When do you think we’ll see x86 become dead to the end user? (Either to ARM or RISCV) And what was the last similarly huge shift in personal computing?
Intel are seemingly taking a kicking on all sides this year, Apple are moving from Intel to their own silicon, so that could be a win for both them and Nvidia (Did that ARM deal go through), AMD are kicking them on the CPU front, they're sold off a few bits from their portfolio..
Are we starting to see the death of a giant here?
I really don't want Apple silicon to be wildly successful. Imagine a world where the entire ecosystem is in Apples control.
*shudder*
Tabbykatze
I really don't want Apple silicon to be wildly successful. Imagine a world where the entire ecosystem is in Apples control.
*shudder*
Could it be a good thing? It'll be worth moving off x86 to a more efficient ISA and with Apples push, more developers might start programming for ARM. Saying that I'm banking on other manufacturers with ARM architecture licenses to give users a non-apple choice because like yourself, I don't want to be stuck with Apple.
Tabbykatze
I really don't want Apple silicon to be wildly successful. Imagine a world where the entire ecosystem is in Apples control.
*shudder*
Lets be honest it already is…. they have a ‘developer key’ (that is paid for yearly) which makes it so a user needs to jump through hoops like on android to install apps from non ‘authorised’ sources and we all know how well that works on android. With the change to arm and their focus on ‘services’ I can see it becoming more restrictive sooner rather than later too.
As to the 32core cpu, well if you ignore the naming conventions of the parts in the current m1 it's technically an 8 (processing) + 16 (neural engine) core cpu already so making a 32core cpu could just be adding another 8 cores to the processing side of things, which wouldn't be too hard.
Will there be more cores in the future, well seeing as there are already 100+ core arm cpu's well it's kind of a given….. not that this really makes any difference to me, none of my primary programs are even made for os-x, let alone anything non x86/x64. Although I would like to see better arm support on windows and ideally the neo come with a decent arm cpu instead of an intel one….
I doubt it. Intel needed a kick up the proverbial due to their smug complacency. I'm not a fanboy to any company although down the years I've generally gone with AMD for value and don't get carried away with the fastest tech obsession. As long as it does the job I want it to , a PC is a tool to me ( I game rarely ) so browsing , invoicing and using proggies is more my need. Their are a few companies I avoid on moral grounds as best I can ( my feelings ) due to abhorent business practises. Intel , Apple , Sony and Seagate spring to mind. Sooner or later Intel will make the strides needed to re-assert itself unless AMD can continue it's forward march at the rate they have been doing. On the R&D side Intel have slipped but have the financial clout to afford ( or poach ) the best out there and have more versatility in their product lines. In a perfect world it would be nice if all brands had the same performance at an equal price and left us just to pick what brand we fancied but the downfall would be less competition and development as we have now. We've come a long way in a realitively short time to my mind thinking back to 386-486 days , 1 - 4 MB memory and 1 MB Trident garaphic cards , Dial- Up internet. Advances amaze me at times , more power in todays grahics cards than Houston had in total with the moon landing , perhaps in the future your kitchen toaster will have more power than the PC you have now , mind boggles. Lol.
Tabbykatze
I really don't want Apple silicon to be wildly successful. Imagine a world where the entire ecosystem is in Apples control.
*shudder*
Yes.
However impressive Apple's CPUs are (and I for one do not pretend to deny that they aren't very impressive), the problem with Apple is that they want total control: no upgradeability, no repairability, just pay pay pay.
While it was largely a historical accident, PCs are still largely commodity parts (at least in the desktop market) which is a good thing for consumers and even ironically even for the environment (although a lot of people don't reuse PC parts as well as should).
So while I would welcome getting rid of x86, there is no way I would move to a closed garden like Apple or the Apple copy-cats who seem to be very keen on ARM.
I hate the people who seem to think that the M1 is such an amazing cpu. It's nowt special at all - competent but not special. Others are doing it as well if not better just Apple package it up and people go wow it's amazeballs…
It reduces competition and choice, makes it more expensive to own and really doesn't help the consumer at all…
Kudos to Apple, they understand that getting their mac line from 10% or even lower, from where it is now to 50% needs massive gains vs the competition to lure away people. If Apple makes a 16+4 Macbook that actually is 3-5x the performance of a comparable laptop, then many people will switch.
As for when x86 will be dead…it won't be dead. Remember Apple has a few advantages that makes them so good. First of all, process. 5nm TSMC is one heck of a process vs what the competition (Intel/less for AMD) has. Second, they have the integration advantage, software/hardware. They can design the chips for the software and use cases. And on this direction, third, Apple is adding lots of dedicated hardware to accelerate common scenarios. If you actually benchmark their CPU cores with no advantage from dedicated hw, the performance advantage is not that massive.
Also, keep in mind that while AMD is pushing their limits and doing their best now, Intel is…using Skylake, still, a 2015 product. No rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish it gets beaten by Apple's latest design. Compare what Apple had in 2015 with Skylake and…it doesn't stand a chance. So in a way, Apple is today here because Intel stood still all these years. They have lost a lot of ground during these years and it'll be very hard for them to recoup that back. Alder Lake with its hybrid architecture looks to be a move in the right direction. If the high performance core is actually a sizeable increase over Tigelake (at least 25%) then performance wise at least, they stand a chance. Power wise, x86 laptops won't be really able to compete since first you are using these high performance chips and general purpose chips and second you have a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishty software, windows.
3dcandy
I hate the people who seem to think that the M1 is such an amazing cpu. It's nowt special at all - competent but not special. Others are doing it as well if not better just Apple package it up and people go wow it's amazeballs…
It reduces competition and choice, makes it more expensive to own and really doesn't help the consumer at all…
It's hard to benchmark mobile and until now comparing the various ARM implementations has meant phone or iPad benchmarks. And since Apple is totally a walled-in garden such comparisons weren't like-for-like.
However, with all those caveats, pretty much all the benches have had Apple outperforming all the other ARM implementations massively for years. Okay 5nm process, throwing transistors at the problem and now on-package memory help massively here, but what Apple did by buying PA Semi and throwing engineering resources at their chips is pretty
amazing.
There are plenty of reason to dislike Apple and if closed-off proprietary stuff replaces the normal PC market I and most enthusiasts won't be happy, but that doesn't distract from what Apple have achieved.
never owned an apple product…never used an apple product…not thinking of getting an apple product…apple is a threat to no one.
kompukare
It's hard to benchmark mobile and until now comparing the various ARM implementations has meant phone or iPad benchmarks. And since Apple is totally a walled-in garden such comparisons weren't like-for-like.
However, with all those caveats, pretty much all the benches have had Apple outperforming all the other ARM implementations massively for years. Okay 5nm process, throwing transistors at the problem and now on-package memory help massively here, but what Apple did by buying PA Semi and throwing engineering resources at their chips is pretty amazing.
There are plenty of reason to dislike Apple and if closed-off proprietary stuff replaces the normal PC market I and most enthusiasts won't be happy, but that doesn't distract from what Apple have achieved.
Erm amazing - integrating dram on board been done before, got fairly decent cores and have custom hardware all been done before. Use AI to help - been done before. Just because Apple did it it's amazing. They control EVERYTHING and that's why they can get these results. Other chips out there that are just as good but people don't know about them. It's only because Apple effectively control the whole thing that these work - and they only did it because Intel dropped the ball(s) multiple times and couldn't produce chips good enough for Apple to use. Qualcomm have some great chips, but because they don't control the software and hardware side they can't get as good results. The DSP and AI functions in the Qualcomm chips are on a par if not better than Apples. But Android (for example) is a much broader OS with different goals. ARM Windows has a massive issue with trying to cover even more bases. But look at a Pi 4, with a low power chip (picked for cost reasons nothing else) and how it can now arguably run a decent desktop experience. Look at other SBC's that have 6 and 8 core chips off the shelf with dram etc. on and they are pretty close running a pretty standard OS like Debian without dedicated hardware
More Apple disposable stuff,so expect even more soldiered parts,and little end user upgradeability or repairability. Apple boasts about how much recycled aluminium they used but made their latest iProducts even less easier to repair.
They and other companies are hypocritical when they go on about the environment. Yet,they continue to make products which are harder and harder to repair,with more and more soldiered and glued parts. I really hope the right to repair movements get more traction,and these companies get massively fined for computers which are on purpose made not to be repaired. Most of the broken electronics is shipped to poorer countries which end up paying the costs of all of this.
CAT-THE-FIFTH
More Apple disposable stuff,so expect even more soldiered parts,and little end user upgradeability or repairability. Apple boasts about how much recycled aluminium they used but made their latest iProducts even less easier to repair.
They and other companies are hypocritical when they go on about the environment. Yet,they continue to make products which are harder and harder to repair,with more and more soldiered and glued parts. I really hope the right to repair movements get more traction,and these companies get massively fined for computers which are on purpose made not to be repaired. Most of the broken electronics is shipped to poorer countries which end up paying the costs of all of this.
iphone 12 has all the different parts tied to the individual product. Almost impossible to even swap the screen nowadays if damaged
3dcandy
iphone 12 has all the different parts tied to the individual product. Almost impossible to even swap the screen nowadays if damaged
They need to be fined for all this nonsense. All you end up with is poorer countries being lumbered with tons of electronic waste.
CAT-THE-FIFTH
They need to be fined for all this nonsense. All you end up with is poorer countries being lumbered with tons of electronic waste.
Would be nice to see!
Thing is, Apple already think that the agreement with the EC about about phone chargers doesn't apply to them.
Aggreements with Apple don't seem to worth much, so the next time the EC has to put the weight of an actual directive behind any ‘agreements’ .
Luke7
When do you think we’ll see x86 become dead to the end user? (Either to ARM or RISCV) And what was the last similarly huge shift in personal computing?
About 10-20 years.
1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.
2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.
3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.
Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.
Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.
Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.
This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.
Kato-2
About 10-20 years.
1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.
2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.
3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.
Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.
Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.
Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.
This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.
Broadly agreeing except Linux on ARM is gaining rapidly and closing the gap quickly. Many builds now quicker to come out on ARM than X86
Kato-2
About 10-20 years.
1 - Arm designs have to get good enough for PC's.
2 - emulation were the performance is equal to or better than x86 to preserve the decades of software.
3 - porting as much new/current software as possible to native Arm.
Windows Arm PC's are nowhere anywhere near the above 3.
Apple on other other hand has had a massive Arm based user base on its iPhone it can leverage and because Apple keep its developer base in lockstep with the company it can pull off this kind of change.
Windows and Linux cannot, everything moves at different speeds.
This aint new back in the 90's PowerPC RISC designs were all the rage, Windows NT ran on them with x86 emulation, it did not prevail.
Oh and ARM is good enough for PC's. Just not mainstream yet and as this site is broadly for enthusiasts that skew it a lot. Some great SBC's coming out and look at the Pi 400. Flash an sd card and have a great Amiga emulator for retro games. Can run a desktop too if you want. And the Pi 4 is slow, quad core only. Many SBC's have hex core cpu's with much faster gfx - just many people haven't even heard of them. Qualcomm have got a few 8 core SoC's that run Linux great, just you never see them in the flesh
kompukare
Would be nice to see!
Thing is, Apple already think that the agreement with the EC about about phone chargers doesn't apply to them.
Aggreements with Apple don't seem to worth much, so the next time the EC has to put the weight of an actual directive behind any ‘agreements’ .
The other issue is that Apple is such a behemoth, putting a restriction on the sale of Apple products would probably harm the economy in the EU.
I wish governments would take Apple to task, and lay a slap down in both repairability and e-waste but it would have to be a combined motion between both the EU and the US else Apple won't care.
CAT-THE-FIFTH
More Apple disposable stuff,so expect even more soldiered parts,and little end user upgradeability or repairability. Apple boasts about how much recycled aluminium they used but made their latest iProducts even less easier to repair.
They and other companies are hypocritical when they go on about the environment. Yet,they continue to make products which are harder and harder to repair,with more and more soldiered and glued parts. I really hope the right to repair movements get more traction,and these companies get massively fined for computers which are on purpose made not to be repaired. Most of the broken electronics is shipped to poorer countries which end up paying the costs of all of this.
The European Union are planning to introduce regulations regarding ‘right to repair’. Although with our imminent leaving of the EU, whether the UK will follow suit is another matter…
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20201120IPR92118/parliament-wants-to-grant-eu-consumers-a-right-to-repair
3dcandy
Broadly agreeing except Linux on ARM is gaining rapidly and closing the gap quickly. Many builds now quicker to come out on ARM than X86
Is anyone actually using that as their desktop though? Your only option is SBCs, and even the powerful ones are far less responsive when web browsing than x86 machines (with an order of magnitude more power draw)
3dcandy
Oh and ARM is good enough for PC's. Just not mainstream yet and as this site is broadly for enthusiasts that skew it a lot. Some great SBC's coming out and look at the Pi 400. Flash an sd card and have a great Amiga emulator for retro games. Can run a desktop too if you want. And the Pi 4 is slow, quad core only. Many SBC's have hex core cpu's with much faster gfx - just many people haven't even heard of them. Qualcomm have got a few 8 core SoC's that run Linux great, just you never see them in the flesh
Pi4 is respectable by SBC standards - terrible by smartphone standards, but those always take a while to filter down to SBCs*. The 6 core ones aren't much better, you're just trading A72s for A52s
* Given you can get smartphones with pretty powerful chips, and lots of built in storage, and oodles of RAM, and a battery, and some cameras, and a touchscreen for not much more than quite naff SBCs, I'm not sure why we don't see more “premium” SBCs with modern SoCs. You can get a phone with a snapdragon 730 that would cream any SBC on the market (A76 cores! Beefy modern GPU! 6 A55 cores - the lower power part is 1.5 odroid C4s!) for a bit over £200 from a name brand like motorola, so you ought to be able to put out an SBC with one for a bit more than pi4 8GB money
Xlucine
Is anyone actually using that as their desktop though? Your only option is SBCs, and even the powerful ones are far less responsive when web browsing than x86 machines (with an order of magnitude more power draw)
Pi4 is respectable by SBC standards - terrible by smartphone standards, but those always take a while to filter down to SBCs*. The 6 core ones aren't much better, you're just trading A72s for A52s
* Given you can get smartphones with pretty powerful chips, and lots of built in storage, and oodles of RAM, and a battery, and some cameras, and a touchscreen for not much more than quite naff SBCs, I'm not sure why we don't see more “premium” SBCs with modern SoCs. You can get a phone with a snapdragon 730 that would cream any SBC on the market (A76 cores! Beefy modern GPU! 6 A55 cores - the lower power part is 1.5 odroid C4s!) for a bit over £200 from a name brand like motorola, so you ought to be able to put out an SBC with one for a bit more than pi4 8GB money
Again - here in the UK we don't see as many nice SBC's being readily available. Pi 4 with 8gb is what everybody thinks about. Nvidia Jetsons and similar just never seem to be available. I agree there are some lovely SoC's available, mobile ones for example and there are SBC's available in China for example with some Exynos 8-core SoC's that are pretty decent. But here in the UK there is no standardised OS choices, people look at Android and think it's a mobile OS. People don't want to compile source or have workarounds to get things working any more - apart from the Pi and that really simple BBC thing we have moved away from that. People losing their minds over Apples M1 chip and how good it is - it should be they spent millions getting to that point and are the main TSMC 5nm customer right now. And they threw transistors at making it emulate X86 and doing some things they wanted! Problem is, the market for an ARM based desktop in the UK is tiny. Probably less than 10k sales in total. Throw in that anybody would look at the Pi 400 and not any further and there is the issue. To beat the Pi 400 is quite easy in power and performance but price is keen. Less than £100 shipped with a 4gb old style keyboard pc and mouse with os already on an sd card - I stopped looking at second hand Amigas for some retro gaming as soon as it was announced. We have a Pi 3+ in a Sega case for our retro gaming needs - tempted to go Pi 4 in the nice SNES case that is available with a SATA port and an enclosure that looks like a cartridge and takes a 2.5" HD or SSD but again you're up to around £100 without the ease of a Pi 400
Easier in the UK to get hold of an Android TV box, flash a different OS or use as Android. Cheap wireless mouse and keyboard set and large SD card and off you go. Android has better support for gpu acceleration you can connect it to your tv easily enough and boom…
But do people want it - they certainly don't need it. If a big supplier (like Apple have) comes along and makes a decent bit of hardware, that just works with a decent ARM based SoC and gets a decent version of say Debian or Android included in the box and installed they *may* have a fighting chance - but it says it all when Apple release something and everybody suddenly goes wild when in reality it is pretty limited, basic io and locked down completely
Luke7
When do you think we’ll see x86 become dead to the end user? (Either to ARM or RISCV) And what was the last similarly huge shift in personal computing?
I would say x86 will be dead to the end user roughly never, sad to say since it is Not My Favourite Architecture.
Last similarly huge shift in personal computing? There are only two. The latest was the shift to AMD64 as a 64 bit architecture, at least cutting off Intel's attempt to push us into them as a single source of Itanium parts. The first one was when the PC came out. At the time any interesting computer was based on the 68000 CPU, but then thanks to being blessed by IBM in their PC which, because it was IBM, businesses bought by the skip load; the laughably poor 8086 with its architectural limit of 1MB, stupid segmented addressing and utter lack of CPU registers started to become the dominant architecture in computing, putting the whole industry back by probably a decade with all the himem, lowmem, lim ems extensions etc and the performance hit of incrementing a huge pointer taking several instructions.
So an architecture that started off crippled won the race to supremacy. In the 90's the fastest thing out there was the DEC Alpha which could emulate much 386 code something like 3 times faster than a genuine Intel Pentium CPU whilst running the same Windows NT natively, but no-one bought it. RISC PC attempts based on MIPS and later PowerPC architectures never got off the ground (I never even saw one of the MIPS ones except in pictures).
Eventually I expect RISC-V will eat into server space as well as the low end embedded and IOT markets, but the PC is an Intel stronghold. You would think that everyone carrying a rather capable ARM based machine in their pocket would change how people act, but it doesn't seem to.