Intel might not even be around in 10 years unless they can suddenly release revolutionarily reliable and efficient yet capable chips to compete with ARM. If I were in charge over there, I’d switch course to RISC-V and skate to where the puck is headed. Perhaps I’m a fool for that idea but the future certainly ain’t x86 …that’s for SURE.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
38 points (100.0% liked)
Opensource
1297 readers
206 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I do think they're on a decline, but enterprise moves SLOW and that's big money. ARM is going places, but the x86 market could almost just freeze entirely and still be worthwhile for legacy applications for a very long time.
And from what I've read, ARM has a way to go to best x86 for all-out performance, which is primary to servers. Reduced power consumption is nice, but we're already maximizing clock cycle usage (power utilization) with virtualization. If you have to install even 5% more servers to meet demand, there's no value in it.
It's not that black and white. In cloud computing ARM already beats Intel and AMD at single-core workflows and are more price competitive even with higher RAM requirements. They also beat Intel in multi-core workflows, but AMD is far ahead yet.
I’d switch course to RISC-V
And give up their only advantage? That would be insane. RISC-V isn't quite mature enough to replace x86 anyway.
They could, perhaps start investing in the maturity of RISC-V was my point (a pipe dream). I know it’s not there yet but that’s simply because there’s so much money to be made by licensing closed architectures like x86 and ARM. If RISC-V had parity with x86 or ARM, it would be able to best them someday, IMO.
I couldn't disagree more.
That’s fair. Please elaborate. I think others have made valid points refuting my hypothesis so please, if you will, pile on. I really don’t mind being wrong.
The points someone else made about servers was an excellent one. That was a blind spot in my hypothesis.
If I'm not mistaken, isn't the N100 chip actually pretty good? It uses like 5 more watts than similar ARM equivalents while still having plenty of power.
At least when it comes to mind pcs