I wonder if in 2025 a company would even allowed to start before being curb stomped by Intel's IP lawyers. After all, they started making clones, something that China gets accused of a lot.
If Intel decide to focus on Foundry, I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA open source or at least available for licensing. I dont want it to end up like MIPS or POWER ISA where everything is too little too late.
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.
And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
90s x86 from ISA pov is already free to use, no? The original patents must have expired and there's no copyright protection of ISAs. The thing keeping the symbiotic cross-licensed duopoly going is mutating the ISA all the time so they can mix in more recently patented stuff.
AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a more open platform are probably more likely to be centered around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors. Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
Remembering the Mac ARM transition pain wrt Docker and Node/Python/Lambda cross builds targeting servers, there's a lot to be said for binary compatibility.
Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base.
Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.
Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.
20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it.
So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.
I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered essential infrastructure or communications technology and medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure competition and domestic availability/production as much as possible.
While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.
Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.
I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and display technology over the same period.
Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer) have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death.
China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint.
Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology. The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a LOT if you had 4-8x what most people were buying in RAM.
Seems like an interesting story, Ashawna - she was about 25 at the time, and as per Wikipedia, already worked on the military projects - the Sprint Missile System, and was at Xerox.
> The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.
I wonder if in 2025 a company would even allowed to start before being curb stomped by Intel's IP lawyers. After all, they started making clones, something that China gets accused of a lot.
If the company was based in the EU, local regulation might encourage reverse-engineering.
See tangentially related topic from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927
If Intel decide to focus on Foundry, I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA open source or at least available for licensing. I dont want it to end up like MIPS or POWER ISA where everything is too little too late.
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.
And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
Software or microcode emulation works pretty well.
So it would be faster and more efficient when sticking to the new subset and Nx slower then using the emulation path.
You could argue that microcode emulation is what they do now.
90s x86 from ISA pov is already free to use, no? The original patents must have expired and there's no copyright protection of ISAs. The thing keeping the symbiotic cross-licensed duopoly going is mutating the ISA all the time so they can mix in more recently patented stuff.
AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a more open platform are probably more likely to be centered around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors. Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
Remembering the Mac ARM transition pain wrt Docker and Node/Python/Lambda cross builds targeting servers, there's a lot to be said for binary compatibility.
They recently killed off their recent attempt; x86s.
Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?
Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base.
Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.
Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.
20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it.
So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.
I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered essential infrastructure or communications technology and medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure competition and domestic availability/production as much as possible.
While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.
Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.
One superpower being in 2005 for CPUs and another being in 2030, and at cold/hot war, would be decisive.
If society as a whole reverted to 2005, we would be fine.
I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and display technology over the same period.
Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer) have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death.
China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint.
Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology. The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a LOT if you had 4-8x what most people were buying in RAM.
China can make CPUs around as good as 2016-18 intel now.
Seems like an interesting story, Ashawna - she was about 25 at the time, and as per Wikipedia, already worked on the military projects - the Sprint Missile System, and was at Xerox.
> The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.