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Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that
by a1369209993 6y ago
Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that they've achieved better feature density than what would be expected from where they are on the Moores law curve.
Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)
- DuskStar 6y ago> they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon. Arguably AMD did the exact opposite - lower prices via splitting a processor into multiple pieces of silicon. (Chip price scale exponentially with area at the high end)
- a1369209993 6y agoWell, my point there was that a 64-core CPU is not (significantly) higher performance than 64 single-core CPUs, so multi-core is - if a improvement at all - a price improvement, not a performance improvement, but fair point about the price-vs-area scaling.
- ido 6y agoSure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture Hasn't x86 been basically RISC-like internally since the pentium-pro/amd k6? Is the translation layer that big of a hindrance?
- blattimwind 6y agoISA doesn't matter nearly as much as people think, unless it's something really different (like VLIW/EPIC/...).
- wolfgke 6y ago> Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA Have you looked at the encoding of Thumb-2 (T32) and particularly A64 (their newly designed instruction set for 64 bit)? Their instruction encoding is in my opinion much more convoluted than x86.