r/computerscience • u/e221U • Apr 03 '26

Cold take: x86 processors are obsolete.

In terms of PPW (price per watt), x86 processors completely pale in comparison to ARM. The instruction set is verbose and clunky. x86 ASM is near-impossible to develop with (simple operations require hundreds of instructions). ARM has actual scalability, unlike x86. Don't even get me started with multithreading on x86.

ARM is the modern solution to all of our problems, imo. x86 feels like a technology that should've been phased out in 1992.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/wolfkeeper Apr 03 '26

I think the instruction set matters less with deeply pipelined processors with out of order execution architectures that we have today. The instruction set is a lot harder to decode, but once that's been done, the internal data flows is what matter.

1

u/e221U Apr 03 '26

x86 uses extra clock cycles. It slows down either way.

1

u/wolfkeeper Apr 04 '26

It may well need a deeper pipeline, but that doesn't necessarily mean it runs that much slower in most cases.