February 19, 2026
Curves, colors, and comment chaos
Visualizing the ARM64 Instruction Set (2024)
ARM64 gets a glow-up; RISC‑V hype and x86 nostalgia crash the party
TLDR: A slick web map visualizes ARM64’s instructions in living color. Comments turned into a turf war: RISC‑V fans want a comparison, x86 nostalgics want an ARM64 “sandpile,” and everyone wants a poster. It matters because these visuals make complex chip tech understandable—and spark cross‑platform curiosity.
A developer just turned the ARM64 instruction set—the “language” chips use—into a mesmerizing, colorful map using a space-filling curve you can explore in your browser. Check the interactive version and watch the comments light up. The crowd instantly split: RISC‑V fans barged in asking for a side-by-side showdown, while x86 old‑timers waved around sandpile.org like a family photo album, demanding an ARM64 equivalent one‑stop hub. Meanwhile, design lovers begged for a giant wall poster, because apparently chip instructions are the new living‑room art. The funniest moment? A “RISC5” request that sent everyone into a gentle correction spree—and a few memes about “the fifth RISC of Christmas.”
Under the hood, the creator pulled data from Arm’s spec and used a decoder to color classes like general, floating‑point, and the exotic SVE extensions—translated here as “different flavors of math and control.” The community vibe: this is gorgeous, but also “do it for RISC‑V” and “give us an ARM64 sandpile.” It turned into a mini turf war, half gallery opening, half standards committee, with fans arguing which chip world looks prettier—and which one should get this treatment next. Pure nerd candy, with receipts.
Key Points
- •The visualization maps all 32-bit ARM64 encodings onto a Hilbert curve and color-codes them by instruction class.
- •Instruction data is derived from Arm’s MRA Specification (June 2023), covering extensions up to ARMv8.9.
- •Custom tools parse XML to list ~3,000 unique encodings and iterate over all 32-bit patterns to decode instruction types.
- •ASL rules can invalidate encodings; a Capstone-based post-processing step filters out such invalid instructions.
- •An interactive site lets users inspect instructions; each pixel represents 256 encodings with alpha indicating density, revealing patterns from SVE2 and SME2.