4 ms·

Apple was also the first vendor to ship an ARMv8-A compatible chip; I'm sure there have been reports that they heavily influenced the design of AArch64 but I ca

• NobodyNada 4y ago
  To back this up, here’s a Twitter thread from an Apple engineer: https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 > arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches. > Arm64 didn’t appear out of nowhere, Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes. When Apple began selling iPhones containing arm64 chips, ARM hadn’t even finished their own core design to license to others. > ARM designed a standard that serves its clients and gets feedback from them on ISA evolution. In 2010 few cared about a 64-bit ARM core. Samsung & Qualcomm, the biggest mobile vendors, were certainly caught unaware by it when Apple shipped in 2013. > Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided. > M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago.