Intel Foundry demonstrates first Arm-based chip on 18a node • Hacker News Board

Post by dlojudice » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #3

dlojudice wrote: post #2

Very unlikely to happen but Intel could release an Arm chip with native x86 translation. Arm and AMD IP would be needed but this would be the best chip for Windows

I don't understand what the difference is between "an ARM chip with native x86 translation" and a dual-ISA x86 and ARM chip. And I don't understand why you'd want a dual-ISA x86 and ARM rather than just an x86 chip. You wouldn't get whatever CPU front-end simplicity advantages there are from ARM, since your front-end would get significantly more complex and consume significantly more transistors than with a normal x8…

I think the core question is whether hardware-accelerated translation could be meaningfully faster than software like Rosetta 2/Prism while avoiding the full dual-ISA complexity you're describing. Rather than literally implementing both instruction sets, it might be more like an ARM chip with specialized translation units and the extended ISA features you mentioned (memory ordering, etc.).

Intel's unique position with x86 IP could make this feasible where others can't, but whether the engineering effort is worth it for what might be a short-term market advantage is debatable.