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Comment by sweden | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see how far the HN community has fallen, to the point in which people don't seem to understand how computers work anymore.

No, this is not a brand new CPU ISA without custom instructions, it's Arm based. And yes, compatibility will be kept with other Arm based CPUs including Apple Silicon.

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The M1 has undocumented extensions.

https://twitter.com/dougallj/status/1339934291929694210

I think there's an inherent conflation among people on ARM compatible versus ARM binaries that run on other arm platforms. This isn't the case with x86 today either, so it's weird when people say "oh look extensions mean it won't be ARM compatible". The core ISA is the same, which means the large majority of code will be portable, and people will have to go out of their way to use non portable instructions and intrinsics.

Being an undocumented extension doesn't matter. Compilers already handle per platform extensions on x86.

Being undocumented is better because it means people won't be targeting it in as high numbers, and therefore won't be making non portable code.

The M1 has a completely proprietary GPU. For an intents and purposes the M1 is proprietary.

Did you see the “underwater Stonehenge” article voted to the to the top of the font page the other day? It’s fallen pretty rapidly in recent times. I’m looking for an alternative but have yet to find one. Disappointing.

It often feels to me that it’s the submission titles that get voted up, not the actual content of the linked articles.

> And yes, compatibility will be kept with other Arm based CPUs including Apple Silicon.

Did you forget the three E's?

"Embrace, extend, extinguish"? Surely you're not that young?

That's not how licensing Arm technology works.

Now it is how it works for embedded processors[1], I see no reason why that can't "tricle up" to the more powerful ones.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/08/arm-brings-custom-instruct...

Do you think Arm will allow MS to EEE their own ISA?

They allowed Apple to do it, so...

But things will become really interesting at the point ARM would be eaten by Nvidia. I've prepared a big pile of popcorn just in case.

You've answered a question I didn't ask!

Agreed on the popcorn though!!

I'm old enough to remember going to one of the very first presentations of the Arm architecture in 1985.

As others have said the licensing terms of the Arm ISA prevent this very thing happening and in any event there is no way that even MS could do this given the size of the whole Arm ecosystem.

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