I still think it's not clear how relevant the whole x86 story is. The closest comparison I can find is the apple A13 bionic vs. the amd 5850u pro - both on TSM

I still think it's not clear how relevant the whole x86 story is. The closest comparison I can find is the apple A13 bionic vs. the amd 5850u pro - both on TSMC's N7p process I believe (but I'm no expert in all the various flavors). The A13 has a 6W TDP; the 5850u 15W (and I can't find a good benchmark source with actual powerconsumption with benchmarking runs, so TDP is the best I have). And the TDP can be scaled down or up at least on the AMD side. All those caveats aside: - https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_pro_5850u-1905 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_pro_5850u-1905 - https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_a13_bionic-1654 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_a13_bionic-1654 Geekbench scores: A13: 1336 single, 3187 multi 5850u: 1414 single, 8140 multi And there are lots of tricks apple uses to keep power consumption down _in addition to_ using arm; and that's partially why it does better than e.g. qualcomm. But many of those tricks aren't somehow arm or apple exclusive; they're just a question of (expensive) engineering or die size - things that aren't fundamental to intels usage of x86. I mean, it might well be that x86 hits some ceiling well before arm's ISA does, but I don't see actual evidence of that being a huge factor yet. At the very least, it feels like it's clear the process node helps, as does all kinds of other engineering, but that the impact of the ISA is not as obvious. Course, I might just be missing the obvious evidence, sure ;-).