4 ms·
Two thoughts: 1. The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder o
by mhh__ 5y ago
Two thoughts:
1. The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder on all the time in the worst case). The widest X86's can only dispatch 75% of the instruction per cycle but X86 instructions can do more, so you'd have to check a specific benchmark.
2. I want X86 to die more because it's fucking ugly than performance as per se. ARM is not a simple ISA, so although you won't be writing a disassembler in 10 minutes like RISC-V, aarch64 is still much less insane than X86 with all the extensions.
- Osiris 5y agoThe vast majority of developers will never even see assembly for x86 or ARM. Compiler developers and those need to hand optimize code may care but for everyone else it's a black box.
- mhh__ 5y agoSure but I am part of that latter category. The unwashed masses don't have to care and won't actually use the performance, I'm not that bothered whether they care or not, although it's worth saying that X86 is such a mess that hiding instructions at weird alignments is a valid obfuscation technique - i.e. it's not just aesthetics/performance.
- LMYahooTFY 5y agoAre there any easily digestible resources you could point to for getting a better grasp of this?
- doctor_eval 5y agoI’m not part of the category you’re part of - but after learning 6502, Z80 and 68K, when it came time to look at the 80x86 I gave it a hard pass and learned C instead. I kinda assumed x86 would die a natural death. Wrong! Sadly I have not programmed in assembly since, and I put it down to how ugly the ISA was. Pretty stupid perhaps, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- saagarjha 5y ago> The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder on all the time in the worst case). Eh, it's overhead, but isn't massive overhead. Power usage is much more a function of how the chip was designed.