HN
The ISA Doesn't Matter Where It Counts
x86's lock-in is real. It's just furthest from the GPU.
AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Arm, and Qualcomm are all selling datacenter CPUs into the AI buildout. The previous piece mapped them across five sockets orbiting the GPU and ranked those sockets by value: coherent host, standard host, thinker, doer, traditional cloud.
The coherent host is the most valuable. The traditional cloud CPU is the least.
Many readers asked if it matters whether the CPU is x86 or Arm.
Honestly, not as much as made out to be. But let’s go socket by socket.
The ISA is the language a CPU speaks. Software gets compiled into that language, and a chip can only run code written for its dialect.