Whenever the transition to ARM came up here before, there were always a lot of people who seemed to think that x86 compatibility would be a huge issue. And if t

Whenever the transition to ARM came up here before, there were always a lot of people who seemed to think that x86 compatibility would be a huge issue. And if they did emulation, the x86 the performance would certainly be awful! When I claimed that they could probably reach performance parity, or maybe even beat the x86 performance of the Intel chips they were replacing, they didn't believe me. I was thinking that they'd probably add custom instructions for x86 emulation, I haven't heard if that's the case or not. Would be interesting to find out. Given the complexity of a modern x86-64 frontend, it was never that far-fetched to think that a combination of world-class JIT and a bit of custom silicon could have a negligible overhead compared to a pure silicon solution. After that it was mostly a question of how good the CPU core and technology node was. And Anandtech, among others, had already shown they were well on track to beating Intel there.