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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • That’s not really how it works actually. You got sort of the idea that ARM is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture but the reduction here refers more to the variety of instructions rather than amount of instructions. In fact ARM typically requires more instructions since there’s less varieity.

    But that really doesn’t mean much in modern processor architectures since all modern processors decode assembly instructions into micro operations internally and execute them. Each instruction and their corresponding micro operations may have a different number of cpu cycles to execute so it’s not something that’s so easily calculatable.

    The age of RISC vs CISC (x86, etc) debates has largely ended because of how modern CPUs work. The difference between instruction sets mostly just come down to the language that compilers translate to.












  • I think AMD should also get back into ARM and low-power devices. The snapdragon laptops have made a big splash, and that market could explode once the software is refined, and AMD should be poised to dominate it. They already have ARM products, they just need to make low-power, high performance products for the laptop market.

    They don’t need to go with ARM. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the x86 instruction set that prevents them from making low power processors, it’s just that it doesn’t make sense for them to build an architecture for that market since the margins for servers are much higher. Even then, the Z1 Extreme got pretty close to Apple’s M2 processors.

    Lunar Lake has also shown that x86 can match or beat Qualcomm’s ARM chips while maintaining full compatibility with all x86 applications.