Why x86 doesn’t need to die

Hackaday recently published an article titled Why x86 Needs to Die" - the latest addition in a long-running RISC vs CISC debate. Rather than x86 needing to die, I believe the RISC vs CISC debate needs to die. It should've died a long time ago. And by long, I mean really long.

About a decade ago, a college professor asked if I knew about the RISC vs CISC debate. I did not. When I asked further, he said RISC aimed for simpler instructions in the hope that simpler hardware implementations would run faster. While my memory of this short, ancient conversation is not perfect, I do recall that he also mentioned the whole debate had already become irrelevant by then: ISA differences were swept aside by the resources a company could put behind designing a chip. This is the fundamental reason why the RISC vs CISC debate remains irrelevant today. Architecture design and implementation matter so much more than the instruction set in play.

Chips and Cheese

The number of instruction sets killed by x86 is high, and the number of times people have wrongly predicted the death of x86 - most recently, after Apple announced its first ARM processors - is even higher. It seems people are still holding on to what x86 was like in the '80s and early '90s, completely forgetting that the x86 we have today is a very, very different beast. As Chips and Cheese details in this article, the differences between x86 and, say, ARM, aren't nearly as big and fundamental as people think they are.

I'm a huge fan of computers running anything other than x86, not because I hate or dislike the architecture, but because I like things that are different, and the competition they bring. That's why I love POWER9 machines, and can't wait for competitive non-Apple ARM machines to come along. If you try to promote non-x86 ISAs out of hatred or dislike of x86, history shows you'll eventually lose.