3 ms·
What portion of x86 transistors are dedicated to supporting the bad instruction set design?
by jules 16y ago
What portion of x86 transistors are dedicated to supporting the bad instruction set design?
- protomyth 16y agoI seem to remember from one article that is was the same amount of transistors as the older ARM cores (not the A8 or A9). This is a pretty big anchor to overcome. previous on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051
- tedunangst 16y agoLess than 10% of the transistors dedicated to cache.
- m0th87 16y agoThat's an interesting question that I don't think anyone would be able to quantify, just because performance is so subjective to the applications that are run. In an interview, Alan Kay remarked that bad processor architectures degrade performance by three orders of magnitude [1]. If he's right, that's a pretty hefty tax. But I don't see anyone being able to prove or disprove his hypothesis. Maybe most of the tax is an inevitable byproduct of increasingly complex chipsets. [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 around 1/3 of the way in