enemies are joining forces against a common enemy: ARM
ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.
They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.
If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.
You can buy an ARM laptop right now.
And you can’t run Linux on it.
You can run Asahi Linux on M1 MacBooks right now. If you didn’t see the news, they’ve even been able to run some relatively modern AAA games with decent enough frame rates. Granted that’s only the M1 macs, but there’s at least one relatively modern ARM laptop that you can run Linux on.
I’ll totally concede that the new Snapdragon laptops aren’t running Linux yet. It seems like Qualcomm is taking Linux support seriously, but I’m a bit skeptical as someone who has been absolutely fucked by a shitty Qualcomm kernel module.
I sincerely hope that if they come up with a 128bit instruction set they call it “x80” to maintain backwards compatibility with previous set names and be deliberately confusing to everyone.
x87.
Because that would be unambiguous what it means.
But
0x80is how you’d normally express 128 as hex. So it’s relevant. But deliberately confusing.
Go RISC-V!
“When we step back and look at it, we see that it is a de facto open ecosystem. Open ecosystems benefit from having consortiums with stakeholders, all with a voice in driving the ecosystem forward”
Lol if the x86 ISA is an open ecosystem, CocaCola is an open source beverage.
Trying to read between the lines though, is Norrod implying that they are considering moving toward a more open x86?
The impression I’m getting is that they’re thinking about sacrificing various legacy features (32bit being the most obvs one) to bring performance per Watt closer to the competition. And then put in its place a more standardized successor? RIS86? They will likely aim to steer clear of formal (published) standards because they want their trade secrets. However, they will need to simultaneously ensure not to violate antitrust rules.
Might be easier for them to just forfeit trade secrets and embrace a different model altogether.Aren’t they legally required to be, or face monopoly litigation
With the rise of ARM, I don’t think they’d need to, since ARM gives enough competition.
At this point, I think they could get away with it. It’s no longer a long shot to argue that x86 has serious competitors.
You’re looking for “collusion”.
I would imagine that any x64 binary compiled to work with both chipsets would only use the instructions that are common between them. This would mean there’s not much gain in developing a new insutruction unless both companies support it.
I’m sure there’s some super-optimised stuff out there that targets extra instructions when they’re available, but it’s very rare.
AMD and Intel are well-matched competitors right now except for AMD having some money.
For some reason Sweeney and Torvalds are working together, that I find the most shocking
People still use x86?
what do you think run your lemmy instances?
There are ARM CPUs for servers and cloud computing. Of course X86 CPUs are far more common, at least for now.
Wake me up when ARM64 based cloud gets mainstream.
It already is. My company runs hundreds (possibly thousands) of ARM64-based instances right now. It’s done great things for our cloud spend. We still have more x86 stuff than ARM because some applications just don’t perform as well on ARM, but I can imagine that ratio will change as software gets more optimized (specifically the JDK, golang’s compiler, and GCC/LLVM) and Ampere releases new systems with better single thread perf.
EDIT: Ampere, not Alterra. God damn tech company names.
That’s actually good news. Honestly, I’m hoping alternative archs would be in the game as well, but their options tend to be less accessible/affordable than the x86 counterpart.
Personally if I ever decide to host an instance I would prefer to do it on aarch64.
Btw?
Clouds
Cloud is just a fancy word for someone else’s (most likely x86) computer
Next you’ll tell me the earth is round 🙄 weathermen (weatherpeople) are the sysadmins!!! Truth!!!
cloud is simply a service being provided on another person’s computer
It’s fueled by rain and synergy. 🙄
When people say x86 as a platform it includes x64 too
There are more than 64 clouds!! It’s a storm. They really should say things are in the storm, not 64 clouds.
What you on about?
