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I think the M1 will wake Amazon up (if they aren't already) to the incredible advantage of being able to customize a CPU to your needs. See the discussion abou
by EricE 6y ago
I think the M1 will wake Amazon up (if they aren't already) to the incredible advantage of being able to customize a CPU to your needs. See the discussion about speed gains Apple got from accelerating common calls in their OS. You will never convince a bin part/least common denominator manufacturer like Intel or AMD to do that.
Just because other ARM cores suck today doesn't mean they have to forever. Apple's don't. They took it seriously. Perhaps Amazon is too and we are just at the start of their journey. It took Apple over 10 years to get to where we are with the M1.
You cited one of the significant contributors to performance - the 8-wide decode. x86 is hamstrung to 4 because of legacy. We aren't at the beginning of the story with ARM for performance, but ARM certainly isn't nearly as hamstrung out the gate by the legacy of x86 either.
Heck, is there anyone making a pure 64 bit x64 chip? There's a bunch of overhead right there.
Your right that ARM isn't magical - but ARM does have the potential for significantly more runway and headroom. The trade off is backwards compatibility. As most code continues to move further and further away from direct hardware interaction, is that backwards compatibility as valuable overall as it was 20 years ago? 10 years ago?
I guess we will find out :)
- theevilsharpie 6y ago> I think the M1 will wake Amazon up (if they aren't already) to the incredible advantage of being able to customize a CPU to your needs. See the discussion about speed gains Apple got from accelerating common calls in their OS. You will never convince a bin part/least common denominator manufacturer like Intel or AMD to do that. AMD has a semi-custom division that will do exactly that for anyone capable of paying: https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-solutions https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-solutions
- kllrnohj 6y ago> See the discussion about speed gains Apple got from accelerating common calls in their OS. You will never convince a bin part/least common denominator manufacturer like Intel or AMD to do that. Of course you will because that happens all the time. How do you think we ended up with VT-x and friends? Intel took a use case that reached enough usage and added specialized instructions for it. This has happened a ton over the years on x86. See also AES-NI for a more application-specific addition. In addition to obviously the huge amount of SIMD experimentation. This is not fruit Apple discovered. AMD & Intel haven't been leaving this performance on the table the last 20+ years. Hell the constant addition of instructions for certain workloads is a major reason x86 is as huge & complex as it is.