Comment by TazeTSchnitzel

9 years ago

And that's for a single processor! There's myriad CPUs the end user could be using.

x86 and x64 are the only two that someone could be using on desktop, right?

  • Instruction set makes much less of a difference than the actual microarchitecture. For an extreme example, see Pentium 4 vs Core. Something that runs fast on one could be dramatically different on the other.

    The only time ISA really influences optimization is for unique ones like IA-64/Itanium. Otherwise, optimizing for e.g. a modern Xeon vs a POWER8 is not terribly different.