Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

>I suspect that building a CPU from scratch

Or you mean designing an ISA from scratch? Which is precisely what ARM have done to ARMv8. And further refined in ARMv9.



Except it's not really from scratch. While we are starting to see A64-only cores, A64 was obviously designed to run on the same cores that also run A32/T32 code.

There are A32 features that A64 carries over which no one else in the 35 years of RISC ISA design since 1985 has seen fit to copy -- the optional shift/rotate of one ALU operand being the obvious one. Would they really have done that if it was a clean sheet design? If it's so great, why hasn't anyone else done it?

Also no other clean sheet ISA designed for high performance since 1990 (it's a short list: DEC Alpha, Intel Itanium, RISC-V) has included condition codes. Even POWER acknowledges that a single condition code register is a bad idea and has eight of them instead (the others just use integer registers to hold long-lived conditions).




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: