Xbit Labs: AMD-> Improvements of Next-Generation Process Technologies Start to Wane.

[Arachnotronic]

I have a hard time believing that the pert/watt impact for the decoder would be greater than the impact from emulating x86 in software...

There is a penalty for x86 decoding, but process technology + clever microarchitecture can EASILY overcome it.

Note how SNB power gates the decoders thanks to that neat little L0 cache? It's clever tricks like that which makes me skeptical of the claims that ARM, because they don't have to deal with a decoder, will always have better mobile chips than Intel.

Bulldozer has FMA4, XOP, and 8 cores, and yet Intel's 4C/8T SNB runs circles around it. Why? Because there's more to a CPU than its ISA.