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I've been hearing that about ARM for more than a decade. Whats different now?
by passivate 5y ago
I've been hearing that about ARM for more than a decade. Whats different now?
- Miraste 5y agoNothing's different, this is the culmination of the last decade's work. These changes are slow, but ARM is now as fast or faster than x86 in several contexts while being vastly more efficient, and looks likely to continue improving at a better rate. ARM has started appearing in laptops, desktops, and servers. x86 is running out of bastions.
- passivate 5y agoIf ARM is getting vastly more efficient then why is the battery life of smartphones not getting vastly-better? Where is the benefit to the end user?
- Miraste 5y agoI said ARM is vastly more efficient than x86, not previous implementations of ARM. You can see this in action in the new MacBooks, which do indeed have like 4x the battery life of the x86 versions.
- passivate 5y agoAh yeah I misread that. I don't think M1 is 4x the battery life of x86 though. Any examples of specific cases? For e.g The M1 Air vs Acer swift (i7-1065G7) - 1.9 W vs 1.8 W at idle, and 30W vs 27 Watts at full load. The power consumption looks to be about on par. But maybe you're thinking of some other measure of efficiency? Also, I'd like to say that M1 is at 5nm fabrication - which is not an advantage of ARM. I'm sure x86 will get there eventually. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-2020-M1-Entry-Review-Apple-M1-CPU-humbles-Intel-and-AMD.508057.0.html#toc-power-management https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-2020-M1-Entr...
- Miraste 5y agoI'm factoring in performance. The 1065G7 has a similar power profile to the M1 but it's much slower - both perceptually and in benchmarks. I like Passmark as a quick and dirty comparison tool, and it has the M1 at 1.7x the 1065G7, putting it in the realm of (but faster than!) the i9 Macbook Pros. 4x runtime was off the top of my head and it looks like that was an overestimate, but it's still over 2x. Also I've used those things and there's no way they get 11 hours. You're right about the process node. AMD's new laptop chips are on 7nm and they compare more favorably than Intel's. x86 isn't dead yet, but the trend is still not in its favor: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png 1065G7: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1065G7+%40+1.30GHz&id=3466 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1065G... M1: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+3200+MHz&id=4104 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320... 9880H: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9880H+%40+2.30GHz&id=3456 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9880H...
- spiderice 5y ago> Whats different now? It's powering the laptops and desktops of the most valuable tech company in the world and outperforming even the best predictions from a year ago.
- passivate 5y agoThat is just the fabrication aspect, 5nm is not going to be an advantage for long.
- sofixa 5y agoA consumer company started selling laptops with ARM chips, so obviously everything will change! /s More seriously, companies like AWS have developed ARM-based chips in-house, and they seem to be very good (cheaper, faster than x86 equivalents) for specific workloads. That will certainly help with adoption, but i sincerely doubt x86 will stop being the dominant architecture. Maybe the consumer market will see a significant shift towards ARM. But not the real money maker, datacenter.
- passivate 5y agoWell said, I agree with you.