this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
37 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

59135 readers
6622 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What do you mean by understanding the difference between instruction sets?

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The number of Assembly instructions needed to do similar things tends to be less on ARM, from my limited understanding. That leads to efficiencies.

[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

That's not really how it works actually. You got sort of the idea that ARM is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture but the reduction here refers more to the variety of instructions rather than amount of instructions. In fact ARM typically requires more instructions since there's less varieity.

But that really doesn't mean much in modern processor architectures since all modern processors decode assembly instructions into micro operations internally and execute them. Each instruction and their corresponding micro operations may have a different number of cpu cycles to execute so it's not something that's so easily calculatable.

The age of RISC vs CISC (x86, etc) debates has largely ended because of how modern CPUs work. The difference between instruction sets mostly just come down to the language that compilers translate to.