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ARM or x86? ISA Doesn't Matter (2021)
For the past decade, ARM CPU makers have made repeated attempts to break into the high performance CPU market so it’s no surprise that we’ve seen plenty of articles, videos and discussi…
Here in this article we’ll bring together research, comments from people who are very familiar with CPUs, and a bit of our in-house data to show why focusing on the ISA is a waste of time(1) and to start us off on our little adventure, let’s reference Anandtech’s interview of Jim Keller, an engineer who worked on several successful CPU designs including AMD’s Zen and Apple’s A4/A5. Just like variable length instruction decode, that overhead is unlikely to matter in a modern, high performance CPU where die area is dominated by caches, wide execution units, large out-of-order schedulers, and big branch predictors. [2] Mikael Hirki and Zhonghong Ou and Kashif Nizam Khan and Jukka K. Nurminen and Tapio Niemi, “Empirical Study of the Power Consumption of the x86-64 Instruction Decoder”, USENIX Workshop on Cool Topics on Sustainable Data Centers (CoolDC 16), cooldc16-paper-hirki.pdf (usenix.org)
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