Is x86 on its way out?

[jonneymendoza]

Seems so as apple are going all ARM on there next line of laptops and machines.

What are your thoughts?

Is ARM good enough to host servers for say this forum?

Be able to play the next COD and any future triple A gaming titles on it?

Be able to run various IDE for developing/coding stuff like websites, mobile apps, software,s backend services etc?

Or is it not viable yet and apple's ARM wont succed?

 

[jonneymendoza]

Yes to all of the above (indeed you can already get ARM server instances on Amazon AWS for example).

With regards to gaming and absolute performance critical work - it will depend what Apple do with ARM chips - the majority of current ARM chips are optimised for low power/mobile use cases.

If you relax power restrictions back to desktop levels, and focus on performance cores (the "Big" in most Big.Little Arm architectures), without integrated GPUs etc, it will be interesting what can be achieved.

Is the up and coming next gen consoles ARM based?

 

[jonneymendoza]

It makes life easier for them, and ARM is good enough on portable devices
Yes. In fact not just servers, but supercomputers run on ARM now.
No. Modern games are written with heavy x86 arch optimisations. More so with consoles all being x86. Will require substantial work for game engines and drivers to run anywhere near as fast as x86.
Depends on how well software is written. Popular IDEs shoud be fine

X86 is furthest from dying in its history.
ARM won portable, is gaining in servers and now on laptops. But I can't see it becoming faster than a 4-8 core skylake or Zen2 even in a laptop. More power efficient, maybe, depending on load. Not faster

SO would PC gaming die then if no one buys x86 laptops and desktops anymore instead they al go ARM?

wont windows OS x86 be dead other then being used for gaming?

Right now i can use my PC for everything i have listed above but if most of the above runs better and faster on ARM, that leaves a windows x86 only useful for gaming.

WHY wont gaming jump onboard ARM like everyone seems to be?

 

[jonneymendoza]

Intel and AMD have a monopoly on X86_64 and this increasingly doesn't sit well with large company's, the beauty of ARM is they don't make CPU's, they sell IP and with that IP anyone can make their own in house CPU, the problem is unless you're designing your ARM IP CPU's for specific tasks you have to convince an X86_64 world to convert to that IP.

Games are not going to be rewritten for the sake of Apple, tho Apple tend to create their own in house applications so they can make them for ARM, Apple will be moving further away from the applications mass market to an Apple black box of Apple applications, which suits them and even thier customers who think Apple is a special eco system anyway.

ARM are not going to be taking over the X86_64 Space, not for a long time if ever......



AMD64 is AMD stand alone 64Bit architecture, its used extensively in Linux and servers, the _64 part in X86_64 is the 64Bit part in X86, its AMD64 tagged into Intel's X86, X86 on its own is very much dead, yes, however AMD were clever enough to integrate AMD64 into X86 making it impossible for Intel to revoke AMD's X86 Licence at the time.



ARM Holdings is a UK company.

And why is that?(the bit i highlighted)

Not faster. Cheaper and more efficient and simpler. So in areas where this is important, ARM gains. Desktop and performance laptop is safe.

the ipad cpu's are faster then anthing intel and amd have put out though or am i missing something?

 

[jonneymendoza]

Bingo. Once Adobe port something like Photoshop or After Effects and you can do a like for like on the iPad/iMac/PC/Intel based Mac you'll be able to see the difference.

Remember when Apple used to try and market the Power PC as being faster than the equivalent x86, using dodgy marketing slides (those people obviously work at Intel now) and the year they dumped Power PC all of a sudden all the stuff x86 was crap at last year it was now amazing at.

They already have ported photoshop on the ipad

 

[jonneymendoza]

I know... but there are no Macs with ARM to test the 'like for like' version against x86, hence the list "you can do a like for like on the iPad/iMac/PC/Intel based Mac"

It's the same.mac os will be identical and merged with iPads os

 

[jonneymendoza]

This is because ARM chips have become so much better in the last 10 years while x86 has been more or less stagnant with only minor improvements. So the operating systems, software and use cases have been updated to use the extra power, rather than becoming stagnant.

A core in Apple A13 is over 100 times faster than a core in Apple A4 (released in 2010).
A core in i9 10900K is almost 2 times faster than a core in Core i7 920 (released in 2008). Majority of the improvement also comes from clock speed improvements (2.93GHz vs 5.3GHz Turbo speeds).

If we've had a 100x performance improvement for x86 in the last 10 years, every OS, game, software and use-case would have been updated to use the extra processing power. In that case, your 10-year-old x86 chip would have seriously struggled as well. Stagnation is not a sign of quality or longevity, it's a sign of mediocracy, and that's what Intel has been in the last 10 years.

Intel are not the only cpu. Amd has made huge strides over the last few years

 

[jonneymendoza]

This is because ARM chips have become so much better in the last 10 years while x86 has been more or less stagnant with only minor improvements. So the operating systems, software and use cases have been updated to use the extra power, rather than becoming stagnant.

A core in Apple A13 is over 100 times faster than a core in Apple A4 (released in 2010).
A core in i9 10900K is almost 2 times faster than a core in Core i7 920 (released in 2008). Majority of the improvement also comes from clock speed improvements (2.93GHz vs 5.3GHz Turbo speeds).

If we've had a 100x performance improvement for x86 in the last 10 years, every OS, game, software and use-case would have been updated to use the extra processing power. In that case, your 10-year-old x86 chip would have seriously struggled as well. Stagnation is not a sign of quality or longevity, it's a sign of mediocracy, and that's what Intel has been in the last 10 years.

AMD says no