Plot twist: Intel and AMD team up to outmaneuver ARM in a bid to continue x86 hegemony

Think of it as Marvel Rivals coming together but in real life. Intel and AMD have announced that they and other partners are coming together to form an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (EAG). Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and his counterpart at AMD, Dr. Lisa Su came together on stage at the Lenovo Tech World 2024 event in Bellevue, Washington sharing this development.

The formation of this EAG for the "world's most widely used computing architecture" comes in the wake of increasing threat to x86 hegemony from ARM and similar architectures like RISC-V. Other members of this group include Broadcom, Dell, Google, HP Enterprise, HP Inc., Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat along with luminaries Tim Sweeney and Linus Torvalds.

"We proudly stand together with AMD", said Gelsinger as he underscores how the x86 architecture has evolved over the decades. Dr. Su said that the EAG will "ensure that x86 continues evolving as the computing platform of choice for both developers and customers" and serves to "provide direction" on future x86 innovations. According to a joint press release, proposed outcomes of this EAG include:

• Enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features.
• Simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD.
• Enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications.

This collaboration couldn't have come at a better time. ARM IP can be licensed by any chipmaker while RISC-V is loyalty-free. With only Intel and AMD having the rights to use the x86, it is about time that these semiconductor giants came onboard to keep advancing this instruction set architecture (ISA).

Intel has been toying with the idea of x86S, a slimmed down version of x86 that is fully 64-bit with no legacy 16-bit stuff. Shouldn't that be called x64, then? Although used interchangeably, the whole x86_64 nomenclature is quite confusing (similar to recent Intel and AMD CPU naming, ahem).

64-bit is actually an extension or subset of the x86 architecture referred by AMD as AMD64 or x86_64 in Linux speak. AMD64 is the prevalent 64-bit code today, which is why you will find many drivers and OS files carrying "amd64" in their filenames. Intel has its own Intel 64 (not the same as Itanium or IA-64), while Microsoft explicitly distinguishes x86 code from x64.

Perhaps, the EAG can start by standardizing this wonky nomenclature and disparate implementations of x86_64. We might also see AMD and other collaborators work on further augmenting x86S down the line.

While ARM-based IPs like Apple's M series chips and Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite lineup have proven to be extremely viable options given their performance-per-Watt gains and smartphone-like responsiveness, x86 is too deeply ingrained in worldwide computing to be written off any time soon.

Although Apple M series chips continue to show significant efficiency advantages, both Intel and AMD have proved that x86 can also achieve good performance at lower power with Lunar Lake and Ryzen Strix Point, respectively. Intel even said in a recent interview to us that it is not the ISA that actually dictates power, rather the transistors that increase with core counts.

From being each other's second-source suppliers of x86 in the 80s to breaching agreements, suing and countersuing each other to gain market share, to even working together to create the ill-fated Kaby Lake-G CPUs in 2017, Intel and AMD's rivalry has shaped the PC landscape as we know it today.

It has finally taken a third player to bring these semiconductor behemoths to the talking table. Interesting times ahead for sure.