Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

Re:Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? by klelatti on Sunday October 17, 2021 @06:37AM (#28895430)

The only advantage I’ve heard put forward for RISC-V on single threaded applications is the existence of compressed instructions - which could reduce cache misses albeit at the expense of a slightly more complex decoder. I’m a bit sceptical as to whether this is material though as cache sizes increase.

Of course the flexibility of the RISC-V model allows approaches such as that being pursued by Esperanto [1] with lots and lots of simpler cores.

[1] https://www.esperanto.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/HC2021.E...

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Re:Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? by NobodyNada on Sunday October 17, 2021 @01:57PM (#28898310)

ARM had THUMB, which definitely improved performance back in the GameBoy days — but they dropped that with AArch64, so presumably they decided it wasn’t beneficial anymore.

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Re:Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? by klelatti on Sunday October 17, 2021 @05:10PM (#28899826)

Indeed and IIRC the increased code density got them into Nokia phones too.

I find it hard to believe that they didn't drop Thumb from AArch64 without a lot of analysis of the impact on performance.

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