Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The fixed width decoders have always been a commonly cited advantage of fixed width, and to some degree it must be true. But this is not a recent thing, the "common wisdom" about instruction format not mattering too much still very much applies here.

Pre-decode lengths or stop-bits and more recently micro-op caches have been techniques that x86 has used to mitigate this and improve front end widths, for example.

People like Jim Keller (who has actually worked and lead teams implementing these very processors at Apple, Intel, and AMD!) basically say as much (while acknowledging decode is a little harder, in the large scheme of things on modern large cores it's not such a big deal):

https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

Andy Glew, one of the architects for Intel's first out of order x86 core (P6) among other things, is another who has said similar.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/elke1FHfYr0/m/SwW9NT...

> X86 tax might be 5%

A consistent 5% win is pretty huge for certain industries.

> A consistent 5% win is pretty huge for certain industries.

Are you referring to Andy Glew's thread? He said perhaps 5%, but he also went on to say probably less than 5% for basically the lowest-end out of order processor that was fielded (A-9), not what you would call a high performance core (even then 10 years ago). On today's high performance cores? Not sure, extrapolating naively from what he said would suggest even less. Which is backed up by what Jim Keller says later.

So << 5%, which is significantly less than process node generational increases.

I'm not saying ARM won't leapfrog x86, I'm just asking what the basis is for that belief, and what those who believe it think they know that the likes of Jim Keller does not.

If it's an argument about something other than details of instruction set implementation (e.g., economics or process technology) then that would be something. That is exactly how Intel beat the old minicomputer companies' RISCs despite having "x86 tax", is that they got revenues to fund better process technology and bigger logic design teams. Although that's harder to apply to Apple vs AMD/Intel because x86 PC and server units and revenues are also huge, and TSMC gives at least AMD a common manufacturing base even if Apple is able to pay for some advantage there.

Yes, but people aren't impressed by the M1 chips because of 5% KPI differences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com