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I would argue that it is better because it gives you the ability to tier your hardware higher. Low end SKUs like mobile hardware can get less physical component
by zelon88 5y ago
I would argue that it is better because it gives you the ability to tier your hardware higher. Low end SKUs like mobile hardware can get less physical components and more abstraction while higher end SKUs like server hardware can have more physical components and less abstraction for greater performance. All still operate under the guise of the highest-common-denominator.
It is a lot easier to abstract away complex instructions from x86 (when performance isn't needed) than it is to add physical hardware instructions to ARM (when performance is needed).
- Taniwha 5y agoMore isn't always better in CPU design, more means slower clocks, or longer pipelines, neither of which necessarily mean faster CPUs. Any particular implementation of an architecture is a study in tradeoffs - gates are relatively cheap these days, but not much faster - it makes it easier to throw gates at bigger caches and more cores rather than faster ones - faster clocks likely mean longer pipelines which need lots of well predictable branches to perform which skew an implementation to particular types of benchmarks/workloads