When I think about how long chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now), it is hard to conceive of a world where there isn't a significant presence of x86 activity for the rest of my life.
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.
Given the new 128-core AMD server parts are on-par with ARM in terms of power efficiency and capable of more raw compute, it may even grow a bit.
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 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.
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.
Plausibly we're headed for a world where feature size decreases stall out but manufacturing improvements continue to lower the price of transistors over time. In a world like that throwing in a few x86 cores even if the dominant ISA shifts might be worth it from a backwards compatibility standpoint even if other ISA become dominant.
There's lots of complications to address there (strict x86 memory ordering versus loose ARM ordering, for instance) but I expect they're solvable.
Just a few years back, I checked out datasheet for an IC encountered in an USB card reader (newly bought).
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'm reminded of the Vernor Vinge novel where a character hacking some fleet's automation hundreds of thousands of years in the future casually mentions that the tech stack is so old that the system time stamp is still the Unix Epoch
“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.”
I mean a thousand years are very hard to imagine, and how many changes there are.
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.
Maybe this is because we're mostly a Apple computers household, but a few months ago I realized the only x86 device my household own is our NAS (and frankly it's the worse device we own). Was pretty wilded out when I figured that one out.
I was surprised to learn a few months ago that 6502's are still in production, so there must be some use for it. Perhaps replacement parts for industrial equipment from the 70s-90s?
x86 is now permanently a part of humanity. 1000 years from now, when we've transcended our physical bodies and exist only as streams of sentient data and energy traveling between the stars, I 100% guarantee x86 will be detectable somewhere.
Stuff like 6502s and Z80s are a bit like little single-cylinder engines - the world will move onto all sorts of interesting new places, but something somewhere will always be powered by a wee Briggs & Stratton that starts first pull of the string, and we'll be glad of it.
We'll always need tiny cores, but it's worth noting that RISC-V can squeeze down to pretty small sizes and is so much nicer to use. Notably you can go smaller than a 68k or 8086.
We did a migration from GCP's Intel based E2 instances to AMD's T2D instances and saw huge 30% savings in overall compute! It is similar amount of savings folks got from switching to AWS Graviton instances, so looks like AMD might keep the x86 ISA still alive
E2 is just extremely old. E2 are a mixed fleet that contain CPUs as old as Haswell. Haswell launched over 10 years ago. It makes sense that you get a better bang for your buck from using something that isn't gravely obsolete. You should also keep that in mind when benchmarking E2, since it's a grab-bag of CPUs you need to control for the actual CPU type, either by specifying the minimum one you require or assuming the worst.
That is true. But in cloud our hands our tied, we cannot really switch from one one generation to another so easily. GCP has so far never launched a new chip while keeping the price same or lower. We did same cost/perf analysis on newer generation chips like Ice Lake from Intel and even Milan from AMD in the form of N2D, but both are quiet expensive for the performance uplift they provide. The unique thing about T2D is that the price is competitive with 10 year old E2, which has been the case only for ARM based CPUs like Graviton and Ampere Altra (T2A from GCP)
I would just like to point out that that is not how the saying goes. When Queen Elizabeth died it would have been “the queen is dead, long live the king”, as the dead thing is the predecessor and the living thing is the one that follows it
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.
>When Queen Elizabeth died it would have been “the queen is dead, long live the king”, as the dead thing is the predecessor and the living thing is the one that follows it
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:
no, the "saying" is "the king is dead, long live the king", because the "saying" uses the apparent absurdity of the king being dead and alive to illustrate the stability of the royal system: the people don't need to worry, they are never without a king.
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.
It's really important to benchmark this stuff, because depending on the workload, a cheap VPS is the way to go (you're almost always idle, say) or getting some of the latest and greatest hardware under your desk can quickly pay for itself.
As a separate data point, I briefly switched one of our servers from an r6a.4xlarge (AMD Epyc) to a r6i.4xlarge (Intel Xeon) and saw a 30% speedup in our number-heavy compute task. I would love to find out why (MKL or AVX512? Do I need to recompile numpy?), but for the time being it pays to stay on Xeon.
We eventually switched to m-instances since that fits our compute/memory usage better when we’re at limits.
Yes, I point this out in the article too. Which CPU will perform better is heavily dependent on your workloads, so I refrain from relying 100% on synthetic benchmarks and directly ran canaries in production instead. It's definitely possible Ice Lake is superior for your workload than Milan
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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.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agnatic
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.
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