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user13558
Asked: 2022-06-29 23:24:46 +0800 CST 2022-06-29 23:24:46 +0800 CST

Is the difference between ARM and AMD64 a matter of number of bits?

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What is difference between ARM and AMD64? Is it a matter of number of bits?

For example, one has 64, and ARM?

Are there more differences besides the number of bits? Are there many differences? And if so, what are the main ones?

Is AMD64 the same as x86_64?

arquitectura

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Comparing a processor with ARM architecture and a processor with x86_64 (or AMD64) architecture is like comparing a passenger plane and a fighter: Certain characteristics will be similar but they are totally different concepts.

    It would take a book to delve into the details, so I'll just list the basic differences:

    • The ARM company licenses (not manufactures) CPU designs based on a RISC architecture. Among these designs we can find some 32-bit and others 64-bit. Companies that make use of these designs: Apple, Mediatek, Samsung, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Huawei...

    • AMD designs and manufactures (it actually outsources manufacturing, but it's a minor detail here) its own processors, based on the Intel x86 architecture but with its own extension to use 64bits. It is considered a CISC-type architecture.

    • ARM processors are characterized by low power consumption, while AMD processors focus on processing power. This makes ARMs the absolute dominators in the mobile device market while AMD64s are the most used on desktops (there are exceptions in both cases).

    Therefore we can say that AMD64 processors speak a different language than ARMs: a code compiled for one is not executable in the other.

    The use of 64 bits or not does not make them understand each other: it simply indicates that memory addresses use 64 bits (so they can address 2 64 bytes (16 exibytes), instead of the old 2 32 bytes ( 4 gigibytes) Also, each "normal" (non-floating point and non- SIMD ) instruction can now process 64 bits at a time, so in principle more data can be processed at once (this is not always possible, it will depend on the nature of the data)

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