Re:How Many X86-64 Instructions Are There Anyway?
by wolfgke on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @09:49AM
(#14246262)
> Even with the complexity of Thumb-1, Thumb-2, and NEON, I'd give the edge to ARM in simplicity. At least the instruction encodings for ARM make sense, even today. x86 instruction decoding is absurd.
If you write down the x86 instruction encoding in octal, it makes a lot more sense:
More importantly, ARM has a way to massively reduce its decoding complexity, via AArch64. AArch64 is a separate RISC instruction set, with room explicitly left in the design for dropping 32-bit ARM in the future (32-bit support is optional, though in practice today everyone includes it). ARM is effectively in the process of making a transition to a more RISC-like ISA, unlike Intel which has no realistic way to get there.