X86 and its Future — an HPC/AI point of view -

Part 1. The Glorious X86

My mobile pushed the following picture to myself, which triggered my first reaction: “Gosh, what happened?”

Immediately, my mind, an natural intelligence, not an artificial one, linked this with the news that I have just read a few weeks ago, which reported Mr. Pat Gelsinger is ready to cut 15,000 jobs and separate the foundry from the design. The thought that AMD is buying Intel flashed in my mind!

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/october-2024-intel-news.html

After I’ve gone through the announcement, my natural intelligence starts to question: what are they trying to do there? What is this advisory group?

My natural intelligence rewinds backward quickly to the 70s and 80s, and also early 90s, the old good time of CPU architectures: That is a period more crowded than today, there are all sorts of CPU architectures, both RISC and CISC, such as X86, POWER, SPARC, MIPS, just to name a few big names important for High Performance Computing (AI was not a hot topic yet at that time), because they were used to build supercomputers earlier or later in those periods by Intel, IBM, SUN, and SGI. (No, I didn’t forget the vector processor, my natural intelligence voluntarily removed them from the list.) Regarding the different CPU architectures, Wikipedia has a very good summary here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology

Most of the time, the marketplace is cruel. Most of those CPU architectures (instruction sets), disappeared or had been marginalized, except the killer-microprocessor X86, alongside the POWER, and the ARM. The killer-micro “killed” most of the others for one reason or the other, and conquered the High Performance Computing niche with the mile stone project ASCI Red, which it dominates till now (in-between, IBM POWER withdrew from the HPC market place)……

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg

With a glorious history, has the biggest market share in data centers and PCs world wide, X86–64’s position seems not shakable, then what the hell are they doing there? Do we need this X86 ecosystem advisory group? Aren’t Intel and AMD duopoly of the market place? Isn’t true that all the system vendors are following their each move? Why do they warry about the future?

The announcement said the advisory group aims to “shape” the X86’s future, “through a more unified set of instructions and architectural interfaces”, with one of the outcomes being “to enhance software consistency and interfaces across X86 products offerings from Intel and AMD”. It seems this advisory group is only here to settle the differences between Intel and AMD, anyway, this is not so understandable by my natural intelligence, I have to search the answers elsewhere……