Between presentations from tech companies like AMD, Apple, or Intel and spec sheets for certain devices and other products, you've almost certainly at least heard the word architecture. Apple brags that its M1 and M2 chips use the ARM architecture, and AMD highlights that its Zen 4 architecture is better than Intel's Raptor Lake architecture. But in all the marketing, it's never really explained what "architecture" actually is. Here's everything you need to know about architectures and why they matter.
Architecture: the foundation of a processor
Architecture is a vague word in tech, but I'm talking here about instruction-set architectures (ISA) and microarchitectures. Both ISAs and microarchitectures are abbreviated to architectures because it's unusual to get ISAs and microarchitectures confused. Additionally, I'll mostly be talking about CPU architectures, but other processors like GPUs use both ISAs and microarchitectures.
The ISA is a good starting point because it's the most basic part of a processor and is what contains its most fundamental aspects, like instructions (like addition and multiplication) and features (like being able to handle numbers that have 32 decimal places). Processors that use a certain ISA can only run code designed for that ISA (though emulation is a workaround). That's why it was a big deal when Apple started selling Macs with Apple silicon because macOS was built for Intel CPUs that use the x86 ISA and Apple's chips use the ARM ISA.
Microarchitectures can have a significant impact on gaming, professional work, or even casual computer use.
In short, the microarchitecture is what connects different parts of the processor and how they interconnect and interoperate to implement the ISA. So if ISAs are like different languages, then microarchitectures are dialects. Designing a brand-new chip doesn't require throwing out the ISA, and creating a new processor without altering the ISA results in a new microarchitecture. Microarchitectures built on the same ISA can be vastly different but run the same code, even if one chip clearly performs better than the other. Companies tend to make new microarchitectures in order to increase performance, add new instructions (known as extensions since they are not within the base ISA), or target a specific application.
Today, we have a handful of ISAs, with the major ones being x86 (co-owned by Intel and AMD), ARM (owned by Arm but licensed to other companies like Apple and Samsung), RISC-V (an open-standard ISA that anyone can use for free), and PowerPC (owned by IBM and mostly used for datacenter stuff and formerly lots of consoles like the PS3 and Wii). There are at least hundreds, if not thousands, of microarchitectures out there, with some famous ones including the Zen series from AMD, the Lake series from Intel, and the Cortex series from Arm.
ISAs have defined the boundaries within tech
The fact that programmers have to make code specifically for certain ISAs in order to run natively (that is, without needing to use a workaround like emulation, which often performs poorly) has necessarily created lots of walls when it comes to computers. Developers tend to focus on just one ISA, and that almost unbreakable link between hardware and software has defined who makes the processors for certain kinds of devices.
x86 is almost exclusively used in desktops, laptops, and gaming consoles, and those devices in turn almost exclusively use x86. ARM, RISC-V, and PowerPC have all dabbled in these areas, but x86 dominates them all. It's not even enough that Microsoft has made an ARM version of Windows because third-party software developers need to make ARM versions of their apps, and very few of them have. On the other hand, Apple's ownership of macOS made it much easier (albeit still challenging) to switch from x86 Intel chips to its own.
Likewise, ARM has a stranglehold on phones and tablets, and that's been true for about two decades. By the time Intel started making x86 chips for phones in the late 2000s, virtually the entire market had been using ARM for years, and Intel had a hard time convincing companies to switch.
Today, it seems that the boundaries that ISAs created have mostly solidified. It's extremely unlikely that ARM chips will ever overtake x86 in desktops and laptops (even though Apple is making significant headway here), and it's all but certain that smartphones will always use ARM. However, there is significant competition in emerging markets like data centers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. RISC-V also makes a compelling argument that many companies would rather make their own RISC-V chips for applications where needing compatibility across a wide ecosystem isn't really a concern. Perhaps in the distant future, some of these ISAs will fall out of use, but it seems likely that only a few major ISAs will ever be relevant at any one moment.
Microarchitectures can make or break your experience on a device
Although you can't take the marketing of companies without a grain of salt, it is true that microarchitectures can have a significant impact on gaming, professional work, or even casual computer use. If you're wondering whether you need the latest microarchitecture in your device or not, here are a few things to consider.
Games often don't benefit from everything a new CPU microarchitecture has to offer, such as a boost in instructions per clock (IPC), since games don't actually use that many raw resources. However, microarchitectures can come with boosts to clock speed, additional cache, and other characteristics that might be better for gaming. If you play video games at high framerates, your experience might be significantly enhanced by using the latest processor. It might be time to consider upgrading if your CPU is more than five years old.
Upgrading to a new GPU with a new microarchitecture might also be a good idea. New graphics cards sometimes introduce new features such as Nvidia's DLSS (which is only available on RTX branded cards, and DLSS 3 only on the RTX 40 series) and AV1 encoding only present on the latest RTX 40, RX 7000, and Arc Alchemist GPUs. Additionally, gaming performance hinges on the graphics card, and new microarchitectures are often paired with cards that have lots more raw horsepower and VRAM than older ones.
Should you upgrade to CPUs with new architectures?
When it comes to professional and creative work like rendering, video editing, and other tasks, getting a new CPU or GPU is often worth it for both new features and generally higher performance. Additional CPU instructions like AVX are sometimes useful, for example. Potential performance gains can vary widely depending on the application, however, and you should research your software to see if it can benefit from newer hardware.
For casual users, the benefits of newer hardware aren't that apparent since basic applications can run on pretty much anything made within the last decade. For laptop users in particular though, a microarchitecture often brings increased efficiency, and better efficiency usually means lower power consumption, which in turn means better battery life.