Intel & AMD Form An x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group

[coder]

They cannot be "viable alternatives" until they get TSO (total store ordering). Only Apple silicon has TSO as of now, so you have to get an Apple-branded computer to get a viable alternative to x86.

The only reason to care about that is if you need the best performance, when emulating x86-64 on ARM.

Otherwise, TSO is actually worse. ARM had good reasons to opt for a weaker memory model.

[Espionage724]

They cannot be "viable alternatives" until they get TSO (total store ordering). Only Apple silicon has TSO as of now, so you have to get an Apple-branded computer to get a viable alternative to x86.

Does that prevent me from running nginx, php-fpm, Wine, and general OS stuff (Firefox, LibreOffice), or I guess anything reasonable? I never heard of TSO.

I get around on a 8th-gen Coffeelake office laptop, and imagine mostly anything modern RISC-V or ARM performs just as-well if not better

[rlkrlk]

That's great only for those people who need to reboot more than once daily, and there is not so many of them.

It's extremely important for situations that must minimize downtime. 99.999% uptime means 5 minutes per year. Booting to multiuser in a few seconds would make a lot of difference.

[NateHubbard]

Can someone please translate this into English?

I see a ton of buzz words and marketing speak and I can't catch the essence.

They are probably going to remove the old 8/16/32 bit support from future x86 processors as a joint effort to make the architecture more competitive.

[Espionage724]

That might be quite a good guess. However, it is unlikely that they need such a huge group just to do it. They want more than just that.

To play the same vendor-locks that were done with GPUs (NV vs AMD with OEMs), only against ARM/RISC-V/etc

Was there anything like this in the past back with VIA and Cyrix that apparently also had X86 CPUs? Like I'm still not seeing how consumer-facing good can come from two hard-competitors joining together all of a sudden.

[curfew]

Can someone please translate this into English?

I see a ton of buzz words and marketing speak and I can't catch the essence.

X86 is irrelevant and dying. Panic ensues. It's the Xorg of CPU architectures.

[dibal]

ARM is only one Company, Intel and AMD are two Companys.
Monopolist like ARM leads to higher prices and lack of innovation.

Some technical Stuff about X64 vs. ARM: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-...-doesnt-matter
Money Quote: " x86 and ARM: Both Bloated By Legacy"

[coder]

Modern ARM performs better only if you can re-compile for ARM, AND the developers of the application which you want to run have taken into account the lack of TSO when they were programing it.

No, if code wasn't written correctly for the memory model, then it's just flat-out broken. The only case where you can "fix" it, at the expense of a performance penalty, is under emulation. When running natively, if some sub-genius is trying to do lock-free programming without the proper fences, the result is going to be buggy. Where you tend to see a lot of such yahoo code is in games, where developers like to think they're smarter than the OS and standard libraries.

Here are a couple docs that cover ARM memory ordering.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...83762124000390
• https://arangodb.com/2021/02/cpp-mem...om-x86-to-arm/

I'm not saying TSO must be always enabled. It can be optional, as it is on Apple CPUs. But, the CPU must have the TSO capabilities to be a viable desktop CPU.

This is BS. The ability to enable it, at a hardware level, wasn't even a "thing", until Apple did it. AFAIK, it's not a standard feature of ARMv9-A.

Yes, ARM had a good reasons, their CPUs were intended for mobile applications, not for desktops. TSO is complicated to implement, so they had absolutely no reason to add it. I would have done exactly the same.

Alpha and POWER didn't implement it, either. That's because it's not only burdensome, but it's slower. GPUs have the weakest memory model of all, and not unrelated to the fact that they have extremely high communication bandwidth (like tens of TB/s, on die) and are extremely power efficient, in terms of pico-Joules per bit.

[coder]

They are probably going to remove the old 8/16/32 bit support from future x86 processors as a joint effort to make the architecture more competitive.

X86S removes some support for legacy modes and features, but those only affect BIOS and legacy operating systems. You'll still be able to natively run 32-bit apps on it.

[coder]

ARM is only one Company, Intel and AMD are two Companys.
Monopolist like ARM leads to higher prices and lack of innovation.

Except anyone can buy an ARM Architecture license and design their own ARM CPU cores, which actually leads to more competition. So, Apple switched from x86, where it had to use CPUs from either Intel or AMD (they chose Intel) to ARM, where they could use CPUs they designed themselves. Qualcomm recently started doing this (again), too.

You can also license ARM's pre-made designs, like a lot of companies do (Nvidia, Amazon, Google, MediaTek, Samsung, ... to name a few).

Some technical Stuff about X64 vs. ARM: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-...-doesnt-matter
Money Quote: " x86 and ARM: Both Bloated By Legacy"

That clown didn't even know about APX, which basically torpedoes his whole argument. If ISA truly didn't matter, then Intel would have no reason for doing APX.