X86 Needs To Die

TLDR: More complex does not mean slower.

@ThePrimeTime this was S-tier material! Please have Casey back.

just got talked out of buying a Washer Dryer Combo

I looked it up on wikipedia. It's called a die, because:

" Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) or other semiconductor (such as GaAs) through processes such as photolithography. The wafer is cut (diced) into many pieces, each containing one copy of the circuit. Each of these pieces is called a die."

Professor of computer science here. Nice work. I loved Casey's exposition. I think Casey is being too conservative in his criticism. The idea that fewer instructions is better is an argument from 1980s RISC proponents -- excusable in 1980 but today we know that's simply not true. If fewer instructions were always better, we would have observed RISC architectures -- the ones that people actually used back in the day -- such as the one used on the PowerPC stay largely static. That never happened, the instruction sets and number of transistors increased on the PPC from generation to generation. The original author also misses the fact that even if we are sacrificing die space to implement instructions you can't just consider the consumption of die space "bad". Implementing something on die can result in a huge performance increase. When x86 ISA was extended to add AES operations (first...second? generation i7's?) The result was a 10x improvement in performance. Given the massive use of AES, who in their right mind would consider that a poor use of die space. Also, while I don't know for certain the etymology of "die" in cpu developent. I suspect it's attributable to the use of the term in machining. Where it can be used for any purpose made tool. i.e., A letter from a type case in a old-fashioned printing press would be called a "die". Some of those were eventually made using photo-lithographic processes.

As someone who is currently learning x86 ASM at college right now, I feel like I've learned more by Casey in one hour than I have all semester. Please bring him back, awesome content! Full-time content creator Prime has so far not disappointed.

As a chip designer I would like to point out that when any article like this comes up about dropping x86, what they really mean is dropping the x87 floating point extensions (the one that is a stack architecture and runs in 80 bit precision mode), The is specifically what the new Intel spec is aimed at killing. For those of you interested in why just think about how you would do register renaming when your register numbers are all stack based.

I an ancient too. Programming professionally since 1988 :D

Are we also going to get a "X86 doesn't need to die" with Primes face photoshoped onto Mercy from overwatch as the thumbnail

The person who wrote the article about risc-v taking piece of x86 forgets to mention that no company who makes risc-v processors use it vanilla, si-five not only design soc architecture they develop extensions (more complex instructions) to solve the problems they need. Maybe tiny microcontrollers use vanilla risc-v that's what makes them cost 20 cents (besides free isa), but for high performance computing they does similar stuff ARM/x86.

At the washer dryer and washer/dryer analogy, i thought he was going to say the washer dryer combo was faster because I always forget to swap the laundry to the dryer when it finishes... So it ends up taking like 2 hours extra.

It was a good analogy though, I actually didnt even know about micro ops before this, but it makes a lot of sense.

You know a person is really smart when they can break down complex concepts to other people. The pipeline explanation was chef's kiss

I‘m dyslexic. So I have a dyslexic dude reading for me lmaooo.

This video was exceptional! Loved diving into the weeds. Also, kudos to your guest for having that board setup. Super helpful and so awesome!

I've wondered from time to time if it'd be easier to just write μops directly and peal back the abstraction, but Casey explaining it as compression made it suddenly make sense: CPUs are much more limited by data transfer than processing.

Casey was so disappointed when he didn't understand why little-endian was better, and also didn't care enough to understand it.

Casey Muratori is on a short list of people who motivate me to keep learning. It is inspiring to see people this knowledgeable about the subjects I love.

One thing I think the author of the article doesn't seem to get, is that if you follow the arguments they actually make to their logical conclusions, you don't end up with RISC-V or ARM, you'd more likely end up reinventing Itanium.

"I'm ancient" yeah sure "I was professionally programing since 1995" well you program longer than I'm alive, you earned that title

Washer / Dryer metaphor for pipelining nailed it.