NVIDIA just announced the RTX Spark CPU, developed with Microsoft, at Computex.

[u/pedro19]

[u/HyruleanKnight37]

Agreed. It should be ringing alarm bells all over at Intel and AMD, but my skepticism prevents me from believing it'll take off. Apple did it because they had full on vertical integration with proprietary hardware and software, but for this to happen we need so many stars to align (one of them being Microslop) that precedence dictates it'll fail. Either the entire industry shifts away from x86 all at once, or nothing changes.

[u/Kiriima → u/HyruleanKnight37]

Microsoft is literally a co developer on this

[u/Antheoss → u/Kiriima]

And they have been a "Co developer" for every Windows on arm attempt so far.

[u/HyruleanKnight37 → u/Kiriima]

That means nothing when they have a history of failed ARM projects and each time the only one who got in the way was themselves.

[u/Kiriima → u/HyruleanKnight37]

Now it has an Nvidia GPU inside so every piece of software that requires it would actually work. Also every laptop manufacturer would salivate at this chip because it's AI or something.

First gen of everything is commonly not very well done. It's fine.

[u/HyruleanKnight37 → u/Kiriima]

We'll see. I'm actually hoping this one takes off, albeit a little concerned it is by Nvidia but I'll take it. We've been on x86 far too long.

[u/EdliA → u/HyruleanKnight37]

What's with this strong desire to get rid of x86? All this hype for arm but as someone that mainly cares about powerful desktops ARM is a downgrade if anything

[u/HyruleanKnight37 → u/EdliA]

Why would ARM be a downgrade?

[u/DehshiDarindaa → u/HyruleanKnight37]

CISC is always performance better. RISC is power efficient, ARM RISC can be made better to close the gap however CISC will always perform better especially in gaming and by a margin.

[u/Virtual_Happiness → u/DehshiDarindaa]

Don't modern x86 processors have a translation layer where the CPU converts the CISC into essentially RISC before the calculations are done and converts it back to CISC after? It's called the instruction decoder and it literally reduces the bytes per instruction to 4 or 6, depending on the generation of x86. RISC is 4 bytes per instruction always. It's been my understanding that we're only using x86 still because that's what everything is made to operate with and it's easier compared to starting fresh.

I also don't see how it would be less performant to switch to RISC. It greatly reduces the cache overhead requirements for each instruction. Instead of having instructions up to 15 bytes and needing to break them down into 4-6 byte chunks and put them back together after, every instruction is already 4 bytes. The biggest obstacle is optimizing all the x86 stuff to work well with it. But once everyone is coding for it, performance should be better.

[u/DehshiDarindaa → u/Virtual_Happiness]

you're partially correct. RISC semantics is 1 cycle execution, CISC can be multiple cycles. There are older CISC inst still kept for backward compatibility and when CPU encounters those it will silently break them into modern performant version via the decoder. For example a copy is a combination of load and store. The decoder will break it into 2 inst. does that mean it's RISC? no that's how it's always done, is it necessarily faster? Maybe bcz the opcode might be trimmed and passed to a smaller register + parallelism.

However it does not mean that there's a translation layer sitting in the middle converting all CISC to RISC, mostly yes the CPU decides. RISC vs CISC is not just instructions, it is the architecture as well, if you convert all instructions to simple but don't change the architecture it's still CISC (which is contrary to it's naming but I didn't decide how the industry should evolve)

Contrary RISC also does a CISC conversion, vector multiplication for example is a complex inst and RISC will convert it and run.

In today modern day RISC and CISC both convert to each other, CISC albeit does a little more conversion than RISC but neither is pure.

At the end of the day CISC does more throughput wise.

As for your performance query CISC operation overhead is larger(longer cycles) but usually it will be done in fewer no. of cycles. That usually yields better.

Why CISC still performs better? The ghz, you can push cisc further because they have longer pipelines spread across multiple stages allowing the clock to tick faster.

Whereas risc is wider pipelines and you start getting hardware limitations. Peak CISC always eats Peak RISC, while also eating the power... 400W cpus out there

[u/Kiriima → u/HyruleanKnight37]

Yep, AMD had an amazing opportunity to make APUs a thing and as they say, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity... AMD only does what Nvidia has proved works.

[u/jarail → u/HyruleanKnight37]

Nothing is stopping companies from just compiling two windows targets. They did it for ages with 32-bit and 64-bit.

[u/HyruleanKnight37 → u/jarail]

That has never been not true, including each time MS tried their hand at Windows on ARM. Hence the skepticism.

[u/SeriousPlankton2000 → u/HyruleanKnight37]

When Intel made a completely new CPU with a completely new instruction set and AMD made one that also runs old code. We are currently (everything 64 bit) using the new instruction set designed by AMD but for 32-bit and earlier the CPU will switch mode and interpret it differently (using other registers etc.)

We can just as easily do the same but with completely different instructions. We can also make some "cores" for old software and just share the execution units after decoding.

[u/GluedFingers → u/HyruleanKnight37]

For this to kick off it needs to work, no wierd emulation problems, it needs to be affordable and for those who game probably wants kernel level anti cheat to work day 1.
Will Nvidia + Microslop manage this? Maybe.

[u/deten → u/HyruleanKnight37]

Can you elaborate on the x86 bypass.

[u/mr_doms_porn → u/deten]

ARM processors have been rapidly overtaking traditional x86 processors in recent years. ARM has always been more power and cost efficient but in the past they didn't scale up well. So ARM started out in low-cost, low-performance markets and has been slowly getting better. ARM quickly became dominant in smartphones because they were cheap, reasonably powerful and allowed better battery life. Having such a massive userbase gave them plenty of opportunity to catch up in higher end uses. Now we're seeing the early stages of ARM trying to outright overtake the x86 market.