<story><title>x86 is dead, long live x86</title><url>https://engineering.mercari.com/en/blog/entry/20230731-x86-is-dead-long-live-x86/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slfnflctd</author><text>When I think about how long chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now), it is hard to conceive of a world where there isn&amp;#x27;t a significant presence of x86 activity for the rest of my life.&lt;p&gt;The majority of &amp;#x27;the market&amp;#x27; may go elsewhere, but for a gazillion reasons, x86 will not be disappearing for quite a while.  At this point it would honestly surprise me if we didn&amp;#x27;t at least have high quality emulation available until the end of the human race as we know it.&lt;p&gt;Sure, we&amp;#x27;ve probably lost most of the software ever written on it, but a whole lot of interesting artifacts from a key transition point for our species still remain locked up in this architecture.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tracker1</author><text>Given the new 128-core AMD server parts are on-par with ARM in terms of power efficiency and capable of more raw compute, it may even grow a bit.&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s lots of room for ARM, Risc-V and x86_64 in the future.  There&amp;#x27;s reasons to support any of them over the others.  And given how well developer tool are getting support across them all, it may actually grow a lot.  I think the down side is a lot of the secondary compute accelerators, such as what intel is pushing and what the various ARM and Risc-V implementations include in practice.&lt;p&gt;The further from a common core you get, the more complex porting or cross platform tooling gets.  Even if for big gains in some parts.  For example, working on personal&amp;#x2F;hobby projects in ARM boards that aren&amp;#x27;t RPi is sometimes an exercise in frustration, with no mainline support at all.</text></comment>
<story><title>x86 is dead, long live x86</title><url>https://engineering.mercari.com/en/blog/entry/20230731-x86-is-dead-long-live-x86/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slfnflctd</author><text>When I think about how long chips like the 6502 have still been in active use (almost 50 years now), it is hard to conceive of a world where there isn&amp;#x27;t a significant presence of x86 activity for the rest of my life.&lt;p&gt;The majority of &amp;#x27;the market&amp;#x27; may go elsewhere, but for a gazillion reasons, x86 will not be disappearing for quite a while.  At this point it would honestly surprise me if we didn&amp;#x27;t at least have high quality emulation available until the end of the human race as we know it.&lt;p&gt;Sure, we&amp;#x27;ve probably lost most of the software ever written on it, but a whole lot of interesting artifacts from a key transition point for our species still remain locked up in this architecture.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riffic</author><text>A thing&amp;#x27;s future longevity can sometimes be predicted by how long it&amp;#x27;s already been around.</text></comment>