QUOTE(babylon52281 @ May 11 2024, 04:22 PM)
Im advocating more towards fully realising ARM uarch to a desktop equivalent or else a new CPU uarch from scratch without the inefficient legacy (hello RISC V?)
Again, no, according to Jim Keller who worked at AMD/Apple/DEC/PA Semi (probably one of the best acquisitions Apple made) and is responsible for CPUs like the AMD K8:
QUOTE
JK: [Arguing about instruction sets] is a very sad story. It's not even a couple of dozen [op-codes] - 80% of core execution is only six instructions - you know, load, store, add, subtract, compare and branch. With those you have pretty much covered it. If you're writing in Perl or something, maybe call and return are more important than compare and branch. But instruction sets only matter a little bit - you can lose 10%, or 20%, [of performance] because you're missing instructions.
QUOTE
JK: I care a little. Here's what happened - so when x86 first came out, it was super simple and clean, right? Then at the time, there were multiple 8-bit architectures: x86, the 6800, the 6502. I programmed probably all of them way back in the day. Then x86, oddly enough, was the open version. They licensed that to seven different companies. Then that gave people opportunity, but Intel surprisingly licensed it. Then they went to 16 bits and 32 bits, and then they added virtual memory, virtualization, security, then 64 bits and more features. So what happens to an architecture as you add stuff, you keep the old stuff so it's compatible.
So when Arm first came out, it was a clean 32-bit computer. Compared to x86, it just looked way simpler and easier to build. Then they added a 16-bit mode and the IT (if then) instruction, which is awful. Then [they added] a weird floating-point vector extension set with overlays in a register file, and then 64-bit, which partly cleaned it up. There was some special stuff for security and booting, and so it has only got more complicated.
Now RISC-V shows up and it's the shiny new cousin, right? Because there's no legacy. It's actually an open instruction set architecture, and people build it in universities where they don’t have time or interest to add too much junk, like some architectures have. So relatively speaking, just because of its pedigree, and age, it's early in the life cycle of complexity. It's a pretty good instruction set, they did a fine job. So if I was just going to say if I want to build a computer really fast today, and I want it to go fast, RISC-V is the easiest one to choose. It’s the simplest one, it has got all the right features, it has got the right top eight instructions that you actually need to optimize for, and it doesn't have too much junk.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-ana...person-at-tesla...and it's not like ARM is a 'bloat free' ISA either

RISC-V? Probably but unless there is a chip that is commercially available and has a large enough software library then there's little reason for that ISA to take off. Note that the success of ISA goes way beyond performance/efficiency, so that's why back in the 1990s Intel was able to defeat a lot of alternate ISAs (such as Alpha/MIPS/Itanium/SPARC) despite those ISAs are far superior to x86, due to its strong install base, as well as the massive economies of scale it offers
This post has been edited by chocobo7779: May 11 2024, 04:39 PM