Dominating!
Hopefully AMD doesn’t get complacent and stick with x86 forever. I don’t think anyone would have guessed it even 5 years ago but it’s pretty clearly on the way out. I’m sure it will stick around for another 5 or 10 years, but in 15 years people will look at you funny if you buy an x86 chip.
Why?
Why is x86 on the way out? There’s a few things that are converging:
- Moore’s law is dead enough that the difference between the ARM and x86 ISAs is relatively significant. Nobody cared about a 20% difference when computers were doubling in speed every 2 years but they no longer are. You can see that in other areas like Google adding support for 16kB pages, which gives a relatively small 5% performance boost which never would have been worth the effort in the past.
- Intel is being absolutely trounced by TSMC on manufacturing.
- ARM has matured enough to enter the laptop/desktop space.
- Apple switched to ARM, proving it can be done, and proving that it’s a huge improvement.
- Emulation of x86 on ARM has matured to the point where it works with little fuss or overhead. I believe ARM has added instructions to help with this (but don’t quote me on that).
ARM has much better efficiency and price than x86, and software compatibility is basically solved. There aren’t really any fundamental reasons left to stick with x86, so when more systems become available (it’s pretty limited right now) people will switch.
ARM has much better efficiency and price than x86
AMD would need to license it though, Apple pays the lowest licensing fees, about half of the other licensees. Meanwhile, they have a full x86 license in a practical duopoly.
ARM has become less attractive ever since SoftBank bought them in my opinion, if I was AMD or Intel, I’d rather invest into RISC-V than put money into a company that has gotten more restrictive with licensing over the years.
Yeah good point about the license. I guess it depends on the terms they have.
Still, 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing…
RISC-V isn’t quite mature enough to replace AMD’s chips yet but it would make sense as a long term goal.
