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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).
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.)
~ C.