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x86 Evolution Still Driving the Revolution
An anonymous reader writes "The x86 instruction set may be ancient, in technology terms, but that doesn't mean it's not exciting or innovative. In fact the future of x86 is looking brighter than it has in years. Geek.com has an article pointing out how at 30 years old x86 is still a moving force in technological advancement and, despite calls for change and numerous alternatives, it will still be the technology that gets us where we want to go. Quoting: 'As far as the world of the x86 goes, the future is very bright. There are so many new markets that 45nm products enable. Intel has really nailed the future with this goal. And in the future when they produce 32nm, and underclock their existing processors to allow the extremely low power requirements of cell phones and other items, then the x86 will be the power-house for our home computers, our notebooks, our cell phones, our MIDs and other unrealized devices today.'"
x86 processosr aren't x86 processors, and haven't been for many years. They all decode the x86 instruction set to microops which they execute internally. The x86 instruction decoder doesn't take up any significant space, and if there really was an advantage to direct microop code, producers would have offered a "native" microop mode long ago. SSE instructions has provided a lot of the explicit parallelism without touchnig the standard x86 set. The mathematical complexity doesn't get less than an ADD or MUL anyway, so it would have been all about arranging the queue inside the CPU. So yeah, ADD and MUL survives but like in mathematics it's just the symbols, in implementation it can be done with everything from microops to an abacus.
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It just goes to show what can be achieved in an open market with multiple competitors (intel, amd, cyrix, via, idt etc), as opposed to a stifled closed market with one party or a small number of collaborators (alpha, hppa, ia64)....
A few years ago, x86 was utter garbage compared to virtually every other architecture out there... But the size and competitiveness of the x86 compatible market has forced companies to invest lots of money in improving their products, to the point that x86 is now ahead of most if not all of it's proprietary counterparts.
The sooner microsoft's strangle hold on the industry is broken, the better, so that the software world can start providing the benefits we got from the x86 compatible hardware market.
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The article appears to be written from the perspective of someone who knows fuck all about the embedded market. The majority of embedded products that have something more sophisticated than an 8bit processor are using Motorola M68K, ARM or MIPS derivatives. That's likely to stay that way, as x86 processors tend to be large, comparatively power hungry and focused on high clock speeds - especially the ones from Intel and AMD. In fact, the only vaguely embedded device I've come across with an x86 chip was using a 486 clone (from Cyrix I think).
Because, like Robespierre, it, (and the "inevitability" of Itanic) has killed off all the possible rivals. Mips, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PPC, take your choice.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Innovation is bringing something on the market that wasn't there before. Most innovation isn't about inventions, but about tweaks to businessmodels, minor changes to productlines, or even just a revamp of the sales material.
This silly blog post looks back at x86 and only x86, fails to put it in perspective, and is otherwise not well researched. In short, a contribution in the best web 2.0 tradition.
As to x86, the major software vendor's complete failure to move platforms (something which that other, different, company managed twice), and its proposed johnny-come-lately successor is a major failure. x86-64 isn't from intel but it finds itself forced to run along with it.
Sometimes I wonder what'd happened if IBM would've done the right thing from a technical perspective and chose anything else, like the m68k or the zilog Z8000 for their PC. Much less braindamage to millions of programmers, for one.
The whole thing lives by inertia and collective mediocrity. IBM, microsoft, and intel; this is the best they could come up with?
I think that ARM will be rather more tenacious than this guy thinks. 32nm will not be a miracle thing that somehow magically drops x86 (even Atom) down into a mobile phone friendly CPU in terms of power consumption and size (never mind the supporting chipset). Companies with years of ARM code will not suddenly decide to port to x86 on the off-chance that x86 will get more than a tiny proportion of the mobile phone market.
ARM in a CPU costs under a dollar to license. Those ARM SoCs probably cost under $20 each, and they're tiny and have everything you need on them. Intel would have to provide a dozen Atom variants (in terms of features and size, not clock speeds and number of cores) to even gain the interest of this marketplace. That's why 3 billion ARM based cores are created every year. There's a huge variety of options available in a truly competitive market.
Although it's true that we have been forced to use x86 for quite a while, and as a result have gotten quite good at using it, that doesn't mean that it is an optimal instruction set. amd64 is an ugly hack, as is PAE, and although they do work, they don't change the fact that x86 was never intended to handle 64-bit spaces.
Consider the various POWER arches, and the ridiculously powerful ARM arch. ARM, for example, has an SIMD extension called Neon, which makes audio decoding possible at something like 15 MHz. These are very cool and potentially powerful architectures that have never been fully explored due to Microsoft's monopoly in the nineties.
(To be fair, Microsoft couldn't have forced adoption of another arch even if they wanted to; they homogenized the market way too far.)
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I know that several of the cores in the Cell resemble PPC's and I seem to recall an association of PPC's and one of the X-Boxes.
Is there any reason to use a PPC these days? At least, for desktop usage?
...normal desktops or laptops that use that ARM?
It only depends on the OS you install.
you mean x86 Intelligent Design is Still Driving the Revolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyonix_PC
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That's "revolution" as in "spinning in place"? :-)
Seriously, x86 these days is just a compression format for a kind of RISC processor. It's probably not a very good compression format, but that probably also doesn't make a big difference.
Article is quite too enthuastic about x86 pushing to other domains.
Lets make it clear.Modern x86 decoder is more complex than entire simple single issue risc processor and it consumes more power.
Yes, thats SINGLE unit in the front end of pipeline, that risc processors do not need.
About those "risc ops" which x86 instructions are translated as. First they are HUGE compared to risc instructions. ~4x as large since they need to map worst case size for each element for everyinstruction. Those are bits that need to be moved and processed in several pipeline stages before execution stage. And take there power.
Then extra local memory operations due to 2 operand instructions and register spills.
All the ugliness creates bad power efficiency in low power applications.
X86 has won in the desktop by sheer amount of engineering resources put in its development, and the engineering resources to get superior manufacturing process. Getting upwards to higher end is possible.
x86 is elephant, and you can make elephant to fly if you apply enough force, like Intel does. But there is serious doubt that no company can create enough force to push it through a key hole.
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