Hacker News

> The Chromebook movement has already been working to close this off.

? Chromebooks are like one of two decent non-PC options (the other is Macs). AFAIK every Chromebook can be flipped to developer mode in <5min and then you can boot anything you want.

On paper, yes. But how many desktop-suitable systems out there that actually implement it?

> require very little modifications to DTB files

DTB only describes what blocks are present, if the kernel doesn't know what "crapvendor,lockinregulator" means it would not work. Vs ACPI that actually provides drivers, however crappy.

x86 has a a mature open source driver system especially for graphics. Although there are great reverse engineering efforts (Collobra and others), with ARM SOCs you can find yourself dependent on blobs for graphics and locked into ancient and insecure Android and Linux images.

DTB it's hell. A lot of devices today only work with obsolete kernel releases.

Agreed.. in a lot of ways, APX is like AVX(512) for scalar code.

Double integer register count, three-operand instructions, improved predication support including conditional load/stores.. If I remember correctly, they actually implement it by having the scalar instructions use the EVEX prefix introduced with avx512.

I would really love to seem them settle on APX + AVX10/512 as a next-generation x86 baseline.

It's exactly because of licencing that the situation with RISC-V is a world of proprietary SoCs with no consistency, as opposed to the open system that is an x86 PC. (That the ISA is or isn't open is trifling and matters to neither user nor kernel developer.) Essentially every single board requires its very own custom port of your preferred OS.

I will wait for x86's doom, but it will take patience. After all, people have been saying it's dying and will be replaced by some RISC alternative for over 30 years now.

But isn’t that at the high end (when doing lots of work)?

I thought the big advantage tended to be when not much was going on, either idle or simple tasks. And that’s where the big ARM advantage in power was.

If you compare a good x86 to a crap ARM yes.

Laptops are populated mostly with crap x86 and good ARM (apart from snapdragon which is a crap ARM)

The value of the ISA is the huge volume of existing software for it, including hardware drivers. The whole x86-using industry migrating away from x86 would be a multi-decade and costly process. In addition, this would just mean more competition for Intel and AMD, as they would lose the moat of their x86 know-how. Why would they do that?

Intel used to sell some embedded ARM CPU's too back in the day. They could adapt to RISC-V in few years.

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation.

I'd modify that to: Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive, period. All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, just maybe more efficient. It is the reason Windows has continued to fail on ARM, because they have to use the same slow off-the-shelf cores as everyone else.

I'm a big Surface fan, and wish they had a version with an Apple M-class SoC in it, but every ARM version (which used the fastest non-Apple ARM core at the time) has been a dog compared to the same model with Intel. Just give me the iPad Air SoC in a Surface...

Apple's emulation literally implements some x86 in hardware, and they will likely drop that silicon when the transition end, so I won't rely on that

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation.

My big problem is Rosetta 2 doesn’t emulate AVX which more and more software uses.

I work in an AI platform team. I’m not actually trying to do machine learning stuff under it, but I just want to start the Docker containers to test some unrelated functions on my laptop. And that happens to start Tensorflow and pgvector, even though I’m not really using either in anger in this case. And both try to use AVX, and then get a SIGILL, so those containers fail to start.

Maybe should just build Linux ARM Docker containers but trying to get some ARM CI machines to build them with (we could just use our laptops but want to do it properly)

I think it’s more on NVidia, Qualcomm, or AMD to engineer their own ARM based chips which can outcompete x86 variants. Both NVidia and AMD are rumored to be working on general purpose ARM based CPUs. Right now NVidia is likely the one to do it thanks to their absolutely obscene margins giving them more than enough money for R&D.

I personally don’t think there is a lot of incentive for ARM to make the fastest possible cores. They’d be undermining those who are currently paying the most to license their IP. ARM’s real incentive is power efficiency and then letting the licensees use and abuse that for performance gains.

Multi arch support has never been better and yet x86 is still competitive. Maybe in 10 years everything will be risc V but it doesn't seem to be happening very fast.

> That is what is so important about it RISC-V is that it being an open ISA creates a commodity with true competition instead of competing oligopolies.

Not just that, but also by being fairly vanilla/boring about a lot of things in the ISA too. Thus letting the ISA itself be less an impediment to being compatible with ARM and x86_64 as far as behavior for memory ordering and such.

Those patents are starting to expire. Original x86-64 is probably free and clear now, being released in 2001. The big sticking point for general code out there (cmpxchg16b) was released in 2008, so it only has a few more years left.

If anything this x86 "reshaping" sounds like a way to get some new patent bricks for the wall of the garden.

It could be, if it has fast RCpc.

The main problem with non-speculative options isn't hardware it's performance. You can turn x86 CPUs into in order machines without respinning hardware. Nobody wants to do it because it's slow as molasses. If there was a completely alternative design that was better than speculative execution wholesale then it'd be back to being the original "just go to the fastest thing".

Yes people need a particular architecture.

There are many legacy systems that still rely on IBM chips, mainframes, etc.

They can’t just move on without rebuilding the entire system from scratch. a monumental and risky proposition.

Even if tomorrow everyone went all in on arm, risc5, whatever, x86 is here to stay.

If anyone knew how to get rid of all the speculation bugs, don’t you think they’d do so? What concretely are you proposing Intel and AMD do?

why not get rid of the wild class of devastating speculation bugs that every OOO processor in existence currently has?

Because almost no one but cloud-computing providers have a threat model that justifies the performance hit (and, not coincidentally, the carbon footprint) associated with crippled CPUs.

Apple have shown that you can get x86-tier performance, but it generally costs a similar amount of silicon and engineering effort as those x86 devices.

The lack of other competitors managing this suggest the arm ISA isn't "fundamentally" better at delivering that performance, it doesn't seem easier in engineering effort or silicon cost. The Apple products tend to outperform in perf/watt though, but that's hard to really compare as they're focusing on a slightly different market that favors that over "Peak Server Performance".

Is ARM better from a license POV? I also don't think so. Some people claim they want away from the "monopoly" of x86 copyright and license shenanigans from Intel and AMD, but I'd argue ARM control their ISA to a similar degree - you need to buy it off ARM to use it, and they have the right to revoke that license. See the Qualcomm/Nuvia legal mess, and that was when both companies were paying ARM already.

So in many ways I see ARM vs x86 as the "Coke v Pepsi" of ISAs, they seem pretty similar from the outside, serving pretty much the same use case (even if how they go around serving that use case is different), but some people online have rather dramatic opinions they confuse with "Proven Objective Fact".

RISC-V might be a good path away from just repeating the same "Single company controls all licensing" problem, but that's similar to how arm was 15 years ago - there's not really any proven high-performance cores approaching common "desktop" use cases yet, and at least ARM had to do a pretty clean re-write to go from then to now in armv8. Some of the things they "fixed" were very non-obvious until you actually tried to make a large, superscaler speculative implementation too - and who knows what pitfalls there may be in current ISA designs that trip over the "next" performance increasing techniques. Maybe they've managed to avoid all them for the near future, but like many things in R&D we don't really know until we get there.

It’s not. There are a lot of ways it’s cleaner but x86 handles some things (debugging and handling of traps, for example) better.

To RISC-V, due to its licensing.

ARM is yet another dead end.

> If consoles did it, it would most likely mean a break in backwards compatibility or a lot of investment in emulation.

Consoles tend to break compatibility every like couple of generations anyway. The PS5 is only compatible with PS4, for example, because the PS3 used the PowerPC-based Cell. Also, Nintendo has been using ARM since like, the Gameboy Advance (Fun fact is that in handhelds nintendo tended to use the previous generation's CPU as a sound chip, and would use it when running previous generation carts) (Nintendo home consoles before the switch used PowerPC. The Nintendo 64 used MIPS)

I agree with you on the custom PC market, but that has to be pretty small compared to consoles.

This. I understand web devs can just use whatever runs Google Chrome but the real world is a bit more complex.

CS2 has over 900k online on Steam right now... Where people push the game to 200fps plus. A PC that can do that can also do anything else. Dev work, VMs, Docker, whatever. Why switch to ARM? Because their soy starbuxx latte workplace gets 2-3h more in battery life?

But I have to disagree on

>With consoles often being the devices that set a performance standard for PC's, I doubt they would be moving to ARM in the next generation so would not happen until the 10th generation. We are likely 2-3 years away from hearing about gen 9, and then another ~8 years until ARM becomes a conversation for any serious game console. There just would not be any incentive for PC to make a serious switch until that point (or around that time) since it would also fruther complicate game development.

Consoles used to be MIPS, POWERPC and stuff and PCs where x86 "back then".

XBOX is like the first x86 console. So I dunno your point here. Really man.

???

Switch is ARM right. Nintendo Switch.

Sony and MS went from POWERPC to x86 as IBM could not make a PPC CPU fast enough and ARM was not good in a big formfactor. Sony and MS use AMD hardware but in PCs Nvidia GPUS are still the best, yes they are my experiece personally and look at numbers. XBOX1 used to be nvidia gforce 3 but abd pricing. So all went AMD later. PS3 was CELL 8 core PPC and Nvidia 70xx GPU. 360 was PPC and AMD gpu. Wii was PPC and AMD gpu.

>There just have not been much movement in this regard. We are seeing a few ports come to Mac (and iPhone) but those are the exceptions.

Nobody on Mac is actually a gamer.

>(not mobile, I am not dismissing mobile but it is not the traditional market that is relevant to this conversation

I will btw. I do not understand why people here love mobile games. No wait I do. They are easy, quick and P2W. They are busy adults or kids or pajeets with no money.

In mobile, what sells? Gatcha games, pay to win trash. There are some gems but few and far between. They are built in a predatory way to take your money.

The best reason I can think of is aesthetic: x86 is the ugliest (extant?) ISA.

Nobody wants to read, write, or think about x86 assembly. Most RISCs are easy and enjoyable to read, reason about, and write by hand.

>I think ARM is overhyped because people see Apple's success and just assume aarch64 > x86_64

It seems like that's the case

"ARM has bigger share in people's minds than actual numbers"

Docker on Mac is running a VM in a hypervisor to run Linux.

> I don't know where this incredible x86 emulation people are talking about on Mac is hiding.

It's in Rosetta, running x86 binaries compiled for older macOS versions.

The state of Docker in macOS has never been good, with Orbdev being the best Docker compatible container engine for desktop Macs.

What flags are you talking about? Everything here runs just fine out of the box. Just slow for x86 images and slow compared to running docker engine or podman on Linux.