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Comment by Bluecobra | Hacker News Reader

> In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years. These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.

I guess you can say that finally came true with Apple’s M1/M2 chips + Rosetta 2. Just took longer than expected.

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Arguably, it came true with the Pentium Pro more than 20 years ago. Ever since then x86 processors have interpreted x86 instructions by translating them into multi-step sequences of microinstructions under software control. The microcode is basically a just-in-time translator with specialized hardware assists. (And it is very much under software control -- that's why the microcode needs periodic microcode patches to fix bugs.) The internal architecture today looks much more like a RISC/VLIW machine than a classical x86 processor.

What finally came true? That the RISC took over from 80x86?

They took over in Apple universe. For some people Apple is everything there is.

I own both a gaming PC running Windows 11 with an Intel i9-12900K and an Apple MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. I think the writing is on the wall for x86, at least from a general computing sense. I’m absolutely blown away on how well Apple pulled off the transition to M1. My previous Intel based MBP had atrocious battery life and could barely survive an hour video meeting on MS Teams. It might take a while but I can see ARM-based Windows taking off the same way if paired with a killer CPU.

The CPU part is the problem. Qualcomm is barely doing anything when it comes to making good ARM chips which compete, and most other chip manufacturers are not much better.

I have a bad feeling though that when ARM processors do finally become viable outside the apple ecosystem, that they will all be locked to running windows, thanks to lack of UEFI support on arm and the mess that is device trees.

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