x86 is dead, long live x86(engineering.mercari.com) |
x86 is dead, long live x86(engineering.mercari.com) |
The majority of 'the market' may go elsewhere, but for a gazillion reasons, x86 will not be disappearing for quite a while. At this point it would honestly surprise me if we didn't at least have high quality emulation available until the end of the human race as we know it.
Sure, we've probably lost most of the software ever written on it, but a whole lot of interesting artifacts from a key transition point for our species still remain locked up in this architecture.
I think there's lots of room for ARM, Risc-V and x86_64 in the future. There's reasons to support any of them over the others. And given how well developer tool are getting support across them all, it may actually grow a lot. I think the down side is a lot of the secondary compute accelerators, such as what intel is pushing and what the various ARM and Risc-V implementations include in practice.
The further from a common core you get, the more complex porting or cross platform tooling gets. Even if for big gains in some parts. For example, working on personal/hobby projects in ARM boards that aren't RPi is sometimes an exercise in frustration, with no mainline support at all.
I’m curious why this is a downside. The current trends in computing is that we’re long past the point of single threaded compute. The first step of that was multi processor and multi core and that’ll continue with more and more dedicated and specialized computing sub-processors. Energy prices are more and more becoming a major determining factor as is the area needed for cooling. By having more separated subprocessors you get both efficiency and easier ability to cool the parts.
There's lots of complications to address there (strict x86 memory ordering versus loose ARM ordering, for instance) but I expect they're solvable.
Also 8051 cores can still be found in modern products
The 32-bit ARM and RISC-V cores are small enough and easier to program.
Turns out a 8051 core was included (iirc clocked @ ~30 MHz, to control jobs like light busy LED on card read/write ops, some bus arbitration / priority settings, power management or the like).
Made total sense to encounter an ancient, 'fast', tiny 8-bit core there, even though unexpected.
There must be (and will be) an endless list of products including tiny CPU cores like that (eg., RFID tags come to mind).
I think this is the critical part. If humanity (as we know it) only lasts 10 more years, then sure x86 will still be around somewhere.
If we last a million years, it will probably be gone long before that. Even in a thousand years it's probably gone a long time ago.
“And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”
But the cynical operator in my head could just laugh. We as a tech community are still running MS-DOS productively. Just wait, someone will run the door controls of our first space ships on some x86 chip. Or some similar system you just need, but that never gets time to be updated properly. Just wait, the new cruise liner spaceship of the milky way republic is going to run some x86 emulator for their window control.
Largely, no. I'm sure there's a few out there, but it's unusual.
Embedded 8051 cores, on the other hand... we're probably never going to fully escape those.
Single thread performance blow my mind with scores like 4000.
Without change a single line of code = performance was 10x than before.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+7600&id...
What exactly is this number 4000? What does it mean? Where can I read more about this scoring system?
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+7600&id...
We eventually switched to m-instances since that fits our compute/memory usage better when we’re at limits.
But since ISA doesn't imply perf. characteristics itself, then x86 will be alive.
The hard part in changing hardware's stuff is getting software to adjust.
I really wish we could test out RISC-V SoCs from the likes of tenstorrent, but it's a long journey
AWS has Zen 4 in preview. Azure and Oracle have Zen 4 available. It's only Google cloud that's been behind this release. The cloud world isn't slow.
Because as much as I like RISC-V myself, it hasn't built up the scale needed to supplant x86/64 or ARM. It's still a long way to go before the following are achieved:
- Similar/better performance to x86/64 or ARM, with at least 80% of their performance
- Similar/lower prices compared against x86/64 or ARM
- A win in either price-to-performance or power-to-performance against x86/64 or ARM at some point.
And that's why x86 is good.
In this case, the article is implying that Intel (x86) is dead to them and AMD (x86) is the successor. Whether Intel is dead or not is up for debate (I doubt they are), but the saying is used correctly.
No. Intel isn't dead. They may be behind (for now) but they're definitely catching up and have in a way on the desktop.
It's not certain that Intel will die and AMD will for sure win. Competition is great.
And if a freshly dead king is replaced by a new king, it's "the king is dead, long live the king".
The predecessor and the living thing doesn't have to be of the opposite sex, or use a different term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_th...!
It's a very famous idiom.
yes, in a particular circumstance, if there happens to be a queen involved (rarer within agnatic primogeniture), then it would be spoken as you say, but that's not "the saying" that people generally quote.
Rarer still, but 2 Queens would have the same form as the saying, "the queen is dead, long live the queen", which I mention to mention, when the king is dead, if it's "long live the queen", it's not generally the king's spouse even if she was styled "queen", but would be some direct blood relative of the king such as his daughter. I think his wife would become Dowager Queen. The Dowager queen might rule as Regent if her children were not adults yet.
Veyron releases later this year. Ascalon next year.
It's going to get exciting.
But worry not, RISC-V is inevitable.
It is an architecure cheered by FOSS folks, that ignore cloud offerings will be just as closed, and no one is selling RISC-V computers at the shopping mall down the street.
If you just bother to open your eyes just a little bit wider you would notice that there is a huge market for Chromebooks, budget laptops, gaming laptops, mobile workstations, ultrabooks for students, gamers, business people, bankers etc. New things are happening every month. We are seeing more efficient laptops from Intel and AMD. Companies like Framework are doing actual innovations in the decade old laptop area. And there are workflows that can only be done on Windows.
Your claim is completely unfounded.
That said, I am not terribly interested in ARM-based laptops for now. Yes, they may be more energy efficient and all but that hardly matters to me compared to just having the same x86 architecture I run on my desktop and servers. That sweet binary-compatibility means less headache.
People underestimate the advantages that CPU architecture monoculture gave us, though they are getting admittingly less important year by year. Maybe one day I am going to run an ARM laptop or even RISC-V.
Yep! For me, it's the same ARM64 architecture I run on my desktop and servers[1]. :-)
Hetzner's offering is very competitive, cheaper than their already rock-bottom x86 offerings. Then there's AWS Graviton, Oracle with their free tier (not sure how expensive that gets if you actually have to load it) and both Azure and Google also have ARM offerings.
[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2023/05/setting-up-hetzner-arm-i...
People also oversell it, I never had any problem developing software for Windows 2000/NT, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Symbian, from my x86 desktop.
1. Apple's chips are so far beyond everything else that it makes obvious sense for Apple only. Snapdragon is at least 30% slower single core while having worse Performance per watt.
2. Apple wasn't playing fair with their translation layer. The Rosetta layer cheats a little because apple also made the chip. The secret sauce is that the M1 has a hardware compatibility mode (That technically breaks ARM spec) for x86 memory order that basically gives near 1:1 performance.
3. Microsoft heavily botched their ARM rollout (again. Hello, Windows RT). The translation layer on W10/11 is just bad, not because of bad coding but just the technical limits of what they were trying to do.
4. Google is in a great place with ARM compatibility in Chrome OS as the only consumer-facing apps are either built-in or on the play store...which was designed for ARM in the first place. Problem is that nobody will give them a good chip for ChromeOS and the focus is on low end, so Mediatek is just cruising.
ARM is a great arch...but right now it is Apple VS x86, not ARM.
In the server market, just an estimated 8% of CPU shipments in 2023 were ARM.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/arm-based-pcs-to-nearly... https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20230217VL209/amd-arm-digiti...
It doesn't seem like a Rosetta 2-like effort is making it into mainline Linux anytime soon, if ever.
On Windows, ARM products just suck. The product is just bad because there is no reason to use it. The chips available are worse than x86 and then the software issue is bad due to a whole set of reasons that Microsoft can't change on their own..\ Google has that last 10% probably, ChromeOS moves ARM devices all day, every day. Just cheap ones.
- ethernet port
- hdmi port
- multiple usb A and C ports
- solid keyboard
Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I work for a large financial services company and receive a MacBook Pro for my work.
My work laptop battery can handle all-day IntelliJ & web browsing without charging, I've never heard the fan and the laptop stays cool. It has a Geekbench multicore score of 13,649.
My personal laptop also lasts that long and stays cool, and doesn't even have a fan.
EDIT: It's funny to see this downvoted. I'm literally speaking of my particular use case and needs! Are there people who believe Apples are better in all scenarios?
I haven't needed an ethernet port on a laptop since the mid 2000s troubleshooting why my newly installed stack of Cisco switches weren't working, and that sort of use cases is rare enough that having a dongle seems fine.
Conversely, about 80% of the people I know use Apple laptops for work.
I don't see ethernet ports making a comeback on thin laptops anytime soon though. They are handy for LAN parties, so bulky gaming laptops will keep shipping with them, but for everyone else it makes more sense to leave that functionality to a dock.
On a desktop (which these days isn't a tower) I do want some of those features, and I get them.
* except kbd, and I find the apple kbds just fine -- I even survived a couple of rounds of the infamous "butterfly" kbds. But I know some people were unhappy and eventually Apple got their act together.
The only thing it is actually missing from your list is Ethernet and usb a
Yes because no one that you know buys an Apple laptop that must mean that Apple isn’t selling any…
> Same for my work laptop, again Windows/x86 and no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I find the lack of self awareness…amusing.
Because no one you know uses a Mac laptop, that must mean no one uses one.
Well my anecdote from working at the second largest employer in the US that the vast majority of technical people prefer Macs even though they can choose Macs or Windows.
Furthermore their market share has never been over 20% of units shipped[1]
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...
I guess like me I like macbook 12 and that is what you use for non-desktop like notebook.
It's impossible to find a use case for the thing. I might have to sell it.
This means, practically speaking, you're only going to really have 1 host on a server that wants/needs these specialized sub-processors. Which means more space/heat/power for a single user/service. It's probably fine for some things, but far from ideal. This also doesn't get into software optimization and alternative paths where not available.
This gets far worse in the ARM space, as it seems every SOC does something different, which means it's often broken, or unusable if you're using a mainline OS/kernel and even then most software won't be optimized for it. At best, you can maybe playback 4k compressed video. At worst, you can't at all. Just speaking to the most common instance in that space, which is video compression, which is often built around closed drivers that mainline OSes (Ubuntu Server, Debian, etc) don't have in the box, and the vendor only supports a single version of a distro fork with no upgrade path.
My understanding for the push for energy efficiency is not for cost reasons, but for performance and stability. At a certain power level, the chips just can't dissipate enough energy, especially on smaller nodes.
If amd could double the performance at double the power, they would.
Cost is obviously a marketing/client-value thing too.
ETA: Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3, so the go compiler generates code using AVX2, BMI2, LZCNT, etc.
> Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3
That's actually a long pending open issue in our backlog :)
Somehow I doubt much has changed. In such applications, reliability + maturity of hw/sw ecosystem is much more important than raw speed or design innovations a competing architecture might bring to the table.
So 8051 based parts may see the occasional process shrink, addition of new peripherals, or new IC packages, I/O pin counts, operating voltage etc.
But I'd doubt any designer worth their salt would dare touch that core architecture unless their life depended on doing so. :-)
[1]: Although that is a thing too; there's a number of manufacturers like Silicon Labs with extensive lines of modern 8051-based mcirocontrollers.
It does not (or it wouldn't be there) and they aren't the only ARM vendor with TSO (Fujitsu also does it.)
Their cores break the ARM spec in other ways too. Added instructions for AMX, new guard privilege modes, HCR_EL2.E2H can't be disabled, GPRs are clobbered on WFI, etc.
It's not bad at all, however Intel patents heavily restricted the initial implementation, to the point they couldn't ship the 64bit emulation. Apple decided to wait out the patents.
The conclusion is on the ball but only current. M1 has been a bit old now and if other arm vendor and the two major architecture (ibm power for mainframe … cannot be counted) it is at least x86-32 plus x86-64 vs arm vs apple.
qemu-x86_64 is probably the closest there is to Rosetta; it works fairly well and I think conceptually it's identical or similar to Rosetta, but I don't really know what the performance is like, and it's of course not as integrated/automatic as Rosetta.
For any program that is open, even if it hasn't been in use for a while, I click it once, and it comes to the forefront immediately.
For programs that are not open, I click it once, and then if I wait for it to launch, it appears in the forefront. If I immediately click back over to my web browser and begin using it before the program launches, it does not appear in the forefront... because I interacted with another program after starting the launch.
On Windows you can, say, click once to pause on a video playing in a browser window that doesn't have focus but is visible. On macOS, it's two clicks, because you have to focus the app first.
I don't care for the behavior but it's so minor to me that it carries essentially no weight.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed an increase in arguing over the meaning of words on HN lately?
Depends on what you mean by increase, arguing, and words.
Mercari replaced Intel with AMD. One x86 out, another in. Usage is correct if figurative.
Article does not claim Intel is dead. States that they are "catching up". But for their nodes, Intel out ("dead"), AMD in.
It's reasonable.
But this subthread (as started by amusingimpala75), and your direct parent's question was about whether the idiomatic usage of "(old) X is dead, long live (new) X" was correct (given that the author believes AMD taking over Intel is the factual case). That is, not about whether the factual statement is correct or not, just whether it's expressed well idiomatically.
It doesn't particularly bother me one way or the other to the point I didn't even think of this, despite also being a daily Windows users on my desktop computer.
The parent poster said
> would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either
What relevance then was there in the statement that the original poster made?
> Apple dominates the laptop market, which is a pretty ridiculous claim since x86 is still the vast majority of laptop sales and Windows is still the dominant laptop OS.
Nor did I argue otherwise. I merely called out the silliness of the statement that because the parent poster “doesn’t know anyone who owns one” or that because every developer he knows uses a Windows laptop, that his anecdotal experience has any relevance.
I don't expect either x86 or Windows to go away any time soon – in general I think x86 has been somewhat unfairly maligned, and for most applications (including laptops) it works pretty well and is even the best available choice. I would prefer to say "diversification" or "the existence of actual competition" rather than "decline", as that doesn't imply it's going away.
But yet Apple is selling millions. Someone must see it as a viable experience.
> I would never buy an Apple laptop and no one I know has one either.
>no one I know with a work laptop is supplied a Mac either.
I don’t know anyone that uses WeChat. Wouldn’t that be a silly argument?
Wars about semantics have been standard fare on geekdom since the dawn of time, and on Hacker News since the dawn of Arc.
What appears as "Obnoxious Contrarian wilderness" is good-old hacker "well, actually" pendanticness (with some sprinkling of on-the-spectrum focus on details and semantics).
Yes, I have noticed “an increase in arguing over the meaning of words on HN lately”. I also know how to discuss the meaning of words and how they form the context of a conversation, once taken together.
> Wars about semantics have been standard fare on geekdom since the dawn of time, and on Hacker News since the dawn of Arc.
Sure, and I enjoy very much some pedantry (and am not above doing my bit every now and then), but that’s not the point. If someone wants to have a heated discussion about how a centuries-old metaphor would apply to the kings of France but not to a multinational company, then sure, have at it, as long as you don’t derail otherwise useful threads. I will just opt out of spending my time that way and instead get some interesting pedantry.
I must admit I am not really sure what image you want to imply by “dawn of Arc”, though it does go a bit with the French king vibe. Would you care to explicit a little?
> What appears as "Obnoxious Contrarian wilderness" is good-old hacker "well, actually" pendanticness (with some sprinkling of on-the-spectrum focus on details and semantics).
Pedantry and semantics are fine, and indeed one of the reasons why I am here. But the point beyond that has to be knowledge and enlightenment, otherwise it’s just, yes, obnoxious. There is also a thin line between a good “well actually” and a nuisance (not even talking about bad faith trolling).
Please note that I did not address any of the people in question, because that would be stupid, rude, and counter-productive. I am happy if they have their arguments on their side. I was just replying to a fellow commenter that they were not alone with that feeling. There’s no need to be rude about it.
Arc is a Lisp dialect invented by PG whose main notable use is that it is the implementation language for HN: the “dawn of Arc” is thus a flowery way of saying something like “the first concrete steps to the creation of HN”.
I'm sorry, then! (Was I tho? I thought I answered mostly matter-of-factly)
I'm the guy who has to come up with a workaround, but it's never a problem for others. Usually I'm translating some bash command into powershell, which takes maybe 2 minutes. Everything else runs just fine, and I don't even need to use WSL. Windows is a perfectly viable development platform, if you give a shit about learning the differences between a unix-like environment and windows instead of just copping out and using WSL
2. Complain when the macOS-oriented process doesn't work for everyone.
Installing Postgres, Redis, etc. on Windows is wildly complicated compared to on macOS or Linux.
Your Linux devs are just used to dealing with it.
Why would this be the case?
Dev environments should concentrate on a single platform as much as possible.
I haven't actively used Windows since 2008. It's such an obnoxious OS to use, and I have never seen a Windows laptop with quality in the same zip code as a Mac. There's always a terrible touch pad, keyboard flex, plasticky trash fit and finish, mediocre display or something that just ruins the whole thing.
In terms of build quality, apple laptops are pretty good, but I can't stand macOS and apple keeps fucking with their ports.
My Inspiron 16 has a good glass screen and a pretty solid aluminum body. It's got all the ports I want (HDMI, USB-A 3.0, SD card reader, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack). Personally, the macbook pro my company issued me is one of my least favorite laptops I've ever used. I also had compatibility or performance problems with x86 based software when I got my first M1 macbook, I don't know if they're improved anything since then
What are your issues? I have a T490 that is a few years old and its great for my use. But I keep it docked in to a monitor and external mouse and keyboard 90% of the time.
You might want to modernize your perception of it, holding on to 15 year old views is not a very smart move in the tech industry.
Windows 10 and 11 are a joy to use, and to develop. I used a Mac for 15 years and switched to Windows to develop 5 years ago, and now macOS looks extremely antiquated and creaky for development.
Development work strikes me as maybe the least distinguishing kind of task to compare them on. Very few hard choices to make unless you're developing for Mac or iOS.
The windows UI itself is an unpolished joke that's a hodgepodge of things that haven't been touched since Windows XP and half-baked new things, with sad window management (ironic) that lacks the perfection of Exposé and Spaces. To say nothing about laptop battery life, plugging in and removing multiple monitors several times a day.
I would strongly consider not working somewhere if they didn't use Macs
And the first link is
https://www.patentlyapple.com/2023/02/apple-currently-owns-9...
It would be much more substantial than anecdotal what his friends and coworkers do.
It’s about as bad as the old Slashdot “do people still watch TV? I haven’t own a TV in 10 years”
If you want to read a non-silly thread, I suggest looking for a non-silly opener, this website has more than average of those.