Thankyou. ARM and x86 are both capable of very high performance. ARM isn't magically capable of putting out 10x the FLOPS in the same power envelope. Modern x8

Thankyou. ARM and x86 are both capable of very high performance. ARM isn't magically capable of putting out 10x the FLOPS in the same power envelope. Modern x86 parts are very close to ARM in terms of work completed per unit energy consumed. The difference is that it's rare to see an ARM part with a heatsink/fan and it's rare to see an x86 part without one. RPi and MacBook 12 are notable exceptions to this. All of this presumes that CPU utilization is what's eating the power. It's not. For an idle machine (e.g. ARM iPad vs. x86 MacBook) most of the energy goes into the display backlight. The SoCs idle down to near zero energy consumption. It's even difficult to assert that CPU usage is a big power culprit on these machines. My MacBook 12 can max out CPU forever and hold 1.8GHz with no fan. The 4 core post-Haswell MacBooks can max out their CPUs and have the fan running very slowly. But run the GPU hard on either of those machines? You'll max out the fans and power consumption immediately and things will start throttling. TL;DR: CPU arch makes no difference. ARM Macs will have similar cooling solutions to the current ones.