Please can you customise this X86 CPU - I’d like it to be smaller, cooler, cheaper, more secure and more powerful please, and if it could use the ARM instruction set that’d be great. Thanks
> Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different.
One of the fundamental challenges for x86 at that time would have been the CISC ISA and decoder complexity overhead. The overhead of the full CISC ISA was just unacceptable for an embedded application. That's probably why Intel was fiddling around with XScale around that time.
With the P6 lineage, the x86 instructions were decomposed into micro-ops, RISC like instructions, that were executed by the CPU. I've read that decoders at the time accounted for up to 10% of power consumed. Intel really didn't start to address this problem until Pentium M and later Core.
Had Intel launched something alongside P6 in the early 90s they might be relevant in that space but they were targeting the datacenter and mainframe space at that time so they were thinking big, not small.
Is there a good telling of why ARM won in the embedded space? I "assume" it is related to power consumption, but I didn't actually follow this very closely.
This is what AMD has been doing for years under their CEO, Dr. Lisa Su: building custom solutions for their clients. See the CPUs in the past couple of generations of Playstation and Xbox as well as thr recently announced Valve Steam Deck – all feature custom X64 chips suited to the needs of those platforms. So, once again, Intel is playing catch up to AMD.
To add some history - AMD's semi-custom segment dates back prior to Su's CEO seat. It was initiated in 2012-2013 under CEO Rory Read [1], although Su was heavily involved in it back then too (as SVP, and eventually as COO, before taking over as CEO in 2014). It ended up primarily targeting game consoles, though it claimed residual wins in other markets too.
It turned out to be an excellent move at the time, as it proved to be a bit of a lifeline during AMD's rough years. And modern-day AMD continues executing on it well.
I also agree w/your general point - given AMD's history doing this kind of thing, it's tough to see what Intel could do in this segment that AMD couldn't do better.
> One of the key elements of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy is the company's newly created Intel Foundry Services (IFS) group that will manufacture chips for others. This group can operate as a classic foundry making any chips its clients want: Arm-based system-on-chips, RISC-V-based controllers, tensor processing units (TPUs), or graphics processing units (GPUs), just to name a few options.
> But Intel can naturally add a unique sauce to its IFS offering: highly competitive general-purpose x86 cores as well as an extremely broad portfolio of its silicon-proven IPs. Earlier this year Intel said that it was in discussion with over 100 of potential IFS customers and recently it revealed that about 1/3 of them were interested in custom x86-based SoCs.
> "Of the 100+ customers, I'd say about a third of them are interested in that x86ish of our ecosystem," said Gelsinger.
1/3 of _potential Intel foundry clients_ want x86. Of course there are plenty of companies investigating the new foundry option coming onboard with Samsung/TSMC lead times being what they are that have no interest in porting their products to x86.
Eh I could still see a ton of application specific customers that would stick with x86. HFT for example: if they can get a chip with a few super fast cores and HBM2 on substrate. Perhaps mix the NIC in and turn the entire thing into an SOC.
I think we have to apply an appropriate degree of scepticism to these statements. ‘Are interested’ could have a broad range of meanings from happy to receive a presentation from Intel sales upwards. ‘Want’ sounds like they are keen to have x86. Given x86 is supposed to be a key part of their offering I think they would have been more positive if they could.
> Put another way two thirds are not interested in x86.
We aren't talking about Intel's customers in general, but those who are using or planning to use Intel's new fab services. In other words, 1/3 of those interested in creating their own chip are also interested in custom x86 design.
> Sorry to say that this article reads like an Intel press release.
This isn't an article but an interview with Intel's CEO. As Intel officially as it gets
It’s not an interview with Intel’s CEO. It’s an article about Intel seemingly informed by the CEO’s interview with a third party. It has lots of apparently TH commentary on Intel vs AMD vs Arm etc. So we should judge it on those terms and on those terms it’s incredibly one sided.
Tomshardware has a history of being basically that, a mouthpiece for Intel. Back in the days of AMDs thunderbird, opteron, etc., I remember tomshardware having some obvious bias that made other outlets like anandtech look super trustworthy by comparison.
Sources for this? I’ve followed Tom’s Hardware for a number of years and they’ve been blasting intel pretty hard lately for their failure to provide competitive offerings in the last gen or two of CPUs:
They also want them to have guaranteed availability for years. Anyone not making PCs isn't planning to redesign their boards every few months as some new chip/upgrade comes available, and they don't have the budget for it. Give me reason to think I'll be able to buy this CPU for the next 50 years at a reasonable price, in whatever quantity and I'll be interested.
Lower power consumption would be nice too. We don't always have mains power.
I'm sort of curious what the "long-lived embeddable CPU" of this era will be.
I can go to Mouser right now and buy a pin-compatible 80186 right now in quantity of 1. You can even order a new 8088 from Renesas, but it says they're back-ordered til next February.
I've seen 386s and 486s manufactured recently enough to have the "newer" Intel logo (the one without the dropped "e") which implies well into the 21st century.
With modern product lines, I'm not so sure. The Atom-class products that seem most appealing for embedded use tend to have a very short shelf life (in those terms). I wonder if they're saddled by a dual market obligation-- I suspect Intel wants to sell to both "quantities of 100" embedded markets, and "quantities of 100,000" $199 laptops/tablets, but they're really only viable use of production capacity as long as the quantities-of-100,000 orders last.
I'm not sure the ARM ecosystem is better, because of the tendency to highly-integrated SoCs. Even if some manufacturer says "here's a vault with 50 years worth of chips", it's unlikely they'll have the one particular part you want in that vault..
I wonder if, of all things, it would end up being something like the RP2040/RPi Pico. Third party designs are going to leave a lot of inertia to keep it available as-is, and at the same time, there's not really a single market-dominating customer who makes the product uneconomical if he leaves.
The 6502 will be 50 in 2025, so unless they stop making them between now and then we will have at least one example of a processor lasting that long commercially. If not, then the Z80 will be 50 in the following year.
> 50 years? Isn't it a little too much? Maybe 10? 20 even. But 50?
There are a lot of products that don't change on tech industry timescales (e.g. all those stories of organizations scavenging replacement chips from eBay). It could be really compelling to have the option to use components that are likely be available for 50 years.
I like this comment. It's an interesting question. It's understandable why we wouldn't want to use the same CPUs for 50 years or more given their history of rapid improvement, but on the other hand, engineering things to "heirloom quality" is important for sustained growth and for sustainability in general.
Depends on the use case but yes I'd agree, 50 might be a tad too long. I work in IoT and industrial computing and the specifications can be for 25+ years however, so it's not unheard of.
Yes, AMD made. Nobody wants another Atom C2000 "System May Experience Inability to Boot or May Cease Operation," blown bus clock outputs situation with hundreds of $ millions in recalls.
What the world really needs right now is a power efficient, server version of the NUC.
An SoC board that carries a solid GbE NIC with LoM (or perhaps SFP+), a console port, supports ECC SDRAM, no sound hardware, and either no video, or very limited-scope 2D-only GPU. Maybe a couple USB 3.1 ports.
>> Intel has to become a bigger maker of chips to stay among the few companies that can develop and use leading-edge fabrication technologies....
They are not currently in that category. Nowhere in the article was any mention of EUV lithography, which is really where Intel fell behind. When they get it figured out I'm sure they'll make some rapid progress, but until then they simply aren't on the leading edge. Aside from capacity I'd say they're about equivalent to Global Foundries, except GloFo has some specialty processes too.
AMD has been doing custom x86 SoCs for a long time, mostly for game consoles. It hasn't had any real impact on the laptop/desktop/server market so far.
That was to be expected, PCs as phenomen only happened due to IBMs mistake of keeping them vertically integrated as all the remaining 16 bit platforms.
Modern laptops and mobile devices reflect a return to the vertical integratio of those computing devices (Atari, Amiga, Macintosh), with PC towers becoming a niche market and businesses coming back to timesharing.
Readit News
Nowadays embedded development is revolving around ARM pretty heavily. Maybe RISC-V in the future, but for now, it's ARM, definitely not x86.
Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different.
One of the fundamental challenges for x86 at that time would have been the CISC ISA and decoder complexity overhead. The overhead of the full CISC ISA was just unacceptable for an embedded application. That's probably why Intel was fiddling around with XScale around that time.
With the P6 lineage, the x86 instructions were decomposed into micro-ops, RISC like instructions, that were executed by the CPU. I've read that decoders at the time accounted for up to 10% of power consumed. Intel really didn't start to address this problem until Pentium M and later Core.
Had Intel launched something alongside P6 in the early 90s they might be relevant in that space but they were targeting the datacenter and mainframe space at that time so they were thinking big, not small.
Someone at Intel must've thought the same thing and even executed it - they bought StrongARM in 1997!
But then they put it to the torch in 2003 and EOL'd everything so that you could see Windows bluescreens in your ATM and kiosks later that decade.
To add some history - AMD's semi-custom segment dates back prior to Su's CEO seat. It was initiated in 2012-2013 under CEO Rory Read [1], although Su was heavily involved in it back then too (as SVP, and eventually as COO, before taking over as CEO in 2014). It ended up primarily targeting game consoles, though it claimed residual wins in other markets too.
It turned out to be an excellent move at the time, as it proved to be a bit of a lifeline during AMD's rough years. And modern-day AMD continues executing on it well.
I also agree w/your general point - given AMD's history doing this kind of thing, it's tough to see what Intel could do in this segment that AMD couldn't do better.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/7281?cPage=4&all=False&...
Put another way two thirds are not interested in x86.
Sorry to say that this article reads like an Intel press release.
> One of the key elements of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy is the company's newly created Intel Foundry Services (IFS) group that will manufacture chips for others. This group can operate as a classic foundry making any chips its clients want: Arm-based system-on-chips, RISC-V-based controllers, tensor processing units (TPUs), or graphics processing units (GPUs), just to name a few options.
> But Intel can naturally add a unique sauce to its IFS offering: highly competitive general-purpose x86 cores as well as an extremely broad portfolio of its silicon-proven IPs. Earlier this year Intel said that it was in discussion with over 100 of potential IFS customers and recently it revealed that about 1/3 of them were interested in custom x86-based SoCs.
> "Of the 100+ customers, I'd say about a third of them are interested in that x86ish of our ecosystem," said Gelsinger.
1/3 of _potential Intel foundry clients_ want x86. Of course there are plenty of companies investigating the new foundry option coming onboard with Samsung/TSMC lead times being what they are that have no interest in porting their products to x86.
We aren't talking about Intel's customers in general, but those who are using or planning to use Intel's new fab services. In other words, 1/3 of those interested in creating their own chip are also interested in custom x86 design.
> Sorry to say that this article reads like an Intel press release.
This isn't an article but an interview with Intel's CEO. As Intel officially as it gets
1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus
2. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-performance-cpus,5...
Plenty of people agreeing with me on various forums: https://www.google.com/search?q=tomshardware+biased+-inurl%3...
Lower power consumption would be nice too. We don't always have mains power.
I can go to Mouser right now and buy a pin-compatible 80186 right now in quantity of 1. You can even order a new 8088 from Renesas, but it says they're back-ordered til next February.
I've seen 386s and 486s manufactured recently enough to have the "newer" Intel logo (the one without the dropped "e") which implies well into the 21st century.
With modern product lines, I'm not so sure. The Atom-class products that seem most appealing for embedded use tend to have a very short shelf life (in those terms). I wonder if they're saddled by a dual market obligation-- I suspect Intel wants to sell to both "quantities of 100" embedded markets, and "quantities of 100,000" $199 laptops/tablets, but they're really only viable use of production capacity as long as the quantities-of-100,000 orders last.
I'm not sure the ARM ecosystem is better, because of the tendency to highly-integrated SoCs. Even if some manufacturer says "here's a vault with 50 years worth of chips", it's unlikely they'll have the one particular part you want in that vault..
I wonder if, of all things, it would end up being something like the RP2040/RPi Pico. Third party designs are going to leave a lot of inertia to keep it available as-is, and at the same time, there's not really a single market-dominating customer who makes the product uneconomical if he leaves.
There are a lot of products that don't change on tech industry timescales (e.g. all those stories of organizations scavenging replacement chips from eBay). It could be really compelling to have the option to use components that are likely be available for 50 years.
Yes, this is a very well known issue, left sour taste.
An SoC board that carries a solid GbE NIC with LoM (or perhaps SFP+), a console port, supports ECC SDRAM, no sound hardware, and either no video, or very limited-scope 2D-only GPU. Maybe a couple USB 3.1 ports.
I would buy these in lots of 100, if available.
They are not currently in that category. Nowhere in the article was any mention of EUV lithography, which is really where Intel fell behind. When they get it figured out I'm sure they'll make some rapid progress, but until then they simply aren't on the leading edge. Aside from capacity I'd say they're about equivalent to Global Foundries, except GloFo has some specialty processes too.
Modern laptops and mobile devices reflect a return to the vertical integratio of those computing devices (Atari, Amiga, Macintosh), with PC towers becoming a niche market and businesses coming back to timesharing.
So yeah, it will happen.