x86 always had standards: same two IRQ controllers, same UART chips, same keyboard controller, same PC speaker I/O, same ISA, same PCI, same AGP, VGA ROM that init the GPU with the same framebuffer address, all PATA controllers used the same I/O and IRQ and a single driver worked for all, same de-facto standards for audio (OPL aka. Adlib / SoundBlaster / MIDI), simple/bidi/ECP/EPP standards for parallel port and de-facto ESC/P standard for printers, etc. Hell, even USB there were only 2 at the beginning: Intel (UHCI) and AMD (OHCI), and then they cooperated and made universal EHCI.
ARM is a complete jungle by comparison. Each ARM manufacturer licenses a different UART, different USB, different PCIe (or none at all), different SATA, different GPU, different audio even if it's just I2s, different I2c, different SPI, different GPIO controller, different MMC/SDHCI, etc. etc. And each one needs, of course, a different driver!
The big mistake ARM (the company) made was to design only CPUs, not complete SoCs with peripherals, or at least require standard I/O addresses. And now they're trying to patch it up with UEFI and ACPI: closed-source ring -2 blobs that will never be updated or bug-fixed by any manufacturer.
Seems like a silly thing to say right when x86 is getting pummelled to death by Apple and Valve, maybe slowly, but steadily, while the rest of the gang also watches on.
This feels like a take from 10 years ago, when Intel was struggling to deliver 10nm but a lot of people assumed it would all shake out in the end. I could see a defensible case for betting on x86 then, and most of the author’s bullet points seem tailored for that era.
But now? I can’t think of a single segment where x86 is doing well. Its out of mobile entirely, it’s slowly getting squeezed out of servers as e.g. Graviton takes over, it has no presence in the AI gold rush, and in consumer desktops/laptops it’s position is precarious at best.
I’m quite bearish on x86.
I don't think my gaming PC will ever use an ARM core. When you want true "big iron" you want x86. Intel and AMD have a duopoly on high-performance, no-TDP-spared chips, and they aren't sharing that market with anyone.
The reason ARM is making inroads in the server market is we've reached the point where cooling is a significant cost factor in server farms, so lowering TDP is starting to become a relevant factor in total cost.
The point about the difficulties with Arm may be fair comment but the positioning and outlook of this post is decidedly weird. It seems to pretend that competitive desktop Arm processors already exist and ignores the existence of Arm ACPI.
On the conclusion - x86 didn't eventually win in smartphones.
And of course having a choice of processor designs from precisely two firms is absolutely something that we should continue to be happy with (and the post ignores RISC-V).
Not what the article is talking about, but I think betting against x86 in terms of the investment of companies (not individuals buying PC parts) has been a pretty good bet!
Being long AAPL and NVDA has crushed AMD and INTC, and that's with AMD's gains which I would argue are mostly due to non-x86 chips. Even Broadcom + Qualcom + ARM has been a better basket to hold for most of the last 5 years.
While PCs still need x86 because of the standardization the article talks about, more appliance-like computers like mobile phones and even server hardware have stolen a lot of market share and I think are the dominant way people will do their computing in the future. This comment was written on a m2 macbook that I use to ssh into a gb200 server.
The future of x86 is worrying but it's nowhere dead yet. I saw the C&C article yesterday and did some research, TL;DR:
- Apple took over the single-threaded crown a while ago.
- ARM also caught up in integer workloads.
- ARM Cortex is still behind in floating-point.
- Both are behind in multithreaded performance. (mostly because there are more high-end x86 systems...)
- Both are way behind in SIMD/HPC workloads. (ARM is generally stuck on 128-wide, x86 is 256-wide on Intel and 512-wide on AMD. Intel will return to 512-wide on the consumer segment too)
- ARM generally have way bigger L1 caches, mostly due to the larger pagesize, which is a significant architectural advantage.
- ARM is reaching these feats with ~4.5Ghz clocks compared to the ~5.5Ghz clocks on x86. (very rough approximation)
Overall, troubling for x86 for the future... it's an open question whether it will go the way of IBM POWER, legacy support with strict compatibility but no new workloads at all, or if it will keep adapting and evolving for the future.
> When I buy an x86 computer, either in parts or from an OEM, either Intel or AMD, I don’t have to worry for one second if Windows, Linux, one of the BSDs, or goddamn FreeDOS, and all of their applications, are going to run on it.
I have a virtual instance of Win11 ARM running in UTM on my MBP. It's honestly been surprisingly rare that I have to figure out how to run something that requires x86. More and more Linux distros have an ARM version that I can run if I need to.
I wonder if we'll still be running x86 code a hundred years after it came out (according to Wikipedia, it came out in 1978). We are already 48 years in.
ARM device trees suck. ACPI for sure it's hell, but a DTB per device it's a damn disaster. U-Boot it's open, but it sucks at having to plug a damn USB-serial cable in 2026 in order to get a prompt. That should come builtin, and with an easy builting help or some text based menu.
Not mentioned in the article, but the latest generation Xbox and PlayStation run completely custom firmware with their own proprietary boot chains, and locked-down hardware. So much for the "uniform" x86-64 "ecosystem". I'm sure there are more examples.
You mean never bet against AMD64
Graviton, Apple M-series...
That variable-length encoding and strongly ordered memory model will do x86 in sooner and not later.
Never say never...
I'm quite concerned about x86 future, but the article has a point if you read it past the title.
It says that x86 is highly standardised - even with different combinations of chips, peripherals and motherboards you know it will work just fine. It's not the case for ARM systems - can you even have something similar to IBM PC with ARM?
I personally know that adding support for ARM devices on Linux is a huge and manual task - e.g. look at devicetree, it's a mess. There is no standard like ACPI for ARM devices, so even powering off the computer is a problem, everything is proprietary and custom.
I don't agree with the article though, x86 is dying and my worry is that ARM devices will bring an end to such an open platform like modern PCs are.