| ▲ | willtemperley 5 days ago |
| Gaming seems to be the final stronghold of x86 and I imagine that will shrink. Clearly games are able to run well on RISC architectures despite decades of x86 optimisation in game engines. Long term, an architecture that consumes more power and is tightly locked down by licensing looks unsustainable compared to royalty-free RISC alternatives. The instability, presumably because Intel are overclocking their own chips to look OK on benchmarks will not help. |
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| ▲ | smallpipe 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| x86 hasn't been CISC in 3 decades anywhere but in the frontend. An architecture doesn't consume power, a design does. I'm all for shitting on intel, but getting the facts right wouldn't hurt. |
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| ▲ | uncircle 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | X86 isn’t CISC, sure, but it isn’t a RISC architecture either. | | |
| ▲ | arp242 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Do RISC architectures still exist? ARM has gained tons of stuff and isn't really "RISC" any more either. Maybe RISC-V? It's right there in the name, but I haven't really looked at it. However, there are no RISC-V chips that have anywhere near the performance x86 or ARM has, so it remains to be seen if RISC-V can be competitive with x86 or ARM for these types of things. RISC is one of those things that sounds nice and elegant in principle, but works out rather less well in practice. | | |
| ▲ | userbinator 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | MIPS is as close to a "real RISC" CPU as one can be, and it's "everywhere you don't look", but for reasons entirely unrelated to performance --- it's the choice of SoCs which are too cheap for ARM. I suspect RISC-V is going to become more popular in that market, although it's one which is already filled with various Chinese MIPS/RISC-ish cores that are entirely unimpressive. | |
| ▲ | remexre 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Maybe RISC-V? RISC-V is specified as a RISC (and allows very space-/power-efficient lower-end designs with the classic RISC design), but designed with macro-op fusion in mind, which gets you closer to a CISC decoder and EUs. It's a nice place to be in tooling-wise, but it seems too early to say definitively what extensions will need to be added to get 12900K/9950X/M4 -tier performance-per-core. In either case though, a bunch of the tricks that make modern CPUs fast are ISA-independent; stuff like branch prediction or [0] don't depend on the ISA, and can "work around" needing more instructions to do certain tasks, for one side or the other. [0]: https://tavianator.com/2025/shlx.html |
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| ▲ | immibis 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The traditional CISC and RISC division broke down the moment processors started doing more than one thing at a time. A RISC architecture was actually one with simple control flow and a CISC architecture was one with complex control flow, usually with microcode. This distinction isn't applicable to CPUs past the year 1996 or so, because it doesn't make sense to speak of a CPU having global control flow. |
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| ▲ | willtemperley 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’re contradicting yourself. The whole reason x86 burns more power is that the CISC front end can’t be avoided. | | |
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| ▲ | wqaatwt 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Clearly games are able to run well on RISC architectures Theoretically that’s likely true. But is there any empirical evidence? Even underclocked Intel desktop chips are massively faster. |
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| ▲ | willtemperley 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Mobile gaming has run well on RISC for a long time and more recently Macs have shown gaming potential. | | |
| ▲ | wqaatwt 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh sorry. Based on the tone and general fervor in your comment I somehow read it as RISC-V instead of simply RISC (which as other say seems like a mostly meaningless label these days). Yes, ARM is certainly competitive. But I don’t know how much is that down to Apple being good at making chips instead of the architecture itself. Qualcomm of course makes decent chips but it’s not like they are that much ahead of x86 on laptops. Even in Apple’s case, if you only care about raw CPU power instead of performance per watt M series is not that great compared to AMD/Intel. |
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| ▲ | williamDafoe 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| "Stronghold" is a joke phrase, is it not? Intel had ZERO progress in integrated graphics from 2013-2020. ZERO. That's the reason why "it works so well" - because they NEVER improved the performance or architecture! Sure, they diddled with the number of CU's, but as far as graphics architecture, they never changed it, and it was POOR to begin with (couldn't do 1080p esports very well ...) |
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| ▲ | nofriend 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | x86 is the cpu architecture. i don't believe gp was talking about intels igpu solution at all. | |
| ▲ | willtemperley 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are x86 consoles a joke? | | |
| ▲ | lmm 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Consoles have very little lock-in on their architectural choices, since they only ever support a small set of hardware configurations in the first place. I guess some of the current generation are x86-based but it would be very easy to move to ARM for the next generation if they wanted to. |
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