Question Why not for desktops too?

[edward78]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns_JzrJA7Vs


Just seems it would all be easier, AMD can just use the socket they have, Nvidea has the resources to do 1 & Intel when ever they join the party, same as AMD.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I'm not sure what question you're really asking here, other than why ARM hasn't replaced x86. So here's two main points:

• The ISA (ARM vs x86) doesn't really determine how fast a CPU will actually perform. While it certainly does help in some situations, what matters more in terms of performance is how the CPU is implemented.
• Nobody wants to make the transition to a new ISA unless it's as painless as possible. The only reason why Apple can get away with this is mostly because they make an excellent emulator of the outgoing ISA beforehand, in addition to having fewer configurations to worry about so they can fine tune things much better.

 

[Eximo]

Apple is being a little non-competitive as well and using their extreme capital to buy up all the fab time TSMC has on their latest nodes, so no one else can have it until they are done. We could have some pretty cool CPUs and GPUs right now if that wasn't the case.

Apple has done several transitions (PowerPC to Intel to ARM) so they knew what they were getting into as well. And yes, the small ecosystem really helped, though they did kind of alienate a lot of their higher end workstation customers by basically removing all the capabilities the Intel based systems had.

Nvidia has developed their own SoCs before and still do. The Nintendo is powered by an Nvidia Tegra. (A long time ago they had smartphones and tablets in the market as well, they were not a success)

x86 just has so much momentum behind it, going to take a while. What I suspect will happen is that this growing trend of having multiple tiles in a CPU will lead to chips with x86-64 and ARM or RISCV cores on the same substrate. Why run emulation when you can just run native.

 

[gamerk316]

The long and short answer: Software support. The software isn't there for native non-x86-64 systems, and running an emulator costs performance which makes the CPUs less attractive (See: Itanium).

Besides, there really isn't a *need* to shift ISAs now that we're already at 64-bit. We had our chance to move away from the legacy of x86, that chance is now gone.

 

[hotaru.hino]

We had our chance to move away from the legacy of x86, that chance is now gone.

What's funny is we say this, but ARM is now pretty much in the same vintage as x86.

 

[gamerk316]

What's funny is we say this, but ARM is now pretty much in the same vintage as x86.

Eh, Arm was really just a replacement for PowerPC. Thing is, as it scales up it's looking more and more like x86-64 CPUs.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Eh, Arm was really just a replacement for PowerPC. Thing is, as it scales up it's looking more and more like x86-64 CPUs.

?

The first ARM chip was made in 1985.

 

[Eximo]

ARM predates PowerPC weirdly. Didn't know that myself.

Alternative would be a better way to say it. Those architectures only died off for the consumer desktop market.