[sklogic]

> The resources required to produce and support a whole new ISA are a major investment

It's not that hard, really. With such powerful tools as LLVM, a new ISA can even be designed and implemented with all the tooling by a very small team.

What is hard in all this ISA business is the backward compatibility concerns. Once you're liberated from this, you're free to do whatever you like. They may want to experiment with a family of ISAs, maybe entirely incompatible, targeting different device classes (instead of a single ISA across the range).

Source: experience in the mobile GPUs design.

[MCRed]

Apple is basically free of backwards compatilbiitly concerns, since they use LLVM and Xcode. They have previously required all new apps to be recompiled for the current version.

It won't be too long before Apps that have not been updated in 2 years start disappearing from the store-- that's all they'd have to do and the app makers would comply.

[threeseed]

And Apple has a long and reasonably successful history when it comes to forcing developers to adopt new approaches e.g. PowerPC, Intel, 64-bit, LLVM, OSX.

[adekok]

> With such powerful tools as LLVM, a new ISA can even be designed and implemented with all the tooling by a very small team.

The Mill team defines their ISA and encoding manually, and then programmatically generates the compiler, assembler, linker, and entire toolchain.

[sklogic]

And the other guys are even generating a hardware (plus a compiler toolchain) out of an ISA spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISA_(Language_for_Instruction...

[fit2rule]

They might want to merge ARM and x86 and create a super-ISA that allows them to run binaries from either platform in the new super-CPU, which might incidentally be fast enough to make emulating an OSX system quite feasible .. while letting us run iApps, &etc. Maybe, when Apple want to merge their products all into one base architecture, and create the SuperPad, it'll have a CPU that lets OSX+iOS apps run, side-by-side, with ease ..