A future without x86?
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I mean, they don't sell Apples at Newegg AFAIK, but given that Apple has two ARM based offerings now, it's only a matter of time before other manufacturers follow suit.
There's a big difference between Apple computers and Dell/HP/etc computers: Apple owns the entire vertical, the others don't. This is why the others can't follow suit. Briefly, Dell aren't fabbing their own processors, Apple are. Why would Dell, et al, switch to ARM and lose the benefit of economies of scale from using X86_64? Sure, they offer ARM[1], but that's an expensive product for them to produce. Apple owning the vertical means that it is neither cheaper nor more expensive for them to offer ARM over X86_64: it's exactly the same! Dell doesn't own their vertical - they assemble existing finished components into a finished product - for them moving to a new chip is going to be hella expensive. It's not about technology, it's about business, and Apple is in the business of providing products at premium price points. The other companies are not, so you can't expect the same level of vertical ownership from them. With all that being said, low-powered laptops and desktops would certainly be welcome, as long as the price point is in line with the product offering. It makes no difference to the end-user (even us embedded devs) whether the chip is based on X86, X86_64, ARM, MIPS, Sparc or m68k[2] - you're gonna do roughly the same work, with the roughly the same constraints, using roughly the same devtools, to produce roughly the same products. The people who it matter to are hardware designers, specifically verilog/VHDL engineers who are designing those chips and peripherals, but I don't think they care either. [1] Well, they used to. I don't know about now. [2] I've programmed for all of those at some point or the other. Even the z80 processor (Zilog?) when I was but a young lad.
They don't need to fab their own processors. All it takes is one company (like say Ampere) to come in and fill the vacuum. Oh, capitalism.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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[Fans (nor physics) don't lie](https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/singlecore)
Sorry, but I don't understand your intent in posting this link? It doesn't bench ARM processors at all.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I don't know... I keep waiting for someone to come up with a GPU-based OS based on Ampere or something like that. It can't be more than a couple years out.
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Sorry, but I don't understand your intent in posting this link? It doesn't bench ARM processors at all.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Not my field of expertise and the site isn't that each to use. But I did (finally) figure out how to search and I found a 'ARM ARMv8 2016 MHz (8 cores)' listed. There are others. Geekbench Search - Geekbench[^] So that is a ARM device right? (I really have no idea if this is what you are referring to or not.) Following claims to discuss the internals. https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals.pdf It says is supports ARM on page 8.
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Sorry, but I don't understand your intent in posting this link? It doesn't bench ARM processors at all.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
The first in the top is 17th: System iPhone 14 Pro Apple A16 Bionic 3460 MHz (6 cores) Uploaded Oct 24, 2023 Platform iOS Single-Core Score 3732 Multi-Core Score 10547 [Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench](https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks/) Top one is Mac Studio (2023) Apple M2 Max @ 3.7 GHz (12 CPU cores, 30 GPU cores) 2803 points Top x86 is (without obvious extreme overclocking) ASRock Z690 AQUA OC Intel Core i9-13900K 3000 MHz (8 cores) Uploaded Aug 25, 2023 Platform Windows Single-Core Score 4220
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
No thanks, I see no real advantage for me personally. I'm an infrequent laptop user so any power benefits are irrelevant. I've retired from the biz and most of my computer time is spent on games, a little video editing and the occasional photo editing session. I'd rather not be throwing away the hundreds of games I've acquired over the years (yes I DO replay a lot of the old ones). So I'll be stick with my AMD processors for quite a while. I've used ARM processors on a number of the products for the last place I worked at and it seems to be a nice processor. It was adequate for what I needed to do, just some relatively simple audio processing for some 911 equipment.
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Not my field of expertise and the site isn't that each to use. But I did (finally) figure out how to search and I found a 'ARM ARMv8 2016 MHz (8 cores)' listed. There are others. Geekbench Search - Geekbench[^] So that is a ARM device right? (I really have no idea if this is what you are referring to or not.) Following claims to discuss the internals. https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals.pdf It says is supports ARM on page 8.
Yeah it is. I just couldn't find it. :rolleyes:
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward.
The Intel x86 CPU's will never be able to match the performance of Apple M series CPU because of a design problem with the instruction set. When x86 was designed parallelism was not an issue because instructions were decoded serially. Today CPU's gain most of their performance from parallel decode. The ARM instruction set is mostly fixed width while x86 is variable width. You can't decode instructions efficiently in parallel when you can't easily determine how to break them up into separate instructions. For example x86 gets a sequence of bytes and first needs to decode the bytes to figure out how to group them together into instructions. ARM can skip this step because the instructions are simpler and fixed width. In that case it can easily issue groups of bytes to parallel decoders. Here is an analogy: Imagine someone trying to direct groups of people to into separate at an airport security screening. They need to make sure that families go together in the same line. If each family could have 1-4 people then they would need to ask each person which family they belong to (i.e. x86). If there is a requirement that all families have 4 people then they can all move through to the x-rays without being asked.
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
ARM just designs and licenses the CPU core. Everyone who implementing the actually chips put a lot of stuff around it, like GPU/video and peripheral I/O (USB, I2C, networking (wired/wireless)) and a lot of that stuff is NOT compatible across implementations. And that is even more true for those "little devices" that you mentioned than it is for anything desktop/server related...
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ARM just designs and licenses the CPU core. Everyone who implementing the actually chips put a lot of stuff around it, like GPU/video and peripheral I/O (USB, I2C, networking (wired/wireless)) and a lot of that stuff is NOT compatible across implementations. And that is even more true for those "little devices" that you mentioned than it is for anything desktop/server related...
Ralf Quint wrote:
ARM just designs and licenses the CPU core.
I actually mentioned that in my OP, and said it was a win. As far as the peripherals, that doesn't matter as much.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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The first in the top is 17th: System iPhone 14 Pro Apple A16 Bionic 3460 MHz (6 cores) Uploaded Oct 24, 2023 Platform iOS Single-Core Score 3732 Multi-Core Score 10547 [Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench](https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks/) Top one is Mac Studio (2023) Apple M2 Max @ 3.7 GHz (12 CPU cores, 30 GPU cores) 2803 points Top x86 is (without obvious extreme overclocking) ASRock Z690 AQUA OC Intel Core i9-13900K 3000 MHz (8 cores) Uploaded Aug 25, 2023 Platform Windows Single-Core Score 4220
Don't know how I missed that. Thanks!
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system
Are you suggesting this is something new? Following says this happened in 2017? "The platform started out bringing Windows 10 to Arm-powered laptops and tablets all the way back in 2017" Windows on Arm — Everything you need to know about low-power PCs[^]
honey the codewitch wrote:
There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally
Perhaps. But is this a comment related to your business domain rather than the overall computing market? I suspect choosing components for any system depends on a number of factors both technological and non-technological.
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I'm currently moving all of my professional and hobby project development over to the ARM Cortex family of platforms. ARM Cortex M7 > ESP32 Microsoft is doing similar with their operating system. Apple already has, with the M1 and m2, AFAIK. ARM > Intel There's no getting around that x86 is showing its age architecturally. Even discounting all the ancient backward compatibility, like "real mode", it's getting awkward. I read this thread with some interest. Aside from some disagreements in the comments, overall it was very interesting, if taken with a grain of salt. the_end_for_isa_x86[^] One nice advantage for me is the ARM Cortex architecture is largely continuous from their little M0 real time chips all the way up to their multicore A line. That means I can create code that will perform well across little devices and PCs. This also has to be a huge win for developers of phone and tablet applications, that their work is more transferable to future PCs now. The fact that ARM doesn't manufacture is also a huge win. They leave fabrication to outfits like NXP. ARM just designs chips. I read somewhere that their time to market for a new offering is about half that of Intel's. Start moving your stock.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix