Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you.
The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet.
But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate.
Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think:
1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or
2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server)
Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
So, to respond, buyers will:
1/ Not give a crap about whether it's x86 or Apple Flavored ARM (read: an ARM with undocumented extensions that is pretty much CISC), but merely look at price, in which case Apple buyers are an extreme minority. A $500 laptop with a mobile Ryzen is more than enough for the average user, and mostly, most people cannot afford a $1200+ macbook air.
2/ Not care about power consumption because it does not matter to a boatload of people. Get out of your bubble, noone outside of software developer nerds care if they have to plug in their laptop once every four hours. Most people have lunch breaks. Is it a great thing to have in a laptop ? Absolutely, and Apple has done great in that regard. Does it matter anywhere else ? Absolutely not. Once again, it's HN jerking itself off about pErFoRmaNcE pEr WaTt when Apple put out a CPU that can't even draw the 105W it's rated for, and has no proof that it can improve in single threaded performance with more power. But sure, toss out more cores, it's what x86 has been doing for years, but when Apple comes out with the M1 Ultra it's a stroke of genius to slap two of these bad boys together.
3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
ARM is not a forward looking architecture, and neither is x86. They both are architectures, with their advantages and flaws (and the Apple flaws are fucking massive, unupgradable-except-if-you-buy-next-year's-version is the very definition of non-forward thinking, especially for end users).
Also you're taking it all off on an angry tangent about the HN audience when I am talking about buyers (I meant including institutional buyers, not end users, and I didn't clarify that enough but I would have thought the focus on architecture would have made it clearer) but:
> I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh).
I would. Between this April and next April my energy bill will double, and it is unlikely to ever fall back to where it is now. Power consumption matters A LOT in Europe right now. Corporate buyers will have to care about that, for the long term.
> 3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
No, they really don't upgrade their hardware, in fact. Almost no computer buyer upgrades through anything other than replacement.
But I'm using a seven year old, secondhand MacBook Pro, so I'm not the target of your comment.
Should have gone with nuclear years ago, our prices are stable.
Between those and an intel Mac Mini and an older iMac, I got over $3000 in trade-in value. Made me feel quite foolish for not having tried that before. The oldest iMac still got me a couple hundred bucks, as would your seven year old MacBook Pro most likely. A two year old high-specced computer?
I get that the list price for any of these is still way higher than putting together a PC from parts… but again, I belatedly traded a bunch of stuff in, and got more than $3000 in gift card value from Apple doing it. That makes 'rebuying a macbook pro every two years' a whole other state of affairs. I'm kicking myself for not having tried that earlier: I'm sure I left over $1000 on the table simply by letting recent computers sit around unused rather than immediately trading them in for Apple credit.
So to the point at discussion: Apple uses their common tech across their entire Market. The M1 chips are the result of making the fastest mobile phones. The M1 is going into tablets. They are just printing money and pumping that money into chip design. If your DIY PC Building is what is going to keep Intel/x86 alive, then I agree with GP: Intel is the walking dead. And it really is just us gamers.
Who needs raw CPU/GPU at their desk? I had one of the first nehalems under my desk (NDA and everything). Then I heard about AWS and started running my shit on that. Back then, that was intel. Now it's Graviton ARM: more processing per $.
Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.