this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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AMD dominates chip sales on Amazon — top ten best selling CPUs all come from Team Red, Intel’s highest entry sits at 11th place (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/hardware
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Dominating!

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[–] FizzyOrange 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FizzyOrange 1 points 2 days ago

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.