It seems that cats and dogs can indeed coexist until the inevitable betrayal.
Intel has been a company in perpetual turmoil, bleeding money as its semiconductor foundries lose billions. A last-minute shift from their own 20A process to TSMC’s 3nm node for the upcoming Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200 series) processors has led to underwhelming performance gains, possibly even regressions compared to 14th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs.
Meanwhile, AMD appears set to dominate the DIY CPU market, especially outside of peak multithreaded workloads when AMD CEO, Lisa Su gets around to gouging consumers with Ryzen 9000 X3D processors.
So, imagine my surprise when the two licensed x86 CPU core vendors with comprehensive IP portfolios, including CPU, GPU, and FPGA designs announced a collaboration to form an x86 ecosystem advisory group, bringing together tech leaders to shape the future of the world’s most widely-used computing architecture.
It seems Patrick’s prayers have been answered yet again, as both companies revealed the new x86 ecosystem advisory group at the 2024 OCP Summit. The group already boasts several key participants from the tech world, including Google, Broadcom, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Red Hat, with more expected to join.
Among the prominent figures are Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, who seemingly maneuvered his way into the deal, likely thanks to a well-timed donation or two from Tencent.
The founding members and key figures can be split into two categories: those relevant to client computing and those focused on enterprise solutions. Tim Sweeney is a well-known figure in the gaming industry, though often for the wrong reasons, as the Unreal Engine continues to dominate game design while being notorious for stuttering and performance issues.
His company, Epic Games, also suffers ongoing financial losses from the Epic Games Store, which has relied on controversial exclusivity deals to lure users.
On the other hand, Linux, created by Torvalds, remains predominantly an enterprise-focused operating system. This advisory group is a special interest team consisting of Intel, AMD (hardware vendors), founding members, and industry luminaries, making sure x86 is consistent as a machine architecture, and there’s two-way communication among the hardware vendors and the members of the group, to shape the future of x86 as the likes of ARM and RISC rise in contention.
In simple terms, the goal of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group is to establish and enforce standards around architectural interfaces, with a primary focus on the instruction set architecture (ISA).
For example, while Intel’s latest “Arrow Lake” CPUs and AMD’s “Zen 5” CPUs are entirely different at the hardware level each built on distinct silicon designs, with Intel even sourcing expensive 3nm wafers from TSMC, the one thing they share is the x86 ISA, alongside some common platform interfaces like memory and PCIe.
Despite these significant hardware differences, the performance gap between Intel and AMD processors in a given price range is often within 5%. This level of hardware diversity isn’t going anywhere, and the advisory group isn’t attempting to standardize the x86 cores themselves, only the ISA.
The group’s purpose is to provide a platform for independent software vendors (ISVs) to communicate their expectations to Intel and AMD, ensuring both companies align their roadmaps. For ISVs, it guarantees that by 2029, any new instruction sets will be universally supported by both Intel and AMD, allowing them to plan their software development roadmaps accordingly.
Intel and AMD’s x86 CPU businesses have been facing increasing competition from the Arm instruction set architecture, which has allowed companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google to design their own CPUs for the PC and cloud markets.
While Arm continues to dominate low-power, portable devices like phones and tablets, its presence is expanding. MediaTek has publicly announced plans to introduce Arm-based CPUs for Windows PCs. Qualcomm has also ventured into the mobile laptop segment with its Snapdragon processors, running on Microsoft’s ARM version of Windows 11.
Although these ARM processors fall short in performance and gaming compared to x86 CPUs, they excel in everyday tasks like web browsing, offering superior battery life over x86-based machines. Go figure?
Both Intel and AMD have responded to the growing threat of ARM’s high core density and efficiency, particularly in servers, by developing their own high-core-count, efficiency-driven processors.
AMD launched its EPYC “Bergamo” chips last year and now dominate the market with its recently announced EPYC 9005 series known as “Turin.”
Intel meanwhile recently introduced its Xeon 6 E-core chips. The rising competition from AMD has contributed to Intel’s declining market position and significant budget cuts. Meanwhile, AMD has capitalized on the competitive edge of its CPUs, steadily gaining x86 market share from Intel and expanding into adjacent areas like networking and AI acceleration.
The x86 architecture is in dire need of modernization, and x86S represents its future, a streamlined or cucked rendition of x86 which is 64-bit-only, eliminating bloat by purging compatibility with outdated 32-bit applications. The creation of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group could accelerate the adoption of x86S.
This new standard sheds legacy features like 16-bit real mode, 32-bit protected mode, and virtual 8086 (v86) mode. It simplifies interrupt handling, removes outdated task-switching mechanisms, enhances security by reducing privilege levels to just ring-0 (kernel) and ring-3 (user mode), and improves memory management by dropping non-long mode paging structures. These changes
drastically simplify the x86 architecture, boost security, and position it for the future. The transition to x86S will be critical for the long-term viability of x86, and the formation of the Ecosystem Advisory Group comes at an opportune time. Other forward-looking developments, like UCIe (which facilitates disaggregated chip designs) and OpenSIL (on-chip hardware initialization standardization), further support this future direction.
In conclusion, while the Intel-AMD x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group is a valuable initiative, it doesn’t fully address the drawbacks of an intensely competitive duopoly. Over the next decade, architectures like RISC-V may begin to challenge x86, especially as the industry shifts away from monolithic designs toward chiplets, 3D die stacking, and custom designs that integrate diverse IP like CPU and GPU cores into a single, compact package.
However, Intel and AMD remain key players, holding vast portfolios of intellectual property (IP), and the transition to x86S, OpenSIL, and other emerging technologies will not stifle innovation. These companies still have every incentive to push for faster, more efficient microarchitectures.
Although the current state of the video game industry and DIY PC market are in decline, likely to face a crash over the coming years the future of enterprise computing looks promising but only for tech nerds and enthusiasts.
