Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) expand the entire x86 instruction set with access to more registers and adds various new features that improve general-purpose performance.
One thing that’s conspicuously absent from this announcement is real-world data on performance improvements. It’s fine that the theoretical change in stores can be up to 20%, but that does not map linearly to wall time. Do those hypothetical performance improvements justify switching to an entirely new x86-derived ISA? Perhaps switching to ARM gets more bang for the buck, specially if that bang is capped so low. Surely the world can get greater performance improvements by buying AMD and stick with AMD64.
This is AMD64 - extensions to x86_64/AMD64 are created all the time, after a while they become expected by software distributors and compiled software relies on their existence. That’s why new games don’t work on old CPUs.
Apple and Microsoft are doing a pretty good job at translating x86 to ARM. It’s not perfect but I haven’t really faced any application that just failed to run (to be fair I use pretty popular applications so maybe there’s a bias there).
One thing that’s conspicuously absent from this announcement is real-world data on performance improvements. It’s fine that the theoretical change in stores can be up to 20%, but that does not map linearly to wall time. Do those hypothetical performance improvements justify switching to an entirely new x86-derived ISA? Perhaps switching to ARM gets more bang for the buck, specially if that bang is capped so low. Surely the world can get greater performance improvements by buying AMD and stick with AMD64.
This is AMD64 - extensions to x86_64/AMD64 are created all the time, after a while they become expected by software distributors and compiled software relies on their existence. That’s why new games don’t work on old CPUs.
The biggest advantage is backwards compatibility with existing x86 software. You will lose that with a switch to ARM.
Apple and Microsoft are doing a pretty good job at translating x86 to ARM. It’s not perfect but I haven’t really faced any application that just failed to run (to be fair I use pretty popular applications so maybe there’s a bias there).