| AsGryffynn said: Throughout the 30 odds years technology has existed in it's popular form, x86 has endured numerous adversarial instruction sets, from RISC to PowerPC and Motorola. I believe this instruction set will never end, but Intel needs to decide whether they will allow it to be released to the public or die. |
At the moment Intel, AMD and VIA are the companies with x86 licenses... VIA pretty much sticks to niche' markets by leveraging Cyrix and Centaur (WinChip) derived technologies for it's Nano chips.
Transmeta tried a different approach by leveraging code morphing with it's VLIW "x86 compatible" processors... But failed to gain headway for various reasons with it's Crusoe and Efficeon chips.
However... We need to keep in mind that x86 chips today from the likes of Intel and AMD aren't really CISC processors anymore... They are actually RISC... They do this by dynamically translating complex instructions into simpler RISC-like micro instructions due to efficiency reasons.
Other companies have tried to leverage binary translation to achieve full ARM or x86 compatibility.. Notably Snapdragon and Microsoft with it's surface devices... And Intel with Atom to allow Android+ARM software ecosystem to operate on Atom x86 SoC's.
Unless Zhaoxin combined with VIA manages to make headway (unlikely) we are likely stuck with the AMD/Intel duopoly for the x86 market with ARM encroaching in x86. (I.E. Servers/Workstations.)
Is what it is. If ARM offers better price/performance/efficiency, then I welcome it.
Intel and AMD both have ARM licenses... And that actually puts nVidia in a pretty enviable long-term position as they will be the proud owners of ARM.
Either way, plenty of approaches can be taken to retain backwards compatibility irrespective of CPU ISA, it's really up to manufacturers.
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