4 ms·
I understand there's probably licensing and crap and all the things that are the reason we can't have nice things, but with the very very ... very ... large amo
by AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I understand there's probably licensing and crap and all the things that are the reason we can't have nice things, but with the very very ... very ... large amount of silicon real estate these days and the "we have so many cores we don't know what to do with them", ... why not have an x86 core or two on the chip? I bet it can share the most of the caches, which are most of the silicon real estate these days anyway.
At least Intel could make some more revenue for a few years off of the Apple arm switch with some licensing.
- jffry 4y agoThat sounds like a nightmare of complexity to get right, and I don't see why Apple would want to Frankenstein together cores when they could build something like Rosetta2 instead.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoRosetta2 was/is far from perfect. Seemed like a coin flip since most of the things I needed it for were "hard" apps that weren't going to be ported anytime soon, but were "harder" for Rosetta to run properly. An actual hardware core would have the advantage of better compatibility. And you only spin it up when needed. But it would probably slow adoption too....
- crazygringo 4y agoPower, of course. The defining characteristic of these ARM chips is low power. Throw on fully functioning x86 cores and you've defeated the entire point. Remember, running x86 code in emulation on ARM uses less power than running the native code on Intel.