3 ms·

I think one of the main advantages was to get onto the latest (or newer..) ARM instruction set, which I recall did increase performance Vs 32bit chips/instructi

• pawadu 10y ago
  Yes, but you also lost a number of useful instructions (such as LDM). Also, many 3rd party implementations already incorporated at least a good subset of those accelerated instructions. So you could (and people did) create synthetic benchmarks where one architecture was 200% faster than the other. Now, I am not saying that 64-bit was just fluff. The new design has a much nicer pipeline (specially thanks to the instructions they removed) which is MUCH better suited for things like speculative execution. But the implementation to make use of this wasn't really there until very recently. Here is a fun fact for you: the 64-bit Cortex-A53 and the 32-bit Cortex-A7 are 80% the same CPU. What does that tell you about the first generation of 64-bit devices?