Beginning of the end for X86

The first PC I bought back in 1986 had a 16 bit Intel processor. I replaced it with one that could run the full Intel 8080 and 8086 instruction set and used it to compile and debug code for Sinclair Spectrum machines that used Zilog Z80 processors that ran a superset of the 8080 instruction set.

Later, AMD began to create devices that ran the same instruction set as the Intel processors and the war of shorter cycle times, more compact instruction decoders and pipelining began in earnest.

Later still, Apple gave up the PowerPC chips in favour of Intel and the latest generation of MAC was born that you could actually install Windows on if you felt so inclined.

Today AMD have announced that they will be making processors based on the ARM chip designs that have been steadily chuntering along in the background making more and more inroads into the devices all around us. The first ARM machine I ever saw was an Acorn Archimedes owned by my friend Bruce Mardle (Yes, he of Carmageddon fame) and I was very impressed at the time with the power of the RISC architecture. It clearly blew away my PC in benchmarks that Bruce ran. I was a little jealous of that but realised that the PC was a more flexible platform for commercial work.

Today however, I have an iPad, an iPhone, several Android phones a vanilla Tablet thing, the usual complement of Mac and PC devices and I am once again utterly stunned by the ARM's capabilities. My most recent aquisition, an LG E400 phone running Android 2.3.3 (I want the compatibility not the flash) is quite capable of running openGL software at 25-30 frames per second.

AMD's announcement shows that the RISC design that has endured all the changes of the last, damn, nearly thirty years! and is still coming out favourably on speed but particularly power consumption and cycles-per-watt calculations that shows it as a winner. Microsoft have seen the writing on the wall and have versions of Windows that run nicely on ARM designs. It seems now that the next generations of server farms will also be powered by ARM designs.

If I had a hat I'd take it off to the enduring and speedy little RISC processor. Bruce, you were right all along.