Yeah I'm not sure I buy it either.

It doesn't matter if most instructions have simple encodings. You still need to design your front end to handle the crazy encodings.

I doubt it makes a big difference, so until recently he would have been correct - why change your ISA when you can just wait a couple of months to get the same performance improvement. But Moore's law is dead now so small performance differences matter way more now.

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imtringued 3 days ago | parent [-]

The core argument in RISC vs CISC has never been that you can't add RISC style instructions to a CISC. If anything, the opposite is true, because CISC architectures just keep adding more and more instructions.

The argument has been that even if you have a CISC ISA that also happens to have a subset of instructions following the RISC philosophy, that the bloat and legacy instructions will hold CISC back. In other words, the weakness of CISC is that you can add, but never remove.

Jim Keller disagrees with this assessment and it is blatantly obvious.

You build a decoder that predicts that the instructions are going to have simple encodings and if they don't, then you have a slow fallback.

Now you might say that this makes the code slow under the assumption that you make heavy use of the complex instructions, but compilers have a strong incentive to only emit fast instructions.

If you can just add RISC style instructions to CISC ISAs, the entire argument collapses into irrelevance.

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IshKebab 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's not just the complex encodings though, there's also the variable instruction length, and the instruction semantics that mean you need microcode.

Obviously they've done an amazing job of working around it, but that adds a ton of complexity. At the very least it's going to mean you spend engineering resources on something that ARM & RISC-V don't even have to worry about.

This seems a little like a Java programmer saying "garbage collection is solved". Like, yeah you've made an amazingly complicated concurrent compacting garbage collector that is really fast and certainly fast enough almost all of the time. But it's still not as fast as not doing garbage collection. If you didn't have the "we really want people to use x86 because my job depends on it" factor then why would you use CISC?

	▲	exmadscientist 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> RISC-V don't even have to worry about Except that RISC-V had to bolt on a variable-length extension, giving the worst of all possible worlds....