Are Intel and AMD joining forces? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 05:59:26 am
content: WTF? They formed an X86 ecosystem advisory group...Is the X86 architecture finally coming to an end?

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 06:19:49 am
content: They obviously see ARM laptops as a serious business threat.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 06:45:11 am
content: Finally at 24:50 we get "AMD should move to Arm ASAP, or even [...] straight to RISC-V".x86 is safe on high end desktops for a little while yet, for professional applications and gaming. There is a lot of market inertia in those applications.Qualcomm's latest Arm chips seem pretty good for people who use their desktop/laptop primarily as a web browser.Server, supercomputers, AI, automotive, mobile seem wide open to whoever can offer the best price / performance / energy usage. Right now in shipping hardware RISC-V is about three years behind Arm-based hardware, but catching up fast with the largest number of companies and the largest amount of money going into RISC-V where you can innovate freely and more quickly, without the threat of Arm trying to exert control and suing their own customers.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 09:32:06 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on October 18, 2024, 06:45:11 amYep. But with an increasing number of applications running on Linux, porting to ARM and RISC-V is much easier so there is less reason to stick to Windows and x86. Take Eclipse for example. Since a few years there are pre-compiled binaries available for installation on ARM64 (and these are not the first ARM64 versions of Eclipse) and it runs OK on a reasonably modern ARM64 platform.BTW, it is interesting to see the swings between thin clients, fat clients (desktop computers) and back to thin clients again. The latter also driven by maintenance and security requirements just as was originally designed / implemented when the mainframes where used abundantly.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 09:46:07 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on October 18, 2024, 05:59:26 amThe problem isn't PC hardware, the problem is Microsoft and Google.This is the age of ecosystem in consumer electronics. Advertising and lack of control over Android implementations is dragging down Google, while Microsoft doesn't even have an ecosystem.So this is the age of Apple and ISA is entirely irrelevant to that. With massively wide superscalar cores and huge caches, ISA is a sideshow.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 10:06:55 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on October 18, 2024, 09:32:06 amIndeed, the Linux toolchain makes cross-compiling code not too hard: provided you already have the shared libraries for your arch available, you just replace g++ with arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ for instance.For many years it was very hard to cross compile anything on Microsoft toolchains simply because they didn't have any support for architectures beyond x86 and the odd WinCE weirdness. So a lot of software has hardcoded x86 hacks in it, or libraries without source that can't be rebuild easily...

author: Haenk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 12:10:16 pm
content: Quote from: hans on October 18, 2024, 06:19:49 amI guess they are thinking even further ahead - China flooding the world with RISC-V. With a halfway modern production process and no license fee to be paid, there might be some decent CPUs ahead of us - OK-ish speed and pretty cheap. That leaves only little room for expensive, top-performance CPUs from AMD/Intel.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 12:27:52 pm
content: This is almost certainly because Microsoft's push for NPU and copilot cost them money while having zero effect on sales.The one thing Microsoft certifies does nothing, while all the things they don't is torpedoing PCs. Terrible powertuning, especially with dGPUs. No clear support for secure enclaves capable of securing passkeys (VBS is meh and the documentation for third party VBS solutions almost entirely absent). Etc etc.

author: andersblur
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 18, 2024, 02:29:45 pm
content: And NVidia. Sadly they have a near monopoly on GPU computing thanks to the prevalence of CUDA. I'm not saying I dislike CUDA or NVidia, but it would be good to have alternatives and not be at the mercy of the whims of a corporation whose bottom line is, ultimately, profit.