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As others have already said, ARM has the economy of scale which POWER doesn't have. And SPARC seems to be dead. Also, ARM has always (?) been about getting the
by donatzsky 5y ago
As others have already said, ARM has the economy of scale which POWER doesn't have. And SPARC seems to be dead.
Also, ARM has always (?) been about getting the most out of limited resources, whereas POWER is about performance at any cost. With modern ARM designs, the performance is getting close to, and even exceeding, that of traditional desktop and server CPUs, while still being frugal with resources. POWER is still, well, power-hungry.
- Twirrim 5y agoAgreed. Power frugality is absolutely crucial, especially at larger, enterprise scale. Unless you're in HPC, you're looking for a good balance of peak performance-per-watt and the lowest idle consumption, with a very good scaling down story. ARM has long done a better job of this than x86. It's one of the main reasons the chipset has been absolutely dominant in the smartphone market. The biggest single cost for AWS etc. is per-rack running costs, encompassing power, cooling etc. It's hard to overemphasise just how much this dwarfs all other costs. To optimise those costs you've got to cut down the power consumption and associated heat production.