In which I post about a TL9 solar system

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Say, it isn't that bad!

CISC or RISC doesn't change the fundamental size of transistors; although Arm being a (relatively) modern design with little baggage does help decrease the number of transistors needed..

I was thinking more along the number of transistors to do the some thing.

"The RISC ISA emphasizes software over hardware. The RISC instruction set requires one to write more efficient software (e.g., compilers or code) with fewer instructions. CISC ISAs use more transistors in the hardware to implement more instructions and more complex instructions as well." - RISC vs. CISC Architectures: Which one is better?

Though this is no few lunch: "The RISC architecture will need more working (RAM) memory than CISC to hold values as it loads each instruction, acts upon it, then loads the next one."

This explains why the A12z WWDC 2020 Special Event Keynote Mac had 16 GB of RAM compared to 8 GB one tends to se in the i5 and i7 low end Macs.

IIUC one of the issues Intel is having at going below 14 nm is heat and in space heat is a problem as the only option for cooling things off is radiation. The x86 architecture hasn't exactly been cool (I still remember the jokes about the Pentium space hear with the very first PC to use that chip)

Originally Posted by Say, it isn't that bad!

Ultimately, though, Apple changing from x86 to Arm may be an indication that they are attempting to get around the soft wall of transistor size as much as practical.

If that is the case then Apple planned for the really long game as the A4 (2014) used a 45 nm process while its x86 (Haswell-DT) used a much smaller 22 nm process. The fact that the WWDC mac handled x86 optimized code as well as it did shows how far software has come (the RISC PowerPC chip's emulation was annoyingly slow)