> Compare : Apple M4 perf vs $your_favourite_rv_”fast”_core perf per MHz
We might get a meaningful comparison like that if Qualcomm starts making RISC-V based SoC's as a hedge against ARM. Or if Tenstorrent comes up with a M4-like CPU design. I think the jury is very much still out as to whether the rather limited variable-sized insns (2 or 4 bytes) of RISC-V + the compressed insn extension is a genuine concern. It's certainly nothing like the chaos you see with x86-64 (which seems to be a real bottleneck for very wide decode), and a lot closer to something like the old ARM32+Thumb2.
It’s been ten years. The jury has returned. Rendered judgement. Left to a picnic. Come back. And since retired to a carefree life of llama farming.
Your argument is wistful thinking. Not fact. “Well, if maybe someone does it” isn’t a fact. Maybe someone will make a 8501 that outperforms my M4. But I won’t believe it till it is done.
And indeed it is close to thumb2. Which was purposefully rejected for aarch64. By careful study. Given that between the two, aarch64 looks to be much better thought-through, I’ll be giving the credit for making the right decision here to that team too.
We might get a meaningful comparison like that if Qualcomm starts making RISC-V based SoC's as a hedge against ARM. Or if Tenstorrent comes up with a M4-like CPU design. I think the jury is very much still out as to whether the rather limited variable-sized insns (2 or 4 bytes) of RISC-V + the compressed insn extension is a genuine concern. It's certainly nothing like the chaos you see with x86-64 (which seems to be a real bottleneck for very wide decode), and a lot closer to something like the old ARM32+Thumb2.