On Monday 13. March 2017 18.13.37 Hendrik Boom wrote:
x86. part-hardware-emulated x86 fine (like the Loongson 3H architecture did), non-x86, fine. pure x86: dying and dead very soon.
Intel already tried that a *long* time ago, with the Itanium. It was provided with software that emulated the x86. But AMD made a 64-bit hardware version of the x86 and took over the market because its hardware outran the emulation on the Itanium, forcing Intel to follow suit or lose the Windows market.
Itanium was something of a special case, being of Hewlett-Packard origins and employing an instruction set architecture that arguably made life more difficult for tool developers. Itanium was a fiasco for quite a few hardware manufacturers who bet big on it being a success, especially those who abandoned their own technologies.
Besides, it was said that the big performance gains in the more recent era of x86 were due to effectively delivering a RISC-style CPU and employing an x86 instruction-recoding front-end, although I don't personally have any familiarity with this. There's an interesting remark about such things on the Cyrix 6x86 Wikipedia page:
"The 6x86 is superscalar and superpipelined and performs register renaming, speculative execution, out-of-order execution, and data dependency removal. However, it continued to use native x86 execution and ordinary microcode only, like Centaur's Winchip, unlike competitors Intel and AMD which introduced the method of dynamic translation to micro-operations with Pentium Pro and K5."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_6x86
Is the situation different now? With an ARM version of Windows, and Microsoft's now proven ability to port Wondows to new architectures, quite possibly.
The difference is where the market is. It was arguably the strength of the relationship between Microsoft and Intel that kept both of them dominant in the conventional computing market, and that led to Microsoft's reliance on x86, even though NT was intended for and delivered for other architectures (i860, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC). But Microsoft has had to adapt to the market and isn't able to define what people want any more in various areas.
What matters a lot more now is the power consumption and performance/power ratio. AMD's new processors look interesting, for instance, but there's a big gap between their power numbers and the kind of numbers you see for SoCs being delivered in huge volumes for things like phones. And even Intel's offerings have punished AMD for that in recent years.
I imagine that AMD wants to exercise its option to make x86-compatible products as much as possible, given that few other companies are legally clearly allowed to do so, but that could easily make the company oblivious to opportunities elsewhere.
Paul