[titzer]

> ARM64 can't be that easy to decode, since ARM's recent high-performance cores (A78, X1) decode ARM64 instructions into MOPS and feature a MOP cache

My point was more about that the fixed-width instructions allow trivial parallel decoding while x86 requires predicting the length of instructions or just brute forcing all possible offsets, which is costly.

> The real question is how does Apple keep that thing fed?

That's why there's such an enormous reorder buffer. It's so that there's a massive amount of potential work out there for execution ports to pick up and do. Of course, that's all wasted when you have a branch mispredict. I haven't seen anything specific about M1's branch prediction, but it is clearly top-notch.