That's an interesting observation - as someone who's built a few ECS implementations, one of the things I've always taken for granted is that things like cache line size are more or less set in stone, given the ubiquity of x86, so it's interesting to consider that the rise of ARM might create additional complexities there.
I'm a bit of two minds about this: on the one hand, for a long time I've wanted a language for writing allocators which is more explicit about memory, and offers good abstractions for low-level memory operations (maybe Zig is going in this direction). In some sense, it feels like the move towards programmers thinking less about memory management has been a bit of a dead-end, and what we really want is better tools for memory management. Fragmentation in terms of how processors handle memory goes against this goal in some ways.
On the other hand, it's a bit of a "holy grail" to imagine a hardware stack which obviates the need for memory optimization, and really does treat loading from and storing to memory anywhere on the heap as the same. But I imagine that the interesting things which the M1 is doing with memory are helping a lot with the worst case performance, and maybe even average case performance, but they're probably not doing much for the best case.
I'm a bit of two minds about this: on the one hand, for a long time I've wanted a language for writing allocators which is more explicit about memory, and offers good abstractions for low-level memory operations (maybe Zig is going in this direction). In some sense, it feels like the move towards programmers thinking less about memory management has been a bit of a dead-end, and what we really want is better tools for memory management. Fragmentation in terms of how processors handle memory goes against this goal in some ways.
On the other hand, it's a bit of a "holy grail" to imagine a hardware stack which obviates the need for memory optimization, and really does treat loading from and storing to memory anywhere on the heap as the same. But I imagine that the interesting things which the M1 is doing with memory are helping a lot with the worst case performance, and maybe even average case performance, but they're probably not doing much for the best case.