Intel And AMD Make X Less Of A Variable For X86 Processors

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2024-10-16 12:00:06

One of the oldest ideas in humanity – and one that may have predated language as we know it – is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Another adage is that he who has the gold makes the rules, and in the datacenter market these days, the Super 8 hyperscalers and cloud builders have all of the gold and they increasingly are setting the rules.

These are two of several reasons why, we think, that Intel and AMD – companies that do not usually refer to each other by name but simply say “our competitor” – are burying the hatchet and forming what they call the X86 Ecosystem Advisory Group to shape a collective and collaborative future for the X86 instruction set and the processors that use it.

While the ARM and RISC-V collectives have standard bearers that keep chip designers from wandering off and extending the instruction sets of these architectures in unique ways that break compatibility, the X86 architecture has had no such standard bearer because Intel was under the distinct impression that no one else should be allowed to clone its instruction set architecture or its processors. This is something that the courts eventually decided was not the case, which is why we need an X86 standard today.

The history between Intel and AMD is long and bitter, and that makes the agreement today all the more remarkable. And is shows how a united front of X86 CPU makers against the Arm collective and the rising RISC-V tide is vital to the future of the X86 architecture. Besides, if there is one thing that neither AMD nor Intel want to do, it is make Arm processors. That said, we would not be surprised to see one of them – or both – shift to RISC-V at some point to counter Arm. IBM has System z mainframe motors and Power compute engines for different purposes and at very different price points.