this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Even AMD showed just how power hungry and thermal inefficient intel generally is
As Arm develops more every year, laptop OEMs will eventually switch just because of the insane power and thermal benefit.
I hope RISC-V gets its chance to shine too
Current gen AMD laptop CPUs rival apple silicon in performance and power consumption on mobile. x86 is nowhere near as close to dying as people think.
Aye exactly, Apple's marketing, which is often basically lying, has a lot to answer for in the prevelence of this idea. They'd have you believe that they're making chips with 14 billion percent more performance per watt and class beating performance. Whereas in reality they're very much going toe to toe with AMD and other high end ARM chip vendors
My M2 air is silent because it has no fans. I've never had any trouble doing any office / photoshop / illustrator work. Battery life lasts hours and hours and hours.
It's not all marketing, there's substance too
Did I ever say it was all lies? They're incredibly capable machines, I'd love to own one. I just take issue with Apple's lark of transparency in the marketing of the performance of the chips vs competition.
Every vendor is guilty of doing this not just apple, even AMD. The fact is apple found a way to make desktop arm chips accessible and viable. If you've ever used an m1 or m2 Mac, you'll understand how big of an impact they've made. My m1 Mac mini 8gb could run several games above 60fps at 1440p at reasonable settings, examples being WoW (retail with upgraded graphics), LoL and DotA2, StarCraft 2, diablo 3, etc. It was and still is a very capable chip.
Don't agree with this. I have the newest 7840U that's supposed to be THE answer to the M2. Performance per watt and battery life is way worse.
Which laptop?
Yoga slim 6
No laptop manufacturers would switch to arm until a good x86 compatibility comes along. People would make huge fuss if they can't use their favorite apps or if those apps don't run decently
Chromebook eco system might have a word with you.
Ew
That's basically android though
So? It's still a laptop.
True, but its a preexisting ecosystem where people have different expectations
There's already CPUs with extra instructions specifically designed for efficient emulation of other instruction sets. This includes ARM CPUs with x86 emulation at near native speed.
Wouldn't adding a bunch of extra features to an ARM CPU make it become less power efficient and more like x86?
I've heard that ARM isn't inherently more power efficient in some special way over x86, x86 has just been around so long and has had so many extra instructions added to it over the years, but that's what allows it to do so much / be so performant. If you took an ARM CPU and did the same you'd have roughly the same performance/watt.
Yes and no, it's not about the instruction set size but about general overhead.
The x86 architecture makes a lot of assumptions that require a bunch of circuitry to be powered on continously unless you spend a ton if effort on power management and making sure anything not currently needed can go into idle - for mobile CPUs there's a lot of talk about "race to idle" as a way to minimize power consumption for this exact reason, you try to run everything in batches and then cut power.
The more you try to make ARM cover the same usecases and emulate x86 the more overhead you add, but you can keep all that extra stuff powered off when not in use. So you wouldn't increase baseline power usage much, but once you turn everything on at once then efficiency ends up being very similar.
* laughs in M1 *
RISCV is going to be huge, but it will take at least another decade for performance version to catch up with Intel and ARM. Hopefully by that time we know how to deal with architecture changes in consumer gear because of the ARM switch and can just painlessly move over.
My fear is losing what we have x86 PCs in the standardization of the platform. ARM and even more RISC-V, is a messy sea of bespokeness. I want hardware to be auto-discoverable so a generic OS can be installed.