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fulafelyesterday at 7:33 PM1 replyview on HN

The instruction set has marginal impact. But many power efficient chips happen to be using the ARM instruction set today.


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IshKebabyesterday at 10:21 PM

I think that's still highly debatable. Intel and AMD claim the instruction set makes no difference... but of course they would. And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?

Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no way the ISA makes 20% difference.

But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is way more debatable.

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