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"ARM and x86 are simply instruction sets (RISC and CISC, respectively). There's nothing about either set that makes one or the other more efficient." This seni
by chisleu 11y ago
"ARM and x86 are simply instruction sets (RISC and CISC, respectively). There's nothing about either set that makes one or the other more efficient."
This senior editor should go back to reporting on vaporizers and video games.
Newer Intel CPUs are even using RISC cores with wrappers for CISC functions because it is more efficient.
- santaclaus 11y ago> Newer Intel CPUs are even using RISC cores with wrappers for CISC functions because it is more efficient. Not even newer chips. The Pentium Pro was released in what, 1996?
- signa11 11y ago> Newer Intel CPUs are even using RISC cores with wrappers for CISC functions because it is more efficient. this has been going on for quite a while now, iirc approx 20 years or thereabouts...
- chisleu 11y agoAnd x86 started ~20 years before that? Thanks for the info though.
- Veedrac 11y agoThe opposite is increasingly true, too - micro-op and macro-op fusion joins multiple instructions into one. There's no clear-cut line no more.
- threeseed 11y ago> no more ? I can't remember there being a clean line for decades now.
- millstone 11y agoThe implementations may have converged but there's still hard differences in the ISA. RISC (including ARM) has fixed-width instructions, x86 has variable width. RISC (including ARM again) is load-store, x86 allows memory to be sources or destinations. So ARM can have simpler decoder logic, if nothing else.
- Veedrac 11y agoSure, but it's not true that CISC machines are just proxies to RISC ones.
- mcphage 11y agoNot only that—when people speak of ARM vs. x86, they aren't really talking about the instruction sets at all—they're talking about the processor lines that have been developed and evolved over period of many years.