steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Processors down to the small comptrollers have long gone to ARM.
I'm confused.Processors down to the small comptrollers have long gone to ARM.
We've already reported on Qualcomm's new 12-core Arm uberchip, the Snapdragon X Elite, and its claims of x86-beating performance and efficiency. But it takes two to tango when it comes a major transition like moving from x86 CPUs to Arm chips. You don't just need hardware, you need software, too.
And that, dear PC fans, is where Windows 12 supposedly comes in. Reports indicate that Microsoft is planning to add specific support for Snapdragon X Elite in future builds of Windows.
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A decade or so ago, the assumption was that Arm was really only suitable for low power applications. You needed x86 for high performance. But Apple's 'A' and 'M' chips have proved that wrong. Apple's Arm cores now have significantly higher performance per clock cycle than any traditional x86 PC processor.
For sure, the top x86 chips still give more outright CPU performance thanks to higher clocks and core counter. But Apple has proven that Arm can compete and then some for fundamental number crunching grunt.
ARM licenses processor architecture as intellectual property. Processors are designed in high level software like VHDL.I'm confused.Processors down to the small comptrollers have long gone to ARM.![]()
The VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is a hardware description language (HDL) that can model the behavior and structure of digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from the system level down to that of logic gates, for design entry, documentation, and verification purposes. Since 1987, VHDL has been standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as IEEE Std 1076; the latest version of which is IEEE Std 1076-2019. To model analog and mixed-signal systems, an IEEE-standardized HDL based on VHDL called VHDL-AMS (officially IEEE 1076.1) has been developed.
VHDL is named after the United States Department of Defense program that created it, the Very High Speed Integrated Circuits Program (VHSIC). In the early 1980s, the VHSIC Program sought a new HDL for use in the design of the integrated circuits it aimed to develop. The product of this effort was VHDL Version 7.2, released in 1985. The effort to standardize it as an IEEE standard began in the following year.
To be fair, both Power and ARM both notably have fixed (or at least tightly bounded) widths AFAIK.Apple is planning to move its Macintosh line to ARM-based "Apple Silicon".
Apple announces Mac transition to Apple silicon - Apple
Apple Silicon | Apple Developer Documentation
Apple Silicon | Release Dates, Features, Specs
Apple Silicon Arm Macs: Coming in Late 2020
Apple Silicon vs Intel - Macworld UK
Apple announces Mac architecture transition from Intel to its own ARM chips, offers emulation path - 9to5Mac
Apple Silicon will use the ARM64 CPU architecture, and its chips will use system-on-a-chip designs that are designed by Apple's designers. Apple has been using such chips for over a decade in its smartphones and tablets, and Apple will now use them in its laptops and desktops.
This will be the fourth CPU architecture that Apple has used for its Macintosh line. Here is a complete list:
- Motorola 68K - 32-bit
- PowerPC - 32-bit, 64-bit
- Intel-x86 - 32-bit, 64-bit
- ARM - 64-bit
Apple has done two previous transitions, and it has done them with a two-part strategy:
Apple will use the same strategy here, and the company expects to complete the x86-to-ARM transition in two years.
- Multi-architecture "universal binaries"
- An emulator for old software
Apple has thus alternated CISC - RISC - CISC - RISC, where C = complex and R = reduced, both of instruction set complexity. The complexity is in what each instruction does, and not necessarily the total number of instructions; some RISC CPU's have large numbers of instructions. A small number of instructions is called MISC - minimal instruction set complexity/computing.
In particular, RISC CPU's have a "load/store architecture", where operations that access main memory do only that, and never do that as part part of other instructions, something common in CISC instructions. RISC architectures typically have other simplifications, like constant-sized instructions and restricted data alignments.