As many of you already know, I am a big fan of ThePrimeagen’s Twitch channel. I’ve been on it a few times now, and at least from my point of view

Does x86 Need to Die? - by Casey Muratori

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2024-04-16 13:30:09

As many of you already know, I am a big fan of ThePrimeagen’s Twitch channel. I’ve been on it a few times now, and at least from my point of view as a guest, it consistently has the best energy of any show I’ve done.

Last week, I joined Prime to discuss a recent article called, “ Why x86 Needs to Die”. You can watch a (very lightly) edited VOD of the complete stream here:

Prime’s show is intended for a general programming audience, and as such, we didn’t go into too much detail. But I feel like we did a good job covering the basics, and explaining why the article was — at best — misleading.

As I say at the end of the stream, I do think there are things about x64 1 that can be improved. But the article seems to be suggesting that the bad parts of x64 are caused by things that have little or nothing to do with the actual problems facing today’s x64 chip architects as I understand them.

Along those lines, folks who subscribe to my performance-aware programming course know a lot about microarchitecture analysis already, and may want to go a bit deeper on this topic. For those interested, I’ve written up some additional context below.