Originally posted by PerformanceExpert
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I think there were two main drivers for mobile adoption: cost and the ability to make custom packages. After a few devices took off the network effect took over and the risk of making an architecture change against the whole ecosystem (think tooling) was too big. No way Samsung or Apple would miss a generation of phones to switch, they are printing money as it is.
A simple ISA absolutely helps though. The way Intel and amd have added to x86, almost haphazardly, I’m sort of surprised they haven’t published a set of choice existing instructions with fixed sizes, decodes and alignments and started to encourage the industry to use only those with the expectation that they would add a mode to accelerate them or exclude others in the future. They had recommendations in the p5/p6 era that boosted performance >10%. It’s possible they are stuck in big business brain haze, but I suspect there are other demons in x86 that eat power and are hard to remove.
intel has been insanely good over the decades, I wouldn’t count them out, but the most shocking thing here is this isn’t a custom core, it’s an off-the-shelf design that ARM licenses that is hanging with AMD’s and Intel’s crown Jewels. Custom accelerators is where the giant performance will be and now you can see some compelling ways to get there. Rumor is AMD has been working ARM core designs too. Intel needs a really big hit in the next year or two to keep x86 on top.
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