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AMD, Intel, and a slew of tech companies are teaming up to fend off ARM chips (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

basic needs of the average office and home user

I mean, ARM chips have been at that level of performance for at least a decade by now. Normal people's most strenuous activity is watching Youtube, which every cellphone since what? 2005? could do.

power consumption in relation to computational power

The thing is that's very much not the actual situation for most people.

Only Apple really has high performance, very low power ARM chips you can't really outclass.

Qualcomm's stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life.

I mean, that's a FANTASTIC achievement for a 1st gen product, but like, it's not nearly as good as it should be.

The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you've been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

(Edit: assuming the software you need doesn't work in the emulation layer, of course.) You might get Photoshop, but you won't get that version of CS3 you actually own updated. You might get new games, but you probably won't get that 10 year old one you like playing twice a year. And so on.

The future might be ARM, but only Apple has a real hat in the ring, still.

(Please someone make better ARM chips than Apple, thanks.)___

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Qualcomm's stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life

Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.

The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you've been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons

I lose about 5% charge/day with my laptop asleep. It does wake up very quickly, but 5%/day feels like a lot. At this point, I don't think Microsoft has a strong incentive to really optimize the kernal for efficiency
Historic massive variability in hardware across devices also makes it hard to optimize efficiency, although the current crop of snapdragon x laptops seem to have less variability
One of the strengths of windows is that it can run applications written 20+ years ago fairly reliably. There's a ton of software that's still floating around that hasn't been actively supported in years. I don't see all of these software companies desiring to port their code over, especially without guarantees that the market will adopt ARM (the Apple approach) or until they see the ARM adoption rate go up (the current Windows approach)

All that said, I've had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.