On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Eric Duhamel ericxdu23@gmail.com wrote:
On March 10, 2017 10:34:55 AM PST, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
bottom line, if AMD want to stay in business they need to get out of x86. part-hardware-emulated x86 fine (like the Loongson 3H architecture did), non-x86, fine. pure x86: dying and dead very soon.
I'm rather curious about this. "x86 is dying" is a rather vague statement.
it's more that they're on a losing battle in the all-important "price-performance-watt" metric due to the extra overhead associated with x86 instruction decoding compared to RISC (that 500mhz dual-core Cortex A9 video produced by ARM comparing to a single-core 1.6ghz atom for example) combined with the power square law vs clock rate means that staying at the absolute top-end of performance (i.e. *ignoring* entirely the price-performance-watt metric) is about the only option available.
Do you mean producers investing in x86 processor based hardware are likely to be pushed out of making profit by non-x86 competitors?
they *can't* make profit. $25 for one of the recent intel "tablet" style processors - and that's the budget cut-down version that has a 64-bit DDR3 interface and a whopping 650 pins as opposed to a 128-bit interface with a THOUSAND - where everyone else is aiming for FOUR i mean they're pissing in the wind basically.
l.