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x86 doesn't need to die because there's nothing wrong with it (or at least, many of its issues are either not talked about or misrepresented.) Marketing hype and people who buy into that have established and cemented a narrative where the despotic x86 chains us to higher power draws and unreasonable architecture choices that we could otherwise do away with if only we could adopt the noble ARM magic silicon. In truth ARM doesn't actually present any real gains (efficiency or otherwise) over x86 in pretty much any space as an inherent consequence of its ISA. The narrative has its origins seeded by way of the principle market that ARM found widespread success in being.... microprocessors and extremely low-end processor like those found in handheld gaming devices and eventually phones. Naturally these processors were designed to sip voltage by way of not actually pushing a whole lot of numbers. The market matured and so did the architecture, and we started to see cellphones that could really sling their weight! It's all smoke and mirrors though, as even in TYOOL 2024 the moment you do something intensive that your phone does not have a hardware accelerator for (eg, compiling software) it becomes apparent the thing you're holding in your hand is about as good as a core 2 duo when it comes to crunching numbers with a lot of branches. Then of course Apple came along and brought ARM back to the desktop space after decades of being relegated to power-sippers. People's jaws hit the floor over a chip that doesn't actually perform any better than its AMD counterparts, because oh hey! 20 hour battery life! Well, actually it's 11 hours if you're doing really light web browsing, and only in Safari. Well hey, that's slightly better than the comparable laptop chips in the x86 family released around the same time, right? And indeed, that's a few hours more than I got in my first gen AMD T14 which by all metrics is close enough to the M1 chip in my mbp. But you know, the more I dug futher, the more I found out that the battery life was about comparable when the system actually has to start doing work. Long video calls in Zoom? That was about 4 hours on both. Heavy use of Firefox? 6 hours each. Lots of compiling and a resource heavy dev environment with a fat C++ language server? Again, about 4 hours on both. The battery gains weren't from some mystical discrepency between how instructions are decoded on the two chips. In the end it just came down to the fact that as all operating systems do, the great M1 battery life was owed to really cute power management drivers in Apple's operating system (as well as implementing a fair amount of extensions to make things like video decode and javascript execution draw less power.) It's a fact that becomes all the more apparent when, while following the Asahi devblog, during the watershed moment of actually getting Linux to bootstrap itself on Apple silicon, I read the kernel's main loop doing absolutely nothing chewed through the whole battery in less than 3 hours. That sounds about right to me, given every single power draw experiment I've read between 2020 and now indicates the M1's power draw isn't really as great as the hype machine has made it out to be. I'm sure we're all at the edge of our seats hoping to experience an efficiency revolution, and that this can be given to us with this one weird trick of changing ISAs... but it's not happening. At least not with ARM, or RISC-V or any other contemporary architecture that isn't x86. Far be it from me to defend Intel or their frankenstein's monster architecture, but I've gotten a bit tired of this dream that we're on the cusp of performing supertasks in an instant, at the cost of mere picowatts. Especially not when it inadvertantly pushes us towards a future of SoC lock-in and hobbyist bare metal development becomes an even bigger waking nightmare. Until then, I sincerely hope x86 never dies, even though saying so kills a piece of me inside. |
You seem to miss that RISC-V being better is besides the point.
RISC-V's massive success was unavoidable, due to its open specification and free license.
The ISA did not need to even be good, just decent.