When I think about how long chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now), it is hard to conceive of a world where there isn't a significant presence of x86 activity for the rest of my life.<p>The majority of 'the market' may go elsewhere, but for a gazillion reasons, x86 will not be disappearing for quite a while. At this point it would honestly surprise me if we didn't at least have high quality emulation available until the end of the human race as we know it.<p>Sure, we've probably lost most of the software ever written on it, but a whole lot of interesting artifacts from a key transition point for our species still remain locked up in this architecture.
We did a migration from GCP's Intel based E2 instances to AMD's T2D instances and saw huge 30% savings in overall compute! It is similar amount of savings folks got from switching to AWS Graviton instances, so looks like AMD might keep the x86 ISA still alive
I would just like to point out that that is not how the saying goes. When Queen Elizabeth died it would have been “the queen is dead, long live the king”, as the dead thing is the predecessor and the living thing is the one that follows it
I've recently switch from VPS with Intel to physical server with latest AMD Zen4.<p>Single thread performance blow my mind with scores like 4000.<p>Without change a single line of code = performance was 10x than before.
As a separate data point, I briefly switched one of our servers from an r6a.4xlarge (AMD Epyc) to a r6i.4xlarge (Intel Xeon) and saw a 30% speedup in our number-heavy compute task. I would love to find out why (MKL or AVX512? Do I need to recompile numpy?), but for the time being it pays to stay on Xeon.<p>We eventually switched to m-instances since that fits our compute/memory usage better when we’re at limits.
If you wanna have additional insights, head over my Medium ports with SPEC CPU 2017 results.
<a href="https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-cpu-performance-in-the-eyes-of-spec-cpu-2017-part-3-a88642f70ed" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-cpu-pe...</a>
x86 would be dead if ARM ISA offered like at least 20% perf boost or energy savings.<p>But since ISA doesn't imply perf. characteristics itself, then x86 will be alive.<p>The hard part in changing hardware's stuff is getting software to adjust.
"The macOS (OS X) version of this game does not work on macOS Catalina (version 10.15) or later due to the removal of support for 32-bit-only apps"<p>And that's why x86 is good.