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Nice article. Unbelievable how simple this chip is. Try reverse engineering an ARM Cortex, Intel i7 or a Geforce 10 GPU, you'll never understand how it works co
by nom 9y ago
Nice article. Unbelievable how simple this chip is. Try reverse engineering an ARM Cortex, Intel i7 or a Geforce 10 GPU, you'll never understand how it works completely, even if if you have a billion dollars to spend.
- kens 9y agoWell, the ARM-1 is simple enough to understand [1], so the ARM Cortex might be comprehensible, depending on how much crazy stuff they added. But I suspect even at Intel nobody entirely understands the i7. [1] http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering-arm1-ancestor-of.html http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering-arm1-ances...
- nom 9y agoYou're right, I just checked out the older ARM Cortex, like M0 and such, and they don't look very complex. It probably get's messy once you have more advanced features like a cache, branch prediction, power saving etc. I really don't want to see the internals of a modern Intel/AMD CPU, or even an IBM one. Nobody can ever fully understand how it works starting at the lowest level, there are just too many features in there.
- pm215 9y agoBear in mind that 'Cortex' covers every modern ARM chip right the way from a tiny (~12,000 gates) microcontroller like the Cortex-M0 up to high performance 64 bit designs like the Cortex-A73, so it isn't a label that tells you anything about complexity...