@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #2409954
2025-09-09 01:12 UTC
@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.
Replies (1)
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-09-09 01:19
@regehr@mastodon.social Eventually, there's nowhere left to hide. For applications where you'd use say an ARM Cortex-M0 or a bare-bones minimal RV32I CPU, I'm not aware of anything x86 past or present that would really make sense. Intel did "Quark" a while back which I believe was either a 486 or P5 derivative, so still something like a 5-stage pipelined integer core. If you want to go even lower than that, I don't think anyone has (or wants to do) anything.