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ARM is not more efficient / faster because it’s “newer”.

People imply ARM is relatively new and thus could correct for the misdirection x86 has gone.

1978 is when x86 was introduced.

1985 is when ARM was introduced.

ARM isn’t that much newer than x86.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture



People tend to lump them all together and just call them "ARM" but the 64-bit instruction set ("AArch64") first came out in 2011 and is hugely different than classical 32-bit ARM. And the chips Apple makes these days don't even implement the 32-bit instruction set anymore.


Honest question: could it be a matter of backwards compatibility?

Intel has been piling stuff on top of old architectures in order to stay backwards compatible at each step, while Apple had the opportunity to develop their architecture from scratch? I don’t know the answer, I’m just curious.


ARM 64-bit is cleaned up from the 32-bit ISA and showed up in 2011.


ARMv8 is new though. That's where the path to M1 started.




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