Post #2409953

2025-09-09 01:07 UTC

@regehr@mastodon.social Every serious study (both from independent researchers and from vendors themselves) that I've ever seen (and I'm up to 5 or so at this point), broadly, supports this, with some caveats. It's not "no difference", but for server/application cores, what differences there are typically somewhere in the single-digit %. You can always find pathological examples, but typically it's not that much. There is a real cost to x86s many warts but it's mostly in design/validation cost and toolchains.

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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-09-09 01:12

@regehr@mastodon.social Some more details: - the D/V and toolchain costs are amortized. Broadly speaking, the bigger your ecosystem/market share, the bigger your ability to absorb that cost. - This holds for what ARM would call "application" cores; oversimplifying a bit, it's essentially a constant overhead on the design that adds some extra area and pipe stages. It's more onerous for smaller cores, but you need to be really small.

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