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How much does the ISA actually matter in a modern CPU? Is there any advantage at all in creating a proprietary ISA? For political reasons: The threat of US san
by throwaway4good 6y ago
How much does the ISA actually matter in a modern CPU? Is there any advantage at all in creating a proprietary ISA?
For political reasons: The threat of US sanctions and China's drive to become indepedent of Western technology it makes sense not to go for ARM, X86 or RISCV. But from a pure technical perspective (ignoring software compability issues), can you actually make a modern general purpose CPU better by designing the ISA from scratch?
- sumanthvepa 6y agoYes. If you design the ISA carefully, you can create a microarchitecture for it that is much more performant and simultaneously more energy efficient. This is one of the reasons that Intel struggles to compete with the Apple M1. The latter does not have baggage of backward-compatibility that Intel is forced to support. For specific use cases, you can get even more performance by tailoring the ISA to the application. E.g. many neural processors fall into this category, their SIMD instruction sets are carefully chosen to be most effective for the sort of calculations you will need to do when you build a neural network.