Comment by vlovich123
6 hours ago
I think your focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise.
Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success.
And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with (partially because Intel didn’t see a market). So they were already familiar with ARM before they even started building ARM CPUs. But also the developer ecosystem familiarity is only partially relevant - even in compat mode the M1 ran faster than equivalent contemporary Intel chips. So the familiarity was only needed to unlock the full potential (most of which was done by Apple porting 1p software). But even if they had never switched on ARM support in the M1 the JIT technique (compiled with a better CPU and better unified memory architecture) would still have been fast enough to slightly outcompete Intel chips on performance and battery life - native software just made it 0 competition.
> I think you're focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise.
> Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success.
I think you are operating with a bit too much benefit from hindsight. In a very reductive sense, every time someone has tried to make dynamic ISA translation work, they have done so because they believe their ability to implement their "real" ISA will be superior in some way than their ability to implement the external ISA. Obviously many have failed at this, usually when trying more ambitious designs, but less ambitious designs (perhaps most famously the AMD K5 and its descendants) have succeeded.
Apple's case is really quite different, in that unlike Transmeta or Nvidia, they already had several generations of CPU implementations on which to base their decisions prior to the point of announcing the macOS x64->arm64 transition, just as they had several generations of Intel hardware to consider when making the PPC->x86 transition.
> partially because Intel didn’t see a market
I saw some articles saying that Intel saw the market very well, they just could not deliver and rather than admit that, they claimed the CEO decided wrong.
Both were probably true to some extent but I doubt they wouldn’t have figured out a way to execute given the huge opportunity.
The mobile CPU market worth is a meaningful chunk of Intel’s overall current market cap and they’re not participating.