> The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder on all the time in the worst case).
Eh, it's overhead, but isn't massive overhead. Power usage is much more a function of how the chip was designed.
The vast majority of developers will never even see assembly for x86 or ARM. Compiler developers and those need to hand optimize code may care but for everyone else it's a black box.
Sure but I am part of that latter category.
The unwashed masses don't have to care and won't actually use the performance, I'm not that bothered whether they care or not, although it's worth saying that X86 is such a mess that hiding instructions at weird alignments is a valid obfuscation technique - i.e. it's not just aesthetics/performance.
Re:Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
by doctor_eval on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:07AM
(#28996959)
I’m not part of the category you’re part of - but after learning 6502, Z80 and 68K, when it came time to look at the 80x86 I gave it a hard pass and learned C instead. I kinda assumed x86 would die a natural death. Wrong!
Sadly I have not programmed in assembly since, and I put it down to how ugly the ISA was.
Pretty stupid perhaps, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re:Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
by LMYahooTFY on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @12:34AM
(#28996433)
Are there any easily digestible resources you could point to for getting a better grasp of this?
https://microcorruption.com/login might be one place to start, but it's got a slightly different focus, but if you broadly want to learn lower-level stuff it's a place to start.
1. The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder on all the time in the worst case). The widest X86's can only dispatch 75% of the instruction per cycle but X86 instructions can do more, so you'd have to check a specific benchmark.
2. I want X86 to die more because it's fucking ugly than performance as per se. ARM is not a simple ISA, so although you won't be writing a disassembler in 10 minutes like RISC-V, aarch64 is still much less insane than X86 with all the extensions.