I don’t think you remember, But the first Archimedes smoked the just-launched Compaq 386s with a dedicated 387 coprocessor.

It was not designed to be one, but it ended up being surprisingly fast.

If your hardware is new, you get the nicest extensions though. You just don’t use the bad parts in your code.

Probably because that's just the infrastructure they have.

> At this point the most likely place for fast RISC-V to appear is China.

Or we just adopt Loongson.

I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.

BTW, it's quite impressive how the s390x is so fast per core compared to the others. I mean, of course it's fast - we all knew that.

And don't let IBM legal see this can be considered a published benchmark, because they are very shy about s390x performance numbers.

Don't blame the ISA - blame the silicon implementations AND the software with no architecture-specific optimisations.

RISC-V will get there, eventually.

I remember that ARM started as a speed demon with conscious power consumption, then was surpassed by x86s and PPCs on desktops and moved to embedded, where it shone by being very frugal with power, only to now be leaving the embedded space with implementations optimised for speed more than power.

If we think of spacetime as some sort of cellular automaton, where each state of a given point is a function (with some randomness, because God likes to throw dice) of previous states of the surrounding points, if the rules for a new state generation are extremely complex, there will be some significant overhead in dimensions we don't see, because the rules need to be somehow represented outside the observable reality. Another issue with this idea is that while the rules might be "outside", the parameters themselves have to be somehow encoded in the state of a cell, and can't propagate faster than light, or one cell (an indivisible unit of space) per indivisible unit of time), which limits the number of parameters accessible to any given cell to the ones immediately surrounding it.

Disclaimer: I hope it's obvious, but I'm no physicist. This is just how I would build a universe.