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>The 512x512b FMA unit is like the size of Alaska and the decoder is the size of Monaco. So the advantages of RISC were overtaken by semiconductor physics for t
by snvzz 5y ago
>The 512x512b FMA unit is like the size of Alaska and the decoder is the size of Monaco. So the advantages of RISC were overtaken by semiconductor physics for the most part.
There still is a hardware advantage (has nothing to do with sizes, everything to do with complexity), but let's ignore that.
RISC being simpler doesn't just help the hardware. It also helps the software, the whole stack.
Extra complexity needs strong justification. RISC-V takes that idea seriously, and this is why it already has the traction it does, and is going through exponential growth.
- jeffbee 5y agoRISC-V has many nice properties but it didn't exist 25 years ago so what does it have to do with why those companies and their objectively inferior CPUs disappeared?
- hedgehog 5y agoIt seems to be more about skill and budget of the development teams, and those are both getting bigger. I think a major underlying factor is the massive increase of transistor budgets relative to clock speed and latency to memory. That pulls every architecture down the path of big caches, speculation, specialized functional units, multiprocessors, etc, that add complexity dwarfing anything in the front end. If I was starting fresh the labor to do x86 would be a handicap but on the other hand Intel switching to RISC-V or whatever wouldn't do anything for them.