> What alternative do we have today that is as open to tinker and invent on as x86 hardware that is also widespread enough that it actually makes any difference at all?
> Thanks to emulation, x86 software lock in is no more, and the moat loses its significance.
Tell me you've never attempted to performantly emulate x86 without saying those words. Look into the difference between x86 memory model and the one used by RISCV, when it comes to ordering of accesses as seen by other cores.
> x86 is on the way out and can't compete on power or performance. In the end RISC won, it just took a while to get there.
What exactly do you think is the fundamental limitation of x86? Most chips do lot and lots of crazy logic to go from instruction set to microcode, it's hard to imagine that the variable nature of x86 instructions are the limiting factor.
> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.
Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.
For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.
> So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising.
Is it? I was under the impression modern CPUs translate x86 instructions do on the fly translation to something else anyway. I’d be very surprised if that hardware translation process was making their chips 4x less power efficient (or whatever the number is).
Also as a consumer, the reasons why x86 stayed around as long as it did sound like a bunch of excuses. If x86 is really as inefficient as you say, then it’s about time the industry started sidelining Intel and moving to a better architecture with or without them. I’m hoping AMD follows suit before long and starts selling competitive arm or risc-v chips.
> Well, the fact that we were able to abstract it out into an ISA, and still make progress would indicate that it isn't holding us back!
Just because something works doesn't mean it works well. Imagine if x86-64 ditched the variety of non-32/64-bit modes. Would x86 be able to better compete with ARM in power consumption?
> It’s long been possible to clone the x86 architecture with no outside help from Intel. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. AMD has built an entire business around this,
Didn't it go the other way round for the 64 bit architecture? I thought it was designed by AMD and adopted by Intel. Only the 32 bit foundation is originally from Intel.
(Software developer preferring ARM if any, not an expert in the field.)
> This change is a hardware change that's been forecast for literally years.
Huh? What x86 processor doesn’t support 32bit code?
If they move to ARM, everything will get broken, regardless if whether it’s 32bit or 64bit. Is breaking things twice really better than breaking them once?
>but what major advances in monolithic kernels have there been to invalidate them now?
What are the significant advances in micro kernels that does not apply to monolithic kernels ?
Also they are not only VERY old, they seem intentionally vague when it comes to actual data about the systems they are comparing against. In short, I welcome the new micro kernels so that we can see a comparison between modern monolithic and modern micro kernels and actually get a good representation of what the performance difference is.
Because if not for performance, there is no reason not to use a micro kernel.
> Why are we shackled with slow IO port operations that replicate hardware from the era when leaded gasoline was widely available? Some may say this is legacy, yet we still rely on it today!!
Does any modern x86 wake up knowing it's a modern x86 or do they all still wake up thinking they are 8086's and progressively wake up from a series of nested nightmares until it realizes the truth that it has more registers, 64-bits and SIMD instructions?
Yesterday I was looking at a server board and it had the two-digit POST display. I assume it is updated with those ancient OUT instructions and attached to the last vestiges of an 8-bit ISA PC bus running at 5v TTL levels.
> But in the long term I actually think it’s going to be a really good thing for the industry if we can get more developers using non-x86 devices and deploying code to non-x86 servers.
Why?
If it's about the dominance of x86, I think in about 15-20 years there will be no other architectures in widespread use except for ARM and maybe RISC-V.
x86 hardware.
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