nerdlinger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 11:21 pm

Kammekor wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 7:20 pm Anyway, since the Intel Atom chips about twelve years ago the number of instructions per Watt in laptop computers have increased immensely. That's a good thing.

“Instructions per watt” is an extremely dodgy metric to have floating around in a discussion about a move from CISC to RISC architecture…

The last "CISC" chip was Pentium 3.

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 3:27 am Apple tried to move to RISC architecture since the PowerPC days. Unfortunately there were too many chefs IBM, Motorola, etc., in the pot, limiting the power of this system.

Apple licensed the original ARM set and then built on top of it. Kinda like buying a stock car and turning it into a custom racer. Started off with the iPhone, then the iPad, then computers. Operating system is moving to cross unity between phones, computers, and wearables.

The newest iteration in the M1 does away with dedicated GPU cards, instead dedicating cores to GPU. The neural engine ties into using cores for even faster performance. It’s the tight hardware software integration that makes an Apple when firing on all cylinders a fearsome machine.

Hopefully this spurs more competition and innovation and makes even better products in the future.

Apple doesn't make anything, they are just a vertically integrated marketing machine. They own patents, but usually through purchase. OSX is actually BSD. The idea of a bunch of cores switching tasks from general computing to doing graphics, on an ARM architecture? So someone rebranded the way cell phones work and put it in an oversized tablet for 20x the normal price.

RorschachRev wrote: ↑Wed Dec 15, 2021 9:16 am

nerdlinger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 11:21 pm

Kammekor wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 7:20 pm Anyway, since the Intel Atom chips about twelve years ago the number of instructions per Watt in laptop computers have increased immensely. That's a good thing.

“Instructions per watt” is an extremely dodgy metric to have floating around in a discussion about a move from CISC to RISC architecture…

The last "CISC" chip was Pentium 3.

While it’s true that the classic distinctions of RISC vs CISC are a lot more blurry in modern architecture, and as such a lot of people will avoid labelling a newer Intel as CISC, it’s still the most useful distinction for the purposes of the point I was trying to make in the context of this conversation. You’re being pedantic and irrelevant.

Instructions or calculations per watt is the major distinction of the ARM based architectures as they move from higher die size to lower. The transition from 17nm to 12nm, then 8nm dies were a major jump point of both cell phone performance and battery life.
There was another CISC architecture, but most people didn't have a chance to buy Transmeta chips before Intel decided to drown them in marketing. The AMD designs for branched CISC and RISC merge as part of the transition to 64 bit processing are the dominant PC architecture today, and I commend their design. Intel ended up needing to copy them (again) in order to compete. These are neither pure CISC nor pure RISC.
So I actually agree with Kammekor here on several key points, "instructions per watt" is a useful metric (see ARM and die), the ATOM clone of the Transmeta design being relevant to discussion, and the actual progress of the chip industry as a whole based on calculations per power, no longer intrinsically linked to either the number of cores or the GHz they are clocked at.

The most erroneous and pedantic argument here is the attempt to link two dead architectures to the conversion, CISC and RISC aren't relevant.