[solved] how disturbing is x86? Unreal-Mode!!!

[T3sl4co1l]

I gave up seriously trying to convince him a long time ago

So you left the thread and ticked "ignore" on it..?

"Try, try again; then give up.  There's no point being a damned fool about it."

Tim

[magic]

Is the purpose of this thread convincing the OP to like x86?

We gotta try harder

[SiliconWizard]

Is the purpose of this thread convincing the OP to like x86?

We gotta try harder

I don't know what the purpose is. At first the OP ranted about some low-level x86 annoyances. Fair enough if you have to deal with these.
Then his rant turned into blaming it all on Intel engineers and claiming they all have been morons.
Then he apparently figured out the initial issue he encountered, but it was too late already and he gave up nonetheless. Because, heaven forbid.
Then he claimed Intel has kept making strategic errors, in spite of its success.
Not sure how it would all help him move forward with his technical issues, but we all rant sometimes.
The funny part would be if he had typed this all on some x86 computer.

[retiredfeline]

We gotta try harder

🐴. 🌊. (Neigh)+. !Drink.

[magic]

The funny part would be if he had typed this all on some x86 computer.

Doubt it. Too loud a RISC fanboy to touch one.

I was about to add that I'm reading them on x86 though, and there is nothing he can do about it, but actually I'm using ARM now

[DiTBho]

Mental illness I suspect,

Aaaand any rational argument, any hope of convincing the other party of your position, is gone.

(Actually you probably did that with your earlier reply but you're really doubling down now.)

Tim

james_s is in my ignore list for insulting me personally, I see from your quote he is doing it again, and I haven't read it for a while, as I clearly wrote, and why does it continue when I don't care what it says?

Again, it's called trolling

And why do you have to *convince* me that x86 is cool? I don't have to approve myself in front of anyone, and the purpose of the forums is precisely to bring different positions because you can learn new stuff this way, that's why I offered my honest thinking, otherwise discussing is completely useless.

You know what, don't be offended, but this forum has lost a lot of polish, which is disappointing

Greetings.

[DiTBho]

I don't know what the purpose is. At first the OP ranted about some low-level x86 annoyances. Fair enough if you have to deal with these.

I opened this topic in the hope that someone would tell me something about the "unreal mode" and found that everyone talks well about x86 then nobody ever knows anything, yet everyone talks.

that's indeed its "being popular"

Then his rant turned into blaming it all on Intel engineers and claiming they all have been morons.

so I solved the various problems by myself, and I wanted to let you know that even to write a trivial bootloader you have to read lots and lots of technical documentation.

you can call this part a "rant" against technical nonsense, I called them "morons"(1) due to the technical nonsense, it's easy for you to talk, but for me that nonsense costs hours to fix learn and fix them, anyway then I considered that it was not engineers' fault because they just followed directives from the leadership.

Then he claimed Intel has kept making strategic errors, in spite of its success.

people always want to justify Intel, so I've compiled some facts, and if you don't even recognize the fact that leaving the ARM world and thinking about replacing it with Atom wasn't a failure, then there's really no point in talking but not because I have a different opinion but rather because of the bias that everything Intel does is ok as it's "popular".

Facts are that Intel gave up on XScale, their ARM-compatible effort and turned down the opportunity to make the iPhone's chip and gain a foothold in the mobile market, and a more direct source, from Intel's own CEO at the time:

The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it.
[..]
It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought

meaning that Intel bet that ARM would take as long to reach x86-level of performance as Intel would take to reduce x86 power consumption to SOC levels.

In the last post, I pointed out how they bet on being able to maintain a hair above the level of "decent" multi-core support for the machines, and how much they underestimate, again, their "botched solutions", specifically that it won't be a problem when the machines have more than 80 cores or an interface to the quantum computing engine.

I foresee more catastrophic loss of money, and I will stand here and watch them fail, again, but this time without investing in their products. I remember XSCALE not only because used on my SHARP PDA but also because at the time I spent a lot of time and money on their SA-1* (Strong Arm) dev boards, reading their manuals, doing stuff for customers, and you can imagine how *we* were all happy to see me drop chip making with, as my only option, having to switch to the Atom platform.

-

Then this thing about that-James-dude having to "convince me" that otherwise, you are mentally ill, really I find it pathetic to the point I wonder how much of a loser someone must be for finding it helpful to troll people on a forum 


- - -

At least, it was a great social experiment on how people are circuited on "good because popular" things.
Having said that, I greet you all, have a good day.

edit:
(1) post was deleted, makes no sense if people continue to reface it to me.

[T3sl4co1l]

james_s is in my ignore list for insulting me personally, I see from your quote he is doing it again, and I haven't read it for a while, as I clearly wrote, and why does it continue when I don't care what it says?

Again, it's called trolling

Ah, my apologies for echoing it then.  Matter of fact, that sounds like a  good enough vote that moderators may want to get involved.  Cheers.

Tim

[Monkeh]

I opened this topic in the hope that someone would tell me something about the "unreal mode" and found that everyone talks well about x86 then nobody ever knows anything, yet everyone talks.

that's indeed its "being popular"

Well I'm certainly not going to go around talking up a platform which is too slow, too expensive, and doesn't even run the software I need, just because it's nicer at a level I don't have to deal with.

I think you might want to replace 'popular' with 'practical'.

You're very much in the wrong place for discussions on the relative merits of architures. The vast majority of us couldn't care less if it gets the task done.

[David Hess]

meaning that Intel bet that ARM would take as long to reach x86-level of performance as Intel would take to reduce x86 power consumption to SOC levels.

It is not ARM which has reached x86 levels of performance, but Apple.  X86 CPUs can be purchased by anybody for any purpose.  Apple's ARM implementation is only available for use inside Apple's products.  If Apple's vision does not support your application, then x86 has higher performance.

Two advantages Apple has are on package memory, which significantly reduces power consumption at the expense of more limited memory capacity, and more limited expansion support.  X86 may gain those advantages when it makes economic sense.

In the last post, I pointed out how they bet on being able to maintain a hair above the level of "decent" multi-core support for the machines, and how much they underestimate, again, their "botched solutions", specifically that it won't be a problem when the machines have more than 80 cores or an interface to the quantum computing engine.

The coherency implementations for x86 have been *better* than ARMs, and most or all other RISC processors.  This gets back to memory ordering where the strict memory ordering of x86 is advantageous in practical implementations.  The loose memory ordering common in RISC processors, which was suppose to be an advantage, causes more problems than it solves.

[james_s]

I gave up seriously trying to convince him a long time ago

So you left the thread and ticked "ignore" on it..?

"Try, try again; then give up.  There's no point being a damned fool about it."

Tim

No, I'm just pointing out how absurd the OPs rants are, you might not have noticed they started multiple threads ranting and raving about their hatred of x86, and then not  being able to articulate why a normal person should care. You could have left the thread just as easily if it did not interest you.

[james_s]

And why do you have to *convince* me that x86 is cool? I don't have to approve myself in front of anyone, and the purpose of the forums is precisely to bring different positions because you can learn new stuff this way, that's why I offered my honest thinking, otherwise discussing is completely useless.

You know what, don't be offended, but this forum has lost a lot of polish, which is disappointing

Greetings.

Nobody is trying to convince anyone that x86 is cool, that's another strawman. What people are arguing is that Intel engineers were not idiots, they knew what they were doing and x86 evolved the way it did for very good reasons that were sound business decisions at the time. It isn't "cool", it's wildly successful. Scores of other companies tried to do something different and none even came close to the success of x86, because being "cool" doesn't count for squat in the marketplace.

If you are offended that's on you, I don't know where this strange idea that one has the right to be shielded from being offended came from.

[james_s]

Ah, my apologies for echoing it then.  Matter of fact, that sounds like a  good enough vote that moderators may want to get involved.  Cheers.

Tim

I'm not trolling at all, go back and read through all of my responses here and point out where you think I'm trolling, or where I have said something meant as a direct insult to anyone here. If you think the moderators should be involved then please do flag the relevant posts and let them decide, I respect their judgement.

[SiliconWizard]

Well, IMO, while ARM (we should be writing 'arm' though, as it's been 'arm' for some years now, bye bye ARM) is a decent RISC architecture, it's not nearly perfect either. It kind of sucks on a number of levels.
And then there are the licensing issues, the behavior or arm's management, the funding, and the uncertainties around its future.

Historically speaking, arm's sucess almost happened completely by chance. The original ARM CPUs were pretty close to getting trashed and forgotten, due to them having at the time basically no market outside of the Acorn Archimedes line, which was a great engineering adventure but didn't end well.

But I could certainly rant about arm as well.

And yes, Apple did a good job with the M1 and M2, but I'm not convinced that what they came up with 1/ can scale up, and 2/ that Apple won't just go for something else right at the moment they find someting better suited, a few years from now.

Anything can suck depending on your perspective.
Nothing wrong with refusing to work with some particular tech though, assuming you can afford not to.

If I could, I would probably throw away pretty much everything that currently makes the computing industry. It's sort of rotten. But it sort of works, so it's still useful and while I have some neat ideas (like many others I guess), I'm not sure they would end up resulting in anything significantly better. I'm afraid I (as most of us) would tend to focus on details while missing out on the big picture.

[james_s]

If I could, I would probably throw away pretty much everything that currently makes the computing industry. It's sort of rotten. But it sort of works, so it's still useful and while I have some neat ideas (like many others I guess), I'm not sure they would end up resulting in anything significantly better. I'm afraid I (as most of us) would tend to focus on details while missing out on the big picture.

I'd love to ditch Windows, it's pretty much a steaming turd and it just keeps getting worse. But it is the defacto standard, it runs on ~90% of PCs in the world, so if I were writing a commercial software product I would primarily target Windows. Not because it's technologically superior necessarily, but because it's what most of my potential customers will have.

[DiTBho]

It is not ARM that has reached x86 levels of performance, but Apple

Arm chips exist for all markets.
Apple makes the Arm chips that can compete in the desktop and laptop consumer space, while Ampere(1), Amazon, and Nvidia supply the Arm chips which can compete in data centers!

(1) I think I already mentioned my boss's 80-core "Ampera", right? here we are not the only ones using this technology, and it's the smallest one, compared to the "Neoverse N1" that has 128 cores, and the "Neoverse v2" has 172 cores!! All ARM big chips, and then there is also Amazon, which has come out with the Graviton3 chip with 64 Neoverse V1 cores. Meanwhile, Nvidia has announced their Grace super-chip which will have 144 Neoverse V2 cores!


Intel is working on this stuff and doing a lot of propaganda.

[David Hess]

It is not ARM that has reached x86 levels of performance, but Apple

Arm chips exist for all markets.
Apple makes the Arm chips that can compete in the desktop and laptop consumer space, while Ampere(1), Amazon, and Nvidia supply the Arm chips which can compete in data centers!

Apple makes ARM microprocessors which are available only as part of Apple's complete systems.  If the later do not meet my needs, then the former are unavailable to me.  Apple competes with various system makers, but they do not compete directly with Intel or AMD.

[DiTBho]

I'm afraid I (as most of us) would tend to focus on details while missing out on the big picture.

And precisely you focus on details while missing out on the big picture: I am just saying -1- do not buy x86 only because it's the most popular when you can buy something else, and -2- inform yourself before pointing the finger only at the most popular solutions!


Note, again, it talks about ARM, and people in this forum only mention Apple Silicon ARM, ignoring all the other ARM solutions I mentioned!

[DiTBho]

Apple competes with various system makers, but they do not compete directly with Intel or AMD.

Talking about data centers and scientific simulators, the fastest supercomputers today are built using Arm and POWER9, not x86 chips, why? well, have you seen the last Intel and AMD CPUs?


(Intel Xeon Platinum 8468)

Sure, they are able to outperform the chips made by Apple, Ampere, and NVidia, but only at the cost of insane power usage!

When you have a 20Kwatt cabinet it makes a BIG difference!


p.s.
I feel sympathy for this comment

I used to own a cloud computing company - we were not massive but we had racks filled with Intel Xeon CPU. I was often asked why we didn't consider AMD and the reason is one I never hear you mention: you have to cripple CPU features to allow hot transfer of workload between AMD and Intel. So in an environment where we were counting cores in the thousands or higher, introducing new CPU that are not "compatible" with the fleet would be an insane choice. You'd have to prevent live migration of workload between heads or alternatively, modify hypervisors to limit features to guest workloads. Because of this, we were effectively "married" to Intel. Moving some devices to AMD would have required too much development time to modify control systems, limited interoperability or have meant that we would have had to make very large purchases on AMD to essentially split into two, distinct farms, and that would have been quite a bet to have taken.

I can confirm it's a BIG problem in a farm!

[magic]

Show me how well live migration works between different ARM core types or different SOCs, and for how long will those SOCs be supported.
 

ARM is the most rubbish arch in the world today. And it goes mostly into smartphones, hmm, mabye not a coincidence.

[DiTBho]

ARM is the most rubbish arch in the world today. And it goes mostly into smartphones, hmm, mabye not a coincidence.

LOL 

I prefer to read Linus' answers to a question that particularly interests me: the ARM transactional memory extension support, the decision of IBM to remove tr-mem from POWER10, note that neither of them has ever done aggressive propaganda either on television, on youtube, or in shopping malls, like Intel has been doing since a while, and they are both intellectually honest in saying "we acknowledge that it was a bad idea", while intel ... Intel's TSX was plagued with functionality bugs and security bugs, yet after 5 iterations, all unsuccessful, once again Intel has announced that it's going to bring back a new version of TSX in the Sapphire Rapids processors, hopefully having fixed the bugs of prior versions.

Linus Torvalds to Andrey, March 31, 2021

> You obviously have to write non-transactional path, and it will have its pitfalls, but the point
> is that you could have better best-case and average performance with TSX.

No, you really really don't.

TSX was slow even when it worked and didn't have aborts, and never gave you "best-case" performance at all due to that. Simple non-contended non-TSX locks worked better.

And TSX was a complete disaster when you had any data contention, and just caused overhead and aborts and fallbacks to locked code, so - no surprise - plain non-TSX locks worked better. And data contention is quite common, and happened for a lot of trivial reasons (statistics being one).

And no, TSX didn't have better average performance either, because in order to avoid the problems, you had to do statistics in software, which added its own set of overhead.

As far as I know, there were approximately zero real-world loads that were better with TSX than without.

The only case that TSX ever did ok on was when there was zero data contention at all, and lots of cache coherence costs due almost entirely due to locking, and then TSX can keep the lock as a shared cache line. Yes, this really can happen, but most of the time it happens is when you also have big enough locked regions that they don't get caught by the transactional memory due to size overflows.

And making the transaction size larger makes the costs higher too, so now you need to do a much better job at predicting ahead of time whether transactions will succeed or not. Which Intel entirely screwed up, and I blame them completely. I told them at the first meeting they had (before TSX was public) that they need to add a TSX predictor, and they never did.

And the problems with TSX were legion, including dat aleaks and actual outright memory ordering bugs.

TSX was garbage, and remains so.

This is not to say that you couldn't get transactional memory right, but as it stands right now, I do not believe that anybody has ever had an actual successful and useful implementation of transactional memory.

And I can pretty much guarantee that to do it right you need to have a transaction success predictor (like a branch predictor) so that software doesn't have to deal with yet another issue of "on this uarch, and this load, the transaction size is too small to fit this lock".

I'm surprised that ARM made it part of v9 (and surprised that ARM kept the 32-bit compatibility part - I really thought they wanted to get rid of it).

Linus

which is just useful for making AMD waste money and time, just so as not to give the customers the impression of staying backward.

When Linus pointed his finger at ARM in the last two lines of his answer, is for this (2021), but note, it's not the ARM support for trMem is done for propaganda or for a sneaky marketing reason, but rather to push researchers and developers on a different level.

so, sorry, but ARM is less intellectual garbage than the marketing garbage that Intel makes 

[magic]

Yes, it's garbage. You can't even migrate a disk with Linux installation from one SBC to another, but you complain that live migration of VMs is fussy on x86 because of some chipset differences between Intel and AMD.

Yes, they could have agreed on hardware standards instead of hiding it all behind an abstract turd like ACPI.
But look at the level of hardware standardization in ARM SOCs

[james_s]

And precisely you focus on details while missing out on the big picture: I am just saying -1- do not buy x86 only because it's the most popular when you can buy something else, and -2- inform yourself before pointing the finger only at the most popular solutions!

Some of the software I use only runs on x86, so you're saying I should buy hardware that doesn't support all of my software for... reasons? Because something else is available? Just to be different? For ideological reasons? This is something I've been trying to figure out throughout all of these threads. Why should I spend more on something that does less for me? I need a solution that will run x86 software, I don't care what CPU architecture is inside the box or how it accomplishes what it does, so what is the suggestion here?

[james_s]

Yes, it's garbage. You can't even migrate a disk with Linux installation from one SBC to another, but you complain that live migration of VMs is fussy on x86 because of some chipset differences between Intel and AMD.

Yes, they could have agreed on hardware standards instead of hiding it all behind an abstract turd like ACPI.
But look at the level of hardware standardization in ARM SOCs

ARM is quite good IMO, for platforms where low power is a priority and backward compatibility is not needed. Most smartphones are arm based, most settop boxes are, the enormously popular Raspberry Pi is arm based, as are most consumer broadband routers, it works very well for that and I own and use quite a few devices that have it. But it can't run x86 software so it is useless as a desktop for me, it simply doesn't meet my needs. It is totally irrelevant how technologically superior a platform is if it doesn't support the software you need. This is the core issue and why this whole argument is rather pointless.

[David Hess]

I have migrated my FreeBSD router and NAS between multiple generations of x86 hardware and between Intel and AMD without issues.  When I migrated the network interface cards as well, I did not even have to reassign them.  Everything just worked.

In order the top hardware failures have been ATX power supplies, Flash memory running out of endurance and retention, and the ice machine upstairs springing a leak and dripping water onto the machine.  Hard drives outlasted Flash drives.