Re:A Big Week for RISC-V
by justahuman74 on Sunday February 13, 2022 @03:34PM
(#30325372)
Apple has deep pockets, but using an existing ISA gives you a lot of OSS porting and optimization work for free. They could just use RISC-V if they wanted to and still have all the flexibility they want.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Given the amount of software they write from scratch, and that they have their own tool chains, the actual ISA is below Apple’s noise floor. I’m sure they spend more on optimizing for the quirks (cache size, instruction timing, etc) of each generation of chip.