Good diagnosis, wrong conclusion [LWN.net]

Wipe the gunk out of your eyes

Posted Oct 3, 2007 23:02 UTC (Wed) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link]

We're hearing this tune for quarter-century: in the next few years x86 will be hopelessly outmatched and replace by fade-of-the-day (RISC, VLIW, EPIC, etc). This predictions stubbornly fail to materialize. The fact is: unless you can show drastic increase in speed (not percents, times) - no one will bother. Even if will show drastic increase in speed - you'll only manage to grab tiny niche if you can not run existing tasks as well as x86-solution (see Itanic vs Opteron). So any solution which have any hope of winning must include x86. It can include specialized instructions and cores (for multi-core CPUs) which can only be used by specialized software, but if it's not x86-compatible at all - it's no starter.

It already happened. Years ago. The Alpha RISC processor could run (at a given clock speed and generation of fabrication) anything else on most typical loads. The x86 architecture is, indeed, going to be around for a long time; this has been perpetuated in no small part by Microsoft and their line of operating systems that have depended so much on backward compatibility. Yes, NT was available for the Alpha, but I know of very few apps that were made available for it. DEC fumbled the marketing of the Alpha, Compaq sold it off to Intel, and Intel, having the choice of continuing its development at the expense of the (inferior in my opinion) Itanium decided to do no further development and End-of-Life it as quickly as contractually possible.

Yes, we're stuck with the i86 lineage, and we will suffer performance ceilings because of it. Ultra-high performance systems will use something else, but the average application end user won't move so long as the dominant OS is bound to intel and insufficient commercial apps aren't available on the other platforms. The Mac could as easily move from the Intel chips to some other CPU in the future -- Apple has enough foresight to provide for fat apps (OS/2 did this, too). Linux is available on just about everything with a register, a stack, and more than 1MB of RAM. For the most part, Open Software can run on anything.

But for most of you, yes, the already hopelessly outmatched x86 line is the chain around your ankle for the next decade.

Wipe the gunk out of your eyes

Posted Oct 4, 2007 6:43 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

Yes, we're stuck with the i86 lineage, and we will suffer performance ceilings because of it.

Yes - but this statement ignores the complete economic picture: it's not just the hardware that matters, but the total stack that is in a computing solution. Nobody buys just the raw hardware - the software is an inextractable part of the equation.

So once you take the cost of writing and supporting software into account too, applied to general computing problems that computers are used for, you will realize that today the hardware is not the main limiting factor but humans are. Most software is running a few orders of magnitude slower than it could run on the hardware.

The platform that is slightly slower but offers superior programmability - especially for something as hard to grok for humans as parallelism and/or cache coherency - will continue to be the most economic choice in all mainstream uses of computers. (and will continue to use the resources it earns from the mainstream to chip away on most of the remaining niches)

The trick is to maintain the right balance between programmability of a platform and raw physical performance - and the x86 space has done that pretty well over the years. (combined with the fact that the x86 instruction set has become a de-facto bytecode - so RISC never had a chance even technologically.)

(If only performance mattered then customers would buy hardware by sending complete chip designs and hard disk images to manufacturers, optimized to their business problem, which would then be assembled from scratch. There would be no uniform 'instruction set' per se. We are still decades (or more) away from being able to transform arbitrary, abstract business problems into actual hardware in such a pervasive way, without having any common platform layered between them. The moment you have even just a single persistent layer between the business problem and the hardware (be that layer controlled by the customer or by a manufacturer or by the market), platform thinking takes over and raw performance takes a backseat.)

Wipe the Windows out of your eyes

Posted Oct 5, 2007 17:27 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

...this statement ignores the complete economic picture: it's not just the hardware that matters, but the total stack that is in a computing solution. Nobody buys just the raw hardware - the software is an inextractable part of the equation.

This is why free software is superior, *all* of our software already runs on *all* the hardware (e.g. 95%+ of Debian builds on all eleven arches), and very well at that! "Programmability" is bunk, all modern CPU architectures are programmable, we're just the only ones bothering to program all of them -- or rather, the only ones open enough to let people adapt our programs to all of them.

So when Sun starts selling its 8-core 8-threads/core Sparcs next year, Solaris, Linux, and maybe one or two BSDs will be there, Windoze and MockOS will not. GNOME, KDE, Compiz Fusion, Croquet, Looking Glass, Second Life, Sugar, etc. will be there; Aero, Carbon, and any 3-D environment they dream up will not. We will have better servers, and better immersive 3-D performance, the games will follow, and it will be over for MS and Apple.

Okay, maybe it won't happen quite that fast. But follow the trends: we were first on Itanium (but who cares?), first on AMD64 (and AMD credits us with driving that platform's success), our software is all over ARM where only a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's is (on "Pocket PC" or "Windows Mobile" or whatever they're calling it now). When the next CPU architecture breakthrough comes, we'll be there and they'll need to play catch-up, again -- hopefully the hardware won't wait for Microsoft this time.

Speaking of which, this is also how DEC fumbled the marketing of Alpha -- they waited for MS to have NT ready before releasing it, and lost more than a year in that wait. They should have bypassed NT, released earlier with VMS and OSF/1 (or Digital Unix, etc.), dominated the workstation/server market, then used Linux on the low end to ramp up the volume and stay faster than Intel.

MS is darned lucky that modern x86-compatible CPUs run 64-bit code somewhat fast with low power consumption. Otherwise Linux on Alpha/Itanic/PPC64 on the high and end ARM on the low end would have eaten their lunch. But then, we're doing that *now* on handhelds and smart phones, we're on Cell and they're not, and we'll beat them to the 64-way Sparcs!

Resistance is futile. World domination is inevitable.

Not Windows specific

Posted Oct 11, 2007 19:51 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

Uhm, the next architecture clash I expect to happen is not what you're waiting for (a new architecture gaining some marketshare) but low power x86 cores gaining over ARM in the 'intelligent phone' space.

Plus even free software has portability issues: the OLPC doesn't use an x86 for nothing..

Wipe the gunk out of your eyes

Posted Oct 5, 2007 0:02 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

You don't have to go that far. You're forgetting Intel try to shift the architecture on the 64-bit switch, which got smashed by the AMD x86-64 "compatible" mode.

Funny how you've mentioned Ultra-high performance systems

Posted Oct 5, 2007 19:24 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Ten years ago very few "ultra-high performance systems" were using x86-based CPUs. Today... They own this space: 63% of systems from TOP500 are using Intel Xeons and AMD Opterons! The next biggest contender is PowerPC - and it's down to 17% already. Why ? People need ultra-fast CPUs not to brag about them but solve real tasks. And x86 makes it easier.

Note: these are custom-built system designed to run custom-built software on top of Linux (usually). So usual excuse that "it's just horrible Microsoft's OS that is driving back adoption of non-x86 CPUs" will not fly.

BTW: Debian is thinking about abandonment of the 11 primary architectures system - obscure architectures often break the only pair that matters (x86 and x86-64) so they'll eventually exclude most of them from "tier 1" support list...

Other distributions already gave non-x86 architectures "second class citizens" status...

x86(-64) adoption driven by performance/price, but is already second-best

Posted Oct 9, 2007 19:50 UTC (Tue) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

> BTW: Debian is thinking about abandonment of the 11 primary architectures system - obscure architectures often break the only pair that matters (x86 and x86-64) so they'll eventually exclude most of them from "tier 1" support list...

Check your facts: this was proposed a couple of years ago, and ten of the eleven arches (all but m68k) satisfied all of the "tier 1" requirements for official release in etch. And where did you get the idea that obscure architectures "break" x86 or x86-64? The only burden they place on the project is mirror space, and mirror admins can exclude them if they wish.

> Other distributions already gave non-x86 architectures "second class citizens" status...

So what? Eleven arches build 95% of the Debian repository, so we have support for nearly all of the 19,000 Debian packages everywhere. PPC/Cell gives much better performance/price than x86(-64), and will only become more so, and we are there now. And Ubuntu *added* SPARC last year, so they're going in the opposite direction, toward more architectures. Perhaps they see the writing on the high-performance wall?

Reality check on PPC/Cell

Posted Oct 9, 2007 20:51 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

> PPC/Cell gives much better performance/price than x86(-64),
> and will only become more so, and we are there now.

No it doesn't. Tell me where I can buy this mythical PPC/Cell with better price/performance and I'll withdraw the objection.

Hint: I'm not talking about a Playstation3 or an IBM Cell based blade. Both are far too restrictive environments to be 'general purpose'. The PS3 is crippled consumer electronics with a dumb 2D framebuffer, little RAM, low end storage and no high speed IO. A blade is only useful in very high density server farms or compute clusters.

Show me where I can buy an actual desktop PC or 1/2U Server based on a Cell or PPC that exhibits better price/performace on real world workloads. For a desktop that would be 3D modeling, heavy numerical crunching (but not cluster workloads) for engineering or some such CPU intensive workload. A web browser and office suite no longer matters, ANY current production CPU should be more than enough for that. For a server workload take your pick, web server workloads (LAMP or JSP) database, file server, whatever.

The reality is only a few niche players produce PPC/Cell hardware and the price simply isn't competitive with x86 or x86-64 because of that. Yes a Cell has some advantages vs x86 hardware which existed when it was introduced, but Cell is still basically the same and the x86 world has been churning newer faster chips with more and more cores. This is what kills every interesting new arch.