I'm planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
even without going too-CISC it can make sense to have instructions for popular use cases
e.g. ARM has special instructions for optimal numeric operations in JavaScript: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floating-point-Instructions/FJCVTZS
and I thought I'd read something about custom instructions in Apple Silicon to optimise virtualisation (i.e. translation of x86_64 executables) but I can't find a source for that, maybe that secret sauce is not in the instruction set
Yeah, what I've read is that ARM is in fact a mix of RISC and CISC. And meanwhile x64 processors turn some CISC instructions into a bunch of simpler ones as one of the first execution stages. So in the end the situation is basically this: