and put them all together in your basement/living room and have a working system. With x86, this is pretty normal still. With other architectures, you're going to get a complete, all-in-one system that either 1) has no expandability whatsoever, at least by normal users, or 2) costs more than a house in NYC and requires having technicians from the vendor to fly to your location and stay in a hotel for a day or two to do service work on your system for you because you're not allowed to touch it.

But what prevents it from working? I've been building PCs from parts since I was a child.

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migration away from these programs, but would nonetheless be a lucrative situation for Intel-AMD in the meantime.

The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-trivial functionality.

C++ language spec doesn't specify and doesn't care about ABI (infamously so; it's kept the language from being used in many places, and where people ignored ABI compat initially but absolutely needed it in the future, as with BeOS's Application Kit and Mac kexts, it's much harder to maintain than it should be.

"two factions" is only discussing source compatibility.

They had ABI breakage when C++11 support was implemented in GCC 5 and that was extremely painful. Honestly, I still wish that they had avoided it.

You can still use the old ABI with -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0

Microsoft (and other parties) already demonstrated quite effective x86 emulation, opening the migration path away from this anachronistic ISA.

Surely there must be an emulator you could use?

Indeed, I could use QEMU to run FreePBX on ARM64. However, the performance penalty would be pretty severe, and there isn't anything inherent to FreePBX that should prevent it from running natively on ARM64. It simply appears that nobody has yet spent the time to iron out any problems and make an official build for the architecture, but unfortunately I think there is still loads of other software in a similar situation.

I believe the "x86 monopoly" was meant to refere to how only Intel and AMD are legally allowed to make x86 chips due to patents. X86 is currently a duopoly, and if Intel and AMD were to merge, that would become a monopoly.

This is how I interpreted it as well. The others seem to be arguing due to a misunderstanding of what was said/meant.

Didn't AMD start making x86 chips in 1982?

That seems correct from some quick Wikipedia reading, but I don't understand what it has to do with anything?

The existence of an imaginary x86 monopoly in the 80s?

Oh, but xbar's interpretation of the phrase "x86 monopoly" is clearly the x86 architecture having a monopoly in the instruction set market. Under that interpretation, I don't really think it's relevant how many companies made x86 chips. I don't think xbar is necessarily wrong, I just think they're interpreting words to mean something they weren't intended so they're not making an effective argument

Did x86 have a monopoly in the 80s to begin with? If there is any period when that was true it would be the 2000s or early 2010s.

> intended so they're not making an effective argument

To be fair I'm really struggling to somehow connect the "x86 monopoly in the late 80s" with the remainder of their comment (which certainly makes sense).

x86 didn't have a monopoly, but IBM PC clones were clearly what everyone was talking about and there the monopoly existed. There are lots of different also ran processors, some with good market share in some niche, but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track by 1985.

> but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track by 1985.

By that standard if we exclude mobile x86 has a much stronger monopoly these days than in 1985. Unless we exclude low end PCs like Apple II and Commodore 64.

In 1990 x86 had ~80%, Apple ~7%, Amiga ~4% (with the remainder going to lowend or niche PCs) so again not that different than today.

This is all very true and why I think a merger between AMD and Intel is even possible. Nvidia and Intel is also a possible merger, but I actually think there is more regulatory concern with NVIDIA and how big and dominant they are becoming.

Intel and Samsung could be interesting, especially if it would get Samsung to open up more. Samsung would get better GPUs and x86, Intel gets access to the phone market and then you end up with things like x86 Samsung tablets that can run both Windows or Android.

Could also be Intel and Micron. Then you end up with full stack devices with Intel CPUs and Micron RAM and storage, and the companies have partnered in the past.

Samsung has its own leading edge fabrication plants. Merging the two would drop the number of leading edge foundries from 3 to 2.

Isn't Intel's main problem that they've ceased to be a leading edge foundry?

Maybe they should follow AMD's lead and spin off the foundry business.

What part of a Samsung merger do you think would help them enter the phone market? My layman's understanding of history is that Intel tried and failed several times to build x86 chips for phones and they failed for power consumption reasons, not for lack of access to a phone maker willing to try their chips or anything like that.

They failed primarily for pricing reasons. They could make a low power CPU competitive with ARM (especially back then when Intel had the state of the art process), but then they wanted to charge a premium for it being x86 and the OEMs turned up their nose at that.

Samsung still has a fairly competitive process and could make x86 CPUs to put in their own tablets and laptops without having the OEM and Intel get into a fight about margins if they're the same company. And with the largest maker of Android devices putting x86 CPUs into them, you get an ecosystem built around it that you wouldn't when nobody is using them to begin with because Intel refuses to price competitively with ARM.

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now

And then in the 2000s after AMD64 pretty much destroyed all competing architectures and then in the 2010s Intel itself effectively was almost a monopoly (outside of mobile) with AMD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Itanium’s hype killed the competing architectures. AMD64 then took over since it was cost effective and fast.

> x86 monopoly

Wintel was a duopoly which had some power: Intel x86 has less dominance now partly because Windows has less dominance.

There are some wonderful papers on how game theory and monopoly plays out between Windows and Intel; and there's a great paper with analysis of why AMD struggled against the economic forces and why Microsoft preferred to team up with a dominant CPU manufacturer.

Ooh got links?

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