Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market::“They’ve been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business.”

  • BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    It will take at least another 10 years to get a majority of the market off of x86 with the 20+ years of legacy software bound to it. Not to mention all of the current gen x86 CPUs that will still be usable 10 years from now.

    • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, we just need some sort of compatibility layer. Direct porting isn’t completely required yet.

    • Patch@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      You don’t really need the majority of the market to have moved before things start to get tricky for Intel. They’re a very much non-diversified company; the entire house is bet on x86. They’ve only just started dabbling in discrete GPUs, despite having made integrated GPU SOCs for years. Other than a bit of contract fabbing, almost every penny they make is from x86.

      If ARM starts to make inroads into the laptop/desktop space and RISC-V starts to take a chunk of the server market, the bottom could fall out of Intel’s business model fast.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure about that. If for example the EU says “for the environment, you may not use chips that use X watts/Ghz” or something, x86 might be out of the game pretty quickly. Also, becoming market leader doesn’t mean old hardware, it’s the new hardware. I bet by 2030, the majority of chipsets sold will be either ARM or RISC-V. AMD did make an ARM rival with the 7840U, but with their entry in to ARM in 2025, it’s not preposterous to believe the ARM ecosystem will pick up steam.

      Also, recompiling opensource stuff for ARM is probably not going to be a huge issue. clang and gcc already support ARM as a compilation target, and unless there’s x86 specific code in python or ruby interpreters, UI frameworks like Qt and GTK, they should be able to be compiled without much issue. If proprietary code can’t keep up or won’t keep up, the most likely outcome will be x86 emulators or the dumping of money into QEMU or stuff like Rosetta for windows.

      Anyway, I’m talking out of my ass here as I don’t write C/C++ and don’t have to deal with cross-compilation, nor do I have any experience in hardware. It’s all just a feeling.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I think it’s safe to say Apple has proved that wrong three times.
      When they switched from Motorola to Power, then from Power to Intel, and latest from Intel to Arm.
      If necessary software will be quickly modified, or it will run well enough on compatibility layers.

      The switch can happen very fast for new hardware. The old systems may stay around for a while, but the previous CPU architecture can be fazed out very quickly in new systems. Apple has proven that.