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jabl 3 days ago

> I vaguely remember that they have trace caches (a cache of decoded micro-operations) to skip decoding in some cases. You probably don't make such caches when decoding is easy.

The P4 microarch had trace caches, but I believe that approach has since been avoided. What practically all contemporary x86 processors do have, though is u-op caches, which contain decoded micro-ops. Note this is not the same as a trace cache.

For that matter, many ARM cores also have u-op caches, so it's not something that is uniquely useful only on x86. The Apple M* cores AFAIU do not have u-op caches, FWIW.