Intel wants to be a foundry\u2014again. Will this time be different?

Intel got big with terrible CPU architectures and super fab. They are now playing catchup on both.

I wonder how much longer x86 will dominate. It's ancient.

On a sunny day (Wed, 20 Oct 2021 10:57:08 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I have 4 Raspberry Pies runnig, 3 24/7, so ARM, chromium webbrowser on one, and lots of stuff I wrote. Even my newsreader works on it, but now using laptop with X86 to post.. Phone is also ARM I think. So it indeed looks like no longer a need for X86 in daily life, for projects, that Pi4 is very powerful really.

I was reading that due to supply chain problems the price of a Raspberry Pi4 is also up from 35 $ to 45 $ Inflation :-) Buy some gold.

Apple gave up on Intel...

Not the biggest computer manufacturer, but I'm sure it has an impact.

John :-#)#

x86 isn't anything like 1980s x86 under the hood, though, it became more RISC-like to exploit the pipelining and OOO advantages of RISC a long time ago.

The CISC frontend is highly optimized but still a kludge, I think the main place this showed up historically was with low power processors like Atom which couldn't really compete with ARM.

ARM's performance-per-watt is socking them at the low end, and AMD's price-per-performance is socking them at the high end. Tough spot.

One MIPS used to cost one megabuck. Computing has basically no intrinsic cost. Well, maybe some exotic quantum theory limit.

Hmmm... you are older than Intel. I wonder how much longer you will be producing electronics?

Yes, in the world of toy CPUs, the Pi 4 processor is powerful. I bought a laptop the other day with an Intel processor and a 17 inch display. This device is amazingly light, produces almost no heat and I can pick it up with three fingers. It's almost in the class of tablets. I'd say it is pretty damn competitive. Proper PC processing is pretty much the exclusive domain of Intel with AMD x86 clones being a small share, around 20% I believe. ARM doesn't hold a candle yet. It has only been recently that they used 64 bit ARMs in cell phones, no? The ARM processors still have a ways to go yet.

That was when Intel first tried to produce a low power processor. They seem to be doing a much better job now. If I hold my ear to the laptop it is making some noise, but I can't find where it has a fan. There are a few holes in the bottom and a few holes in the top above the keyboard, but nothing that is clearly intended to be fan exhaust ports. You can barely feel warmth in the case. Very minimal cooling. With only 12 GB of RAM it can get slow when the memory runs out. But otherwise it is very nice, I might just keep it for every day use.

That's not correct. Computing has a cost since it requires manipulation of physical object even if they are electrons. There was an article in Scientific American (before it turned into a true glossy) on the theoretical limits of low power computing that has nothing to do with the technology being used. You might try looking that up and reading it.

On a sunny day (Wed, 20 Oct 2021 21:21:45 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

I dunno, my Samsung laptop is a Core-I5 and now 9 years or so old and used daily. Special low reflection display. Laptop prices are going up now too, shortages, inflation... Much of the stuff I wrote for x86 I recompiled on Raspberry ARM without major problems. For some code where libraries were changed I had to recompile old library versions, as debian stuff was screwed up, so that now also works. Sure there is a lot of x86 not open source that will not run, but I stay clear of that.

It is interesting, in the early eighties I think it was I bought a book on ARM, interesting architecture.. Never expected it to rule the world :-) An other thing with raspis is the GPIO I/O.. interfacing, and THAT is an important one. There even exists an FPGA 'hat', although I have never tried it. It is not processor power, on the contrary, that early Pi4 4GB here runs and records / encodes

5 security cameras, runs Chromium browser, 2 audio recording channels, airtraffic and ship traffic logging weather station and GPS and radiation monitor etc etc from other raspis via the LAN, my mediaplayer and background music, some other stuff... Note the 2 small antennas on the right.. the HDMI switch to select the output of things.

The big black PC is permanently off (no that is not racist).

top - 08:46:13 up 2 days, 20:05, 15 users, load average: 0.52, 0.67, 0.65 LOL not even busy.

35 $ and a few $ for a metal housing and fan from ebay, the 8GB Pi4 is in original plastic housing and nice and warm raspi99: ~ # temperature temp=65.7'C no fan

raspi95: # temperature temp=40.0'C

Will run days an a decent battery... Each Pi4 has a 3 TB USB harddisk connected via USB hub Backups... SDcards...

...

You are considering only one aspect of performance.

The High Performance Computing mob have always pushed the boundary of computing. They know a key metric is performance per watt, and ARM shines there.

Hence, in 2020 at least, the fastest supercomputer was powered by ARM.

Another key point in favour of ARM is that customers can embed them in custom hardware and add proprietary extensions. That will continue to become more important. Intel is attempting to counter that by integrating FPGAs with x86 processors; the success is as yet unknown.

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Do you even have any clue as to just how long the 80186 was used in industrial control applications? Long before ARM came into being. Or you gonna say now that there was no 80186?

None of it is "x86" at the micro-architecture level any more anyway. The hardware code there is very specific and even smaller than RISC. The memory access and arrays are fast too so we do not need to change that either.

Is everyone bitching because AMD beat Intel by using more cores in their configuration and tied to their graphics subsystem in the gaming realm?

I think Intel is still quite a winner on several fronts. And they will be back on top again soon. You do not(obviously)have the whole picture.

You are a terrible science person architecture.

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Maybe you could offer up a statement to go along with your facts?

Not sure why you say that. I had no trouble buying a laptop, the store had hundreds if not thousands, Micro Center. Probably near 100 on display. The prices were very good. The low end machine I bought at Costco Friday was only $600 with a 17 inch display. I is a corner cutter in every other way, 12 GB of RAM instead of 16, only 3 USB ports, i5 processor. But in many ways this is a nice machine, *very* light and no real heat generation. It does drag a bit from time to time and I'd hate to run a spice sim on it.

I also bought a machine at Micro Center with an i7, 17 inch display, better keyboard, 32 GB RAM, etc. It weighs a bit more but still less than my Dell boat anchor. Only $1,200. I took the bottom cover off of my old machine to remove the SSD and that thing is built like a brick shit house! I may still resurrect it if I get the time, but it is hot and heavy, literally a desktop in a laptop. But the hard part is the now fully broken hinge. It's a compound fracture with the bottom half sticking out of the back of the unit. I'm not sure where to find a replacement hinge, but maybe buying a "parts" machine is the way to go.

Again, not sure what your point is. I guess you are saying you can port programs between the platforms, but that's not interesting to me. I don't work on my own cars anymore either. Too much like work and a real time sink.

I saw that coming around 2000 I think. I tried to get a vendor of a Forth compiler to support the new ARM MCUs explaining how they had the momentum to take the lead, but the bottom line was he wanted someone to pay him for the port and after a couple/three more years that happened. It wasn't hard to see how the market would winnow down to a single architecture... with many flavors... lol Some pointed out that compilers make your code CPU agnostic, but that's not exactly the issue. People are going to focus on a single processor line since there will be many common elements. If they change vendors they will need to support new I/O functions, but not so much anything relating to the CPU itself. Even if the peripherals are much more code, if nothing else a common CPU provides a "comfort" factor. Many engineers don't do the same things all time time, so they want to focus on the application, not the tools or the devices. Learning new devices is the "work" part of engineering while the application is often the fun or interesting part.

Yeah, that's where embedded processors do well, embedded apps. Desktop processors do well in desktops.

Perhaps in a highly specialized application. x86 is still dominating the server market. While ARM devices may be starting to show up in servers, this is still a heavily dominated market by the x86 world. I'm sure you are aware power is a huge factor in the server market.

Just the sort of highly specialized market that is not significant enough to get attention other than as an attention getting device. I believe China is going all in on super computers with their own CPU designs. So neither ARM nor x86 may end up owning this market.

Huh? Countering something they don't care about at all? That's not what FPGAs are about to Intel. Intel attaches them to the CPUs so they can instantiate custom accelerators in servers totally smashing anything from the conventional CPU world. The customization you are talking about for ARMs is only practical in huge quantity apps since they are full custom chips like for cell phones, a totally different application. Remember, all those chrome books and cell phones get a lot of support from the servers.

The configuration of computer power has swung a few times from a single processor be shared by "dumb" terminals to smart terminals providing front end processing power to dominating the running of apps with a central comms and data storage and is now swinging back with the "terminal" end (e.g. phones) being more dumb and the real power being in the servers. This will help power consumption and battery life in mobile devices which is the real limiting factor in phone CPUs.

I won't say phone processors won't ever take over the current PC end of things, but there will always be a distinct difference between mobile devices having limited power budgets and stationary computing with large power budgets. A friend told me of a golf simulator his friend bought, $2,000. It sounded like it has an Intel processor with a graphics accelerator in it. Maybe in five more years it will be based on an ARM, but I'm not betting on that.

I've tracked AMD pretty closely for a number of years. I identified three times when AMD was a good investment and friends got in on it a couple of times. AMD was pretty much always six months or so behind in process tech, but would periodically come out with a new architecture that would trump the Intel advantage of lower cost dies. Then AMD would be profitable for six months to a year. Two or more years later this would repeat. Then some years back AMD just could not keep up and fell a full generation behind Intel. Their advantages in architecture could not make up for fabrication expenses and they were not profitable for some years other than when they won an anti-competitive suit in the EU with a multi-billion dollar award. That was about the time they announced they were selling off the fabs. Once they did that I expected AMD to be the big loser, but they partnered with the big Taiwanese fabs who have now leaped ahead of Intel in processing tech.

Now Intel is the biggest loser, behind in both process and architecture. Until they sort out their process problems they aren't catching up with anyone, even if then. Now they can't get ahead by outspending AMD, they need to outspend AMD's foundry partner and everyone associated with them.

I used the 80188 (8-bit 80186) in industrial control devices for about 15 years.

There are two reasons to drop it:

1. The software tools for the 80x86's started to aim for PC's only, making it difficult to create Flash-based code
2. The ARM's came. Our first was ARM7TDMI (AT91R4008).

Even before the ARM's we made some attempts at MC68k's, with a MC68332, but the ARM was better, despite the raw software toolkits. Maybe we should have tried the GNU tools for the 68k instead of the commercial offerings.

On a sunny day (Thu, 21 Oct 2021 01:21:18 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

The P4 4Gb or Pi4 8 Gb or DVB-T TV or security cams can be selected on my Samsung Syncmaster S22B350 desktop monitor. so the Pi4 4 GB is now my default desktop.

Of course you can run its Chromium browser via ssh too on the laptop but that is slower.

So ARM as desktop is already here, and for web browsing now faster than my core I5. Why should I pay for a many hundred $ big PC if can do things for < 100 $ with a Raspi? Raspi4 is quad core ARM.

The 68332 is still available from Digikey, status = ACTIVE.