ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
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ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
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Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#2Unless I misread the current arm docs, I don't think this is still present in the ISA as of 2020?
The whole RISC/CISC thing is long dead anyway, so I don't really mind having something like this on my CPU.
Bring on the mill (I don't think it'll set the world on fire if they ever make it to real silicon but it's truly different)
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#3FTA:
> Which is odd, because you don't expect to see JavaScript so close to the bare metal.
This seems to ignore all the work done on server-side javascript with projects such as node.js and deno, as well as the fact that cloud service providers such as AWS have been developing their own ARM-based servers.
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#4FTA: > Which is odd, because you don't expect to see JavaScript so close to the bare metal. This seems to ignore all the work done on server-side javascript with projects such as node.js and deno, as well as the fact that cloud service providers such as AWS have been developing their own ARM-based servers.
No it doesn’t, it’s still surprising to see a CPU instruction added specifically to cater for such a high level language like JS.
It does totally makes sense though, given the importance of JS and it’s common use in mobiles.
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#5FTA: > Which is odd, because you don't expect to see JavaScript so close to the bare metal. This seems to ignore all the work done on server-side javascript with projects such as node.js and deno, as well as the fact that cloud service providers such as AWS have been developing their own ARM-based servers.
No it doesn’t, it’s still surprising to see a CPU instruction added specifically to cater for such a high level language like JS. It does totally makes sense though, given the importance of JS and it’s common use in mobiles.
> No it doesn’t, it’s still surprising to see a CPU instruction added specifically to cater for such a high level language like JS.
It surprises you personally, but if you think about it it's easy to understand that widespread interpreters that use a specific number crunching primitive implented in software can and do benefit from significant performance improvements if they offload that to the hardware.
You only need to browse through the list of opcodes supported by modern processors to notice a countless list of similar cases of instructions being added to support even higher-leve operations.
I mean, are you aware that even Intel added instructions for signal processing, graphics, and even support for hash algorithms?
And you're surprised by a floating point rounding operation?
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#6Unless I misread the current arm docs, I don't think this is still present in the ISA as of 2020? The whole RISC/CISC thing is long dead anyway, so I don't really mind having something like this on my CPU. Bring on the mill (I don't think it'll set the world on fire if they ever make it to real silicon but it's truly different)
Arm v8 is the "current" 64-bit version of the ISA and you almost certainly have it inside your phone. You might have a version older than v8.3.
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#7My guess is that this is what JIT people asked for.
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#8FTA: > Which is odd, because you don't expect to see JavaScript so close to the bare metal. This seems to ignore all the work done on server-side javascript with projects such as node.js and deno, as well as the fact that cloud service providers such as AWS have been developing their own ARM-based servers.
No it doesn’t, it’s still surprising to see a CPU instruction added specifically to cater for such a high level language like JS. It does totally makes sense though, given the importance of JS and it’s common use in mobiles.
It doesn't surprise me because we are supposed to expect commonly used programming languages to receive optimizations. If we didn't follow this logic there would be no reason to optimize C. Instead each processor company would optimize for their own proprietary language and expect everyone to use the proprietary language for high performance needs.
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#9[deleted]
Re: ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name
#10Unless I misread the current arm docs, I don't think this is still present in the ISA as of 2020? The whole RISC/CISC thing is long dead anyway, so I don't really mind having something like this on my CPU. Bring on the mill (I don't think it'll set the world on fire if they ever make it to real silicon but it's truly different)
I think you are thinking of the old Java-optimizing instructions on the older ARM processors.