| x86 doesn't "need to die". long lasting designs that earned their keep and have proven are valuable. so from that standpoint, i agree with the premise. the problem is that the article makes too much reliance on bad arguments such as "ISA differences were swept aside by the resources a company could put behind designing a chip". this is a dangerously bad argument. the fact that a company can afford to and is willing to keep x86 afloat and competitive with massive resources is not an argument for dismissal, but for its economic usefulness. the value to a legacy ISA is real. but the cost is complexity. this complexity drives $, silicon area, power. period. in a even drag race, the simpler more efficient design would definitely win. and a load-store architecture is simpler than a complex addressing scheme and will have more throughput per clock with less resources (design work, validation, $, area, power). a fixed or simple variable length opcode is always going to be simpler to implement than x86! but on the other hand, a lot of those massive costs (NRE) are sunk costs. others are not. so there's nothing wrong with x86 at the moment - it's still clearly the cheapest (due to scale) and fastest (definitely per/$) and excepting M2/M3 also fastest absolute per-core. it certainly doesn't need to "die". part of the advantage is inertia. and that's part of the disadvantage too. it's just barely starting to look like the trajectory is changing. but by the time the overall economics of ARM, RISC-V, etc. begin to overtake x86, the inertia and cruft will be negatively affecting them too. things get old and die on their own. there's no stopping it. but in this case it doesn't need to be hastened and it won't be a "happy" moment when the changing of the guard does happen. |