Arm Is The New RISC/Unix, RISC-V Is The New Arm

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www.nextplatform.com, Sept. 22, 2022 – 

When computer architectures change in the datacenter, the attack always comes from the bottom. And after more than a decade of sustained struggle, Arm Ltd and its platoons of licensees have finally stormed the glass house – well, more of a data warehouse (literally) than a cathedral with windows to show off technological prowess as early mainframe datacenters were – and are firmly encamped on the no longer tiled, but concrete, floors.

For modern corporate computing, Day One of the Big Data Bang comes in April 1964 with the launch of the System/360 mainframe. Yes, people were farting around with punch cards and tabulating machines for 75 years and had electro-mechanical computation, and even true electronic computation, before then. But the System/360 showed us all what a computer architecture with hardware and software co-design, with breadth and depth and binary compatibility across a wide range of distinct processors, really looks like. And by and large, excepting a change in character formatting from EBCDIC to ASCII, a modern computer (including the smartphone in your hand) conceptually looks like a System/360 designed by Gene Amdahl that had a love child with a Cray-1 designed by Seymour Cray.

But that is not the point.

What is the point is that as the richest companies in the world adopted the System/360 to create back office systems, getting rid of a lot of manual processes that come with running a Fortune 500 or Global 2000 enterprise (thus eliminating a huge amount of human costs) while also allowing for data to be stored and used on a scale never seen before to actually drive the business instead of just watching it.

WAVES UPON WAVES

And this first wave of true corporate computing made IBM fabulously rich and the bluest of the blue chips stocks that the world has ever seen. And will ever see. And hence there were so many clones of the System/360 architecture.

Digital Equipment, an upstart maker of proprietary – and interactive – minicomputers established in 1958, before the mainframe era started and aiming its wares at the technical market, was having none of that. With the launch of the PDP-11 in 1970 and the VAX in 1977, high performance programming became affordable for the masses, and a wave or proprietary minicomputers came out of everywhere, swamping the mainframe on all sides and doing new kinds of work. (Cheaper computing always drives new workloads. AI is but the latest example.) In response, IBM had three different minicomputer lines itself, and this wave democratized corporate computing across small and medium businesses in a cost-effective way that a mainframe never could.

The success of the proprietary minicomputers spawned a new breed of server makers, using computationally efficient RISC processors and operating systems that hewed to the Unix standard to various degrees that started off in scientific workstations in the mid-1980s.

Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and a small British company called Acorn RISC Machines ("from little acorns big oak trees grow") led the RISC/Unix charge, and now the mainframes and minicomputers were under attack again. The attack was so successful that eventually IBM, DEC, Fujitsu, NEC, Bull, Siemens, and everyone who was selling systems had a RISC/Unix line. RISC/Unix peaked at 45 percent of the revenue of the worldwide server market in the early dot-com years – every company had a Unix backend with an Oracle relational database driving their Web sites.

But several years before that moment, the Intel X86 PC on our desktops got tipped on its side and jumped into the datacenter. Intel expanded and hardened the X86 architecture, which was not initially as capacious or reliable as the RISC chips made by Sun, HP, Data General, ARM, and others. It didn't need to be as computing on the Web was more distributed. What the Web-scale world needed was for datacenter compute to be was cheaper, and the X86 architecture was certainly cheaper than the RISC/Unix machines of the time.

The relative affordability and absolute compatibility of the X86 architecture literally transformed the world. By the time the Great Recession was roaring in early 2009, X86 servers accounted for about half of the $10 billion in quarterly sales of systems worldwide. And then the next wave of Internet innovation hit, and these non-X86 architectures dwindled ever so slowly – still including pretty big IBM mainframe and minicomputer businesses, oddly enough – to about $2.5 billion per quarter, but the X86 market rose exponentially to be between $20 billion and $25 billion a quarter these days. And that is why the X86 architecture accounted 99 percent of server shipments and 93 percent of revenues at its peak in 2019, according to data from IDC.

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