Re:A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM
by spijdar on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:24AM
(#25386738)
I think "RISC" was, for a stretch of time, "superior", but it was always in very expensive and very niche workstations and servers.
x86 was itself a kind of underdog in that space, losing out in sheer performance and bandwidth to the high-end RISC market, but making up for it by, you know, being cheap enough that "regular people" could go and buy a family computer with an x86 processor.
Intel managed to slowly improve the various deficiencies over time, and produced a processor not only affordable, but also superior to the incumbent RISC chips in all but niche areas.
I think more than the ISA, Apple's M1 manages to be so good at its job for similar reasons to the old RISC chips -- it's built from the ground-up with a pretty specific target application, rather unlike x86, which has to be all things to all people, with legacy support and scaling from laptops to quad socket 3U servers.
x86 was itself a kind of underdog in that space, losing out in sheer performance and bandwidth to the high-end RISC market, but making up for it by, you know, being cheap enough that "regular people" could go and buy a family computer with an x86 processor.
Intel managed to slowly improve the various deficiencies over time, and produced a processor not only affordable, but also superior to the incumbent RISC chips in all but niche areas.
I think more than the ISA, Apple's M1 manages to be so good at its job for similar reasons to the old RISC chips -- it's built from the ground-up with a pretty specific target application, rather unlike x86, which has to be all things to all people, with legacy support and scaling from laptops to quad socket 3U servers.