Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "BREAKING: Intel, AMD, Linus and more team up to save x86" video.

the main point i would pick you up on is your use of advanced cisc instructions vs single core risc, which is largely a straw man argument but useful as an illustration in some circumstances. the real battle now is between a small number of fast but power hungry cisc processors which need lots of cooling, and much higher core count risc processors which are cheaper to design, build, and run. this is why your average smartphone already has at least 10 cores, while your average desktop does not. yes, i know multithreading inflates the thread count, but the results are in, and the downsides are enough that it is starting to go away.
2
@nexovec financially, absolutely, you just need to spot early when to abandon the sinking ship.
2
@jose-lael certainly the move to produce some chip designs which dump x86 support should help them reduce transistor counts a lot, which should reduce some of the risc chip advantage for multicore designs. a fundamental own goal by cisc chip companies is their systematic failure to work closely with compiler designers. if they worked to move some of the custom logic into external chips like we did in the 8bit days, and looked to find software improvements to replace the extra instructions, which could be released to compiler writers under something like a bsd licence, they could significantly reduce the amount of legacy stuff they had to support on chip, reducing transistor counts a lot and possibly having other advantages. as it is, instead we get legacy cruft in the processor design, the need for soft microcode updates to fix cpu bugs and other similar garbage.
2
except that arm was developed at acorn in the 1980s, so its old is the wrong argument. actually, the idea behind cuda also goes back to the 1980s as well, as does the work on multicore processor systems.
1
the reason this matters is that in modern synchronous designs, all of the instructions are slowed down to fit the time needed for the slowest part, which is slower on cisc. by dumping some of the slower instructions, risc gets a speedup for free. when the research was done on asynchronous arm chips in the 90s, an improvement was seen, but the funding went away and we never got to find out if synchronous clocks were fundamentally a bad idea, or just a simplification which was not expensive enough to dump.
1
@jasonbuffalo6845 if it was just logically equivalent to having a firmware x86 / x86-64 to risc microcode jit, then i would agree with you, but even some of the cisc processor designers say that the larger instruction set increases complexity, which in turn increases transistor counts. that is before you consider the failure of these people to work with compiler writers to make some of these more complex instructions into compiler macros instead, reducing the need to keep them on the chip. this is also a problem for testing, which is historically why you can recognise which intel x86 cpu you are running on by spotting which hardware bugs need working around.
1
@jasonbuffalo6845 not sure i agree with that. because the extra hardware does not report its presence, it is hard for the os to detect, and thus use automatically, which can cause all sorts of issues. i agree intel got complacent, they do that every so often.
1
actually you are wrong. if the processors get much higher clock rates, you have to stop sending the signals down wires, and start sending them down plumbing, which is why they stopped chasing clock numbers and moved to something else. the main thing keeping the x86 & x86-64 alive is the wintel duopoly, which is slowly dying. data centers need cooler less power hungry processors, which they can move to now that linux is getting better risc support. the desktop is being eaten by smartphones and tablets on one end, and by web apps on the other, neither of which need windows. the windows market will get further punished due to the hardware requirements for 11 and 12 making it so that developing countries cannot even use pirated versions, as they cannot afford the hardware. the writing is on the wall for both windows and cisc, as cisc is only being kept alive due to windows. i hope they get a plan b before it is too late.
1
@John_Smith__ i largely agree, but it is not just mobile where risc wins due to power, but the data center too. the issue here is that cisc uses a lot of power, and produces a lot of heat. moving to a larger number of slower processors which use less power overall, and do not produce anywhere near as much heat saves the data center a fortune. as most of these loads are platform neutral, and you can just recompile linux for arm on the server, it does not have the windows lock in. even worse, as more devices go risc, the software moves to apps and websites, further killing the need for windows. and of course for a lot of tasks, the linux desktop is already good enough, so you have a triple threat. i cannot wait to see the companies panic as they realise that people outside the west cannot upgrade to 11 and 12 due to costs being too high, and scramble to find some other solution.
1
@BenLewisE i am sure someone will make that argument, but the real tradeoff today is between more, faster cache, and more cores. due to the relatively huge die sizes for cisc, they have to optimise for cache, whereas risc designs also get the option of having more cores and less cache. as this option is only available on risc, we need to wait and see which will be better in practice, but risc has a lot of other advantages, so in the long term, risc is going to win, the same way x86-64 beat x86.
1
actually it was getting 2 cores to work right, then getting os support for it which took forever. it only really took off when they started hitting clock speed limits, so going dual core was the only option.
1
you are fundamentally wrong about cloud. while cloud dumped x86 in favour of x86-64 well before the desktop did, it was because we could see well in advance the problems that would kill it. the problem facing x86-64 is it is only relatively cheap due to economies of scale due to windows, and for the data center it uses too much power, and needs too much cooling. windows is gradually going away, which is obvious to everyone outside the usa, and to microsoft which will shrink the market even further. the data centers have already decided to move to risc with linux to solve the power and cooling problems, and the only major question is how fast.
1
nothing wrong with being a hypocrite when money is involved. i dumped intel in the 90s due to every new processor having a different hardware bug, but was forced to stick with amd due to insufficient hardware alternatives. just make sure to jump ship before the windows 11 and 12 hardware requirements disaster, and third world forced linux migration, and server power and cooling problems kicks the windows crutches out from under intel and amd.
1
@sarthakdash3798 it might be, but the point it makes comes straight from the 1970s ibm research on how most cisc chips contain instructions which are often both slow and buggy, and how optimising the compiler to generate fewer of these instructions and thereby only use a smaller part of the instruction set actually produced better, faster and less buggy code. cisc came about because we did not have either the knowledge to build, or the resources to run such advanced compilers. risc came about because cisc is a nightmare from so many different angles that people thought it a good idea to try a different approach, and it worked. the gpu issue is different. both cisc and risc use a single stream of instructions working on a single stream of date. sisd for short. gpus still use the single stream of instructions, but every point has different data, or simd, which has advantages for some workloads. then you have the third case, multiple instruction streams with multiple data streams, which was researched by danny hillis and others in the 1980s. this is basically multicore with advanced inter core communications, and cisc is really bad at it compared to risc just due to the extra size and power needs per core, which is why things like thread rippers need something that sounds like a jet engine on top to stop it overheating. again, smp works well for some workloads, not so well for others, which is why cisc designers are making chips with a mixture of slow efficient cores and fast power hungry ones, an approach not needed with risc.
1
risc vs cisc is not being talked about directly, but is fundamental to if the future is cisc with bigger caches, or risc with way more cores with smaller caches. and the answer to that is we don't have the data yet to know which way thecfuture will jump, but the answer will come from smartphones and risc in the data center.
1
x86-64 is being kept in power by windows, which is only relevant on the decreasingly used desktop. netbooks died because smartphones and tablets increasingly displaced the form factor, and chips got good enough that entry level laptops crashed in price. x86-64 is in a similar position. linux has killed windows in the data center, which are now moving to risc because of power and cooling. it never got anywhere in smartphones, which are all risc, and because of this more things are moving to web apps in data centers. then you have the excessive hardware needs of windows 11 and 12, which mean that developing countries will not be able to afford even pirated copies of windows, accelerating the existing trend to ditch it in favour of linux. nobody ever got fired for buying ibm, until they lost the market to the pc they helped create. microsoft are diversifying away from windows as they can see which way the wind is blowing, so the only remaining question is how amd and intel pivot when the wintel duopoly dies.
1
@zalnars7847 so you are seriously claiming that the addition of the tpm chip for windows 11 and the ai chip for 12 are not increasing the price for the base windows hardware, and that this will not be an issue for anyone needing to replace multiple machines, nor for all of the people outside the west, who mainly run pirated windows as they currently cannot pay more than a months wages for the existing machines, and thus will not be able to run even pirated versions of 11 and 12. india already has 15% linux desktop usage for these reasons, and 11 and 12 will make this grow faster. just because some wintel fanboys in the west can afford the latest microsoft tax does not mean everyone can. the other points have similar supporting reasons.
1