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It's not my contention that RISC designs are necessarily faster/more power efficient/etc. It's just that the x86 design is, from an engineering perspective, a m
by pcwalton 7y ago
It's not my contention that RISC designs are necessarily faster/more power efficient/etc. It's just that the x86 design is, from an engineering perspective, a mess.
> Since long ago, even those processors that started as RISC got more and more instructions and started to worry about having them encoded with less bits.
x86-64 is not very space efficient, because of all the REX prefixes. Look at the comparative sizes of AArch64 and x86-64 binaries if you don't believe me.
- fmakunbound 7y ago> from an engineering perspective It's pretty awesome. Remember engineering doesn't happen in a void. It's influenced all sorts of shit including economics, existing investments etc.
- blattimwind 7y agoFrom an engineering perspective it is hugely impressive that a 2020 AMD or Intel chip can run an x86 app compiled in '92 at something like 100 times the speed.
- mumblemumble 7y agoFrom an engineering perspective, these two assertions that have been prefixed with the qualifier, "from an engineering perspective," are entirely compatible.
- lallysingh 7y ago28 years later, the speedup on their selected representation is 100x? That seems low for such a long time.