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night862 | 1 year ago
I've thought about this quite a bit since I responded to a commenter who was somewhat was amazed at an ARM supercomputer quite a while ago about this subject. I decided to comment about this a lot more since it is my option to do so. cheers They had posited that ARM would take over, mostly recognizing the very low-power and fairly inexpensive ARM SoC in phone handsets and routers.
This thought didn't sit quite right with me. I considered the power requirements and architectural needs of a larger computer system. With many, many PCIe lanes or some other interconnect, rapid storage commitments and the very responsive performance required by a "serious" architecture will cause all of these subsystems to continually draw current and dissipate heat. This is in stark contrast to power efficient computing devices like iPhone or ARM macbooks, and in my mind seems likely to eat the "gains" that people generally associate with these devices.
The piece missing in my understanding is about the semiconductor industry and the electronics field in general, and is particularly interesting to me, because many of the highest-tier operators outsource %100~ of their production to TSMC or the other. There isn't anything magic or even very good about x86 architecture. I'm fairly certain the instruction set no longer maps to hardware in most cases, rather more analogous to function calls in typical software applications.
Every now and then I like to reflect that iPhone came out in 2007. My car is older than that, and we were well on our way during the election of Barack Obama. And while legends hold that Power still exists, I had long forgotten about ALPHA or SPARC by then.
Imagine for yourself this earth-shattering shift: What happens when the basic lithography processes, assembly practices, and validation procedures become such that for similar trade offs, any advanced hobbyist could order a wafer from future fab houses similar to JLPCB, Scaleway, OSH Park, TSMCWAY, or whatever on-demand? Like, what if you could just pay $$$$ to buy a wafer that you designed and then sell 14nm UltraSPARC on tindie?
bhouston|1 year ago
Yes, I believe this is called micro operations and have been around for a while now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_microcode#P6_and_later_m...