- The first game console with an ARM CPU was the 3D0 (1991 - not sure if it was an ARM1 or later version).

- The first game console with an Intel CPU was the Magnavox Odyssey 2 with an Intel 8048 (it also had an Intel graphics chip) (1978).

- The first game console with an x86 Intel CPU I believe was the FM Towns Marty (I think this is 1992 or 1993 - it had a 386).

- The first successful game console with an x86 Intel CPU was the original Xbox (2001 or 2002) - and actually it was an AMD CPU.

There were mobile phones with Intel CPUs in them for a short time - I think it was 2010-2011. I always wanted to see one (was like super curious how the boot firmware looked if it was user accessible). I wonder what happened.

I think it was actually a Pentium III with less cache, i.e. basically a Celeron. Only third-gen Microsoft consoles onward use AMD parts.

Correct according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_proc...

Astra at Sandia Labs was the first Arm peta-scale supercomputer, and the first on the Top500. It debuted in 2018.

Fugaku is the fastest Arm supercomputer, taking the #1 spot on the Top500 in 2020. It is currently #4.

All NVIDIA Grace-Hopper systems will be Arm. There is one in the top 10 already, Alps at the Swiss CSCS, at #6. There are four more in the top 100.

Sometimes useful to see how cpu architectures grow and then get crowded out by the next processor family -- at least among supercomputers.

Apparently I am super wrong here. ARM has made serious inroads here as well.

I think that ARM's willingness to allow their IP to be customized for their clients needs has really given them a lot of competitive advantages.

Right now RISC-V is ultra slow in all implementations I've seen. Like 30x slower than a top of the line Apple Mx series CPU. Maybe there is a high performing RISC-V chip out there but I haven't yet run into one.

RISC-V benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V. Compare to an Apple M4 benchmark: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953

That said, RISC-V is good for embedded applications where raw performance isn't a factor. I think no other markets are yet accessible to RISC-V chips until their performance massively improves.

It's not like ARM has taken over those markets yet. Snapdragon X is fine but nothing special compared AMD/Intel chips. I think we just might have a pretty distorted view of ARM vs x86 because of Apple. They are just much better at designing ARM chips than anyone else (including both Qualcomm and especially ARM itself). Servers is kind of a mixed story as well.

There is nothing wrong with other companies trying to disrupt AMD/Intel duopoly and hopefully we'll get lower prices and more innovation because of that but calling x86 dead is a bit premature at this point..

The issue is that ARM is now fine for Windows. Until Snapdragon, ARM was actually pretty crap outside of Apple. This is a huge step. Qualcomm acquired a lot of the original Apple team for the M1 via Nuvia and I expect them to be able to execute at least decently going forward.

Apparently they are selling because they have better battery life than Intel/AMD laptops according to this: https://www.techpowerup.com/324301/battery-life-is-driving-s...

> Servers is kind of a mixed story as well.

Graviton is 30% cheap for the performance (e.g. performance adjusted price.) It is a no brainer for a lot of workflows, especially given so many developers are actually building on ARM machines in the first place. I want my servers to be 30% cheaper.

> There is nothing wrong with other companies trying to disrupt AMD/Intel duopoly and hopefully we'll get lower prices and more innovation because of that but calling x86 dead is a bit premature at this point..

Qualcomm is exploring acquiring Intel. A company who got its value from ARM is looking to take over the historic leader in x86 - doesn't that tell you something? https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/qualcomm-approached-in...

The writing is on the wall. x86 isn't dead and it won't be dead anytime soon, but it definitely in its twilight period.

Sure, I mean I agree that ARM can outcompete x86 there but mainly Amazon can just cut out Intel/AMD and make their chips themselves which can significantly reduce costs. Not because Neoverse is somehow inherently better or faster than its x86 equivalents. Of course from the perspective of most users that's effectively the same thing, why overpay for 1 fast core when you can just get 2 slightly slower ones.

> Qualcomm is exploring acquiring Intel.

That's far fetched and hard to believe. IIRC there were talks about Qualcomm maybe buying some secondary subsidiaries/departments form Intel and somehow it got extrapolated to Qualcomm acquiring Intel (unless there is any credible information to back that up?)

Also reported in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/qualcomm-approached-intel...

That is Reuters and WSJ reporting it, not an X post by a anonymous rando. It mentions at least two sources.

This is not a rumour, it was at least somewhat real. Doesn't mean it will happen, it seems to be very preliminary and exploratory.

How can you tell? I'm not denying that and obviously can't claim to know but I just don't see any public information that would allow us to make this conclusion.

WSJ, Reuters and everyone else regularly report rumours that sound credible.

Although if we're only talking about "exploring" rather than anything more that's probably true, there is no reason for Qualcomm to at least try and do the math of at what price point it might start making sense and they should be obviously be doing that.

I just don't really see how is that particularly newsworthy since it's just extremely improbably (due to factors both Intel and Qualcomm can't directly control).

Huh? You live in a different reality than I do. These are reputable sources and I need to move onto something more productive.

Yes? And? Did I imply that there is something wrong with that or that they shouldn't be reporting it? I assume our definitions of what is a "credible rumour" differ...

> You live in a different reality than I do.

If you can seriously believe that Qualcomm could actually acquire Intel (unless Intel's management is engaging in some extreme amount of fraud to hide the fact that the company is on the brink of imminent bankruptcy) then yes, that must be the case...

Nvidia wasn't even allowed to buy ARM even though they weren't competitors and had almost no real overlap. This would be considerably harder to pull off.

Also you have that whole AMD64/x86 patent thing. Not sure about the details (and maybe the original agreement has expired and that part wasn't renewed) but according the original deal the cross licensing agreement would automatically expire if either party was acquired.

I think the first reason is more than enough but if it's not and they still have something similar about newer x86 related features developed after 2009 Qualcomm would only be buying Intel for the fabs and other assets or would have to pay off AMD if they want x86.

Some other deal, where Qualcomm buys some pieces of Intel, might be possible.

Why would they, though?

Neither Apple nor Qualcomm have any incentives to share their designs with ARM anymore than they do with Intel, AMD or each other. I wonder how AmpereOne will look assuming it actually ever comes out...

Techniques leak out as people move around, etc.

For example, AMD had a lead on chiplet designs but now Intel has them in the latest generation. I would expect that ARM will have chiplets designs by the end of the decade as well.

Look at Anthropic that seems to have an LLM that is on par with OpenAI GPT 4.

The Nuvia designs Qualcomm bought were made under an ARM architectural license that specifically restricts all designs sold to only go in servers - not phones, laptops, or anything else. They also weren't allowed to sell the company without destroying the designs first, because Nuvia got a really sweet deal on the architectural license. Qualcomm thinks that doesn't matter, because they have a (much broader) ARM architectural license already - you can't force someone to buy the same license twice, under the principle of rights exhaustion.

ARM furthermore has an incentive to keep architectural licensees from competing with ARM's in-house design licensing business. Apple Silicon isn't a threat to that business because Apple will never sell their own components to third-parties. In fact, that's why they hate right-to-repair so much[0]. They're better off licensing ARM patents and having Apple continue to work on LLVM than trying to squeeze them for more money. Qualcomm on the other hand sells phone chips to other companies, and currently spends a lot of money to package ARM's licensed designs into their own SoCs. Nuvia designs going into those phones would be a significant movement of money from ARM's pocket to Qualcomm's.

[0] To be specific, in a right-to-repair world where individual components have to be sold at the same pricing arrangements available to the OEM, Apple would not be able to have exclusive parts in their phones that other vendors can't have. Apple can't say this, because it's hilariously self-serving and the general public correctly doesn't give a flying fuck about IP law, but you can infer it from conduct.

Apple is perfectly willing to sell you assemblies, of course. Because no vendor is going to buy 100 unrelated parts to get the 1 they care about.

Huh, I didn't even realize they are sufficiently big for this to be potentially possible.

and those chips become relatively unimpressive once everyone gets access to the same TSMC nodes a year and some down the road with AMD's x86 beating Apple's wonder ARM once again…

This was in a different era where most PCs weren't networked.

x86_64 has moved to UEFI and SecureBoot since, but is still mostly expected to boot any live distro you'd like. Replacing x86 could drastically reduce the chances of replacing non-free vendor software with free software.

The presence or lack thereof of standardized interfaces for firmware, device configuration, or the underlying platform are orthogonal to issues regarding Secure Boot and trust management. Apple Silicon Macs use nonstandard boot firmware (iBoot) but booting a "fully untrusted OS" (or fuOS) is an explicitly supported[2] use case on them, gated only by the user needing to boot recoveryOS (OTR specifically) once and enter their password to sign the alternative kernel. They even support per-volume boot policies, so you can keep your macOS install fully locked down while your Asahi Linux does whatever you want.

And likewise Intel isn't stopping you from building in whatever user-hostile nonsense you want into x86 firmware. There's actually a whole range of laptops that have BIOS rootkits preinstalled, specifically to force-install Computrace onto whatever Windows install gets booted for corporate IT management purposes. The thing is, corporate IT has a terrible habit of leaving this shit on laptops they've sold", either because the laptop was stolen internally or because IT couldn't give a shit to do the computer equivalent of signing the title, so people wind up buying laptops that will lock up and wipe themselves if you ever install Windows on them.

[0] The most successful of these being the PC-98, which lasted all the way up until the Windows 9x era

[1] ARM SoC vendors additionally commit the crime of not being compatible with themselves. It is common for new SoCs to have completely different memory and device layouts. Apple is the only exception, ironically because they make both the OS and the SoC, which is the one time where such crimes would be excusable.

[2] I'm told Apple's original intent was Boot Camp with Windows on ARM, but Microsoft wouldn't license Windows on ARM on Macs because they have an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm.

This is a feature rather than a bug ;-)

They could just refuse to install Windows. It'd be more polite.

ARM devices are embedded in the SoC. That's basically the definition of a SoC. Intel & co. at that time didn't produce SoCs. A CPU was just a CPU. It didn't have UARTs, GPU, SDHCI, I2c, SPI and other stuff in it.

The only thing x86 (basically Intel, not Microsoft) did good was to standardize I/O addresses like framebuffer, IDE ports, serial I/O and later to make the rest discoverable via ACPI standard (which is a bad standard, btw, and UEFI is far worse).

You may view ACPI as the x86 devicetree. The only difference is that x86 comes with ACPI written in a chip, while ARM firmware is a separate file you add into your bootable image next to the kernel, without the need for a separate EEPROM chip.

You shouldn't be complaining about the ARM device descovery (devicetree), but about the absolute jungle of devices that ARM includes. Just think how many different USB controllers are out there. Each manufacturer designed it's own controller and every ARM chip needs a different driver. On x86 there are/were only 2: Intel (UHCI) and AMD (OHCI), and then they cooperated and made universal EHCI and xHCI.

Fugaku?

https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/fujitsu-a64fx-arm

I guess a secondary factor is that it was made of custom/low volume CPUs, which would increase the unit price as compared to the higher volume providers.

I've thought about this quite a bit since I responded to a commenter who was somewhat was amazed at an ARM supercomputer quite a while ago about this subject. I decided to comment about this a lot more since it is my option to do so. cheers They had posited that ARM would take over, mostly recognizing the very low-power and fairly inexpensive ARM SoC in phone handsets and routers.

This thought didn't sit quite right with me. I considered the power requirements and architectural needs of a larger computer system. With many, many PCIe lanes or some other interconnect, rapid storage commitments and the very responsive performance required by a "serious" architecture will cause all of these subsystems to continually draw current and dissipate heat. This is in stark contrast to power efficient computing devices like iPhone or ARM macbooks, and in my mind seems likely to eat the "gains" that people generally associate with these devices.

The piece missing in my understanding is about the semiconductor industry and the electronics field in general, and is particularly interesting to me, because many of the highest-tier operators outsource %100~ of their production to TSMC or the other. There isn't anything magic or even very good about x86 architecture. I'm fairly certain the instruction set no longer maps to hardware in most cases, rather more analogous to function calls in typical software applications.

Every now and then I like to reflect that iPhone came out in 2007. My car is older than that, and we were well on our way during the election of Barack Obama. And while legends hold that Power still exists, I had long forgotten about ALPHA or SPARC by then.

Imagine for yourself this earth-shattering shift: What happens when the basic lithography processes, assembly practices, and validation procedures become such that for similar trade offs, any advanced hobbyist could order a wafer from future fab houses similar to JLPCB, Scaleway, OSH Park, TSMCWAY, or whatever on-demand? Like, what if you could just pay $$$$ to buy a wafer that you designed and then sell 14nm UltraSPARC on tindie?

Yes, I believe this is called micro operations and have been around for a while now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_microcode#P6_and_later_m...

[0] https://top500.org/system/179807/