Exciting times for CPU architectures this year with both the M1 and Zen 3 being highly competitive. The 2010s were a bit of a stagnation when it comes to performances, lets hope more the 2020s is more interesting.
Does anyone know why this was? For an outsider, it seems like something went seriously wrong at Intel: the exploits, plus not making serious advances, and now seeing what M1 can do on laptop processors.
Not directly involved, but repeating what I've heard from others here: Intel apparently got taken over by MBA-types who didn't understand what it takes to generate long-term engineering value (a bit like Boeing?). It also refused to pay competitive salaries even when it was rolling in cash, making it easy for competitors to poach its talent.
(Boeing brought McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but management-wise, MD's beancounting culture took over Boeing's engineering culture. A kind of reverse-merger. Several pundits lamented this in the wake of the 737-max scandal)
There was no competition for Intel in the x86 market. They attempted to enter mobile which was a huge and growing market and they failed.
This stagnation may have fuelled development elsewhere (RISC-V?) and now that AMD is "back in the game" and ARM is making its way into server hardware and "desktop", there's real competition again.
That was a market without competition. Without anything lighting a fire under Intel they had no reason to improve the chips further and kept making tiniest of iterative improvements year after year.
A long time ago, when RISC was first posited, we all thought that RISC vs CISC was a big deal.
But these days, not really. Peel back and peer at the CPU and they all look and work much the same. The CISC implementations typically convert to their own simplified instruction subset internally, and the RISC crowd keep adding fatter and fatter CISC-like instructions.
So its not really an x86 instruction set problem. The legacy that Intel (and, a lesser extent, AMD) seem to struggle to overhaul is in their architecture, not the instruction set itself.
This is proven by the M1 doing binary translation of x86 and still being faster than the Intel chips.
> This is proven by the M1 doing binary translation of x86 and still being faster than the Intel chips
That’s the real kick in the nuts for intel isn’t it. I bet apple could have jumped last year or before and been ahead in native performance. But waiting meant they even beat intel at their own game, while massively handicapped.
Maybe not 2010, but some time before that it was evident that their architecture couldn't scale. They increased clock rate every year, and hit a wall. My Pentium 4 in 2006 or so still had much more GHz than any CPU I've had since. After hitting the ceiling, they pushed on in that direction for far too long before rethinking the approach, like getting blood from a stone.