3 ms·

The reason to switch to ARM is to get better performance, especially per-watt. If the supplier that's making your graphics card can deliver that, then why risk

by lmm 3y ago

The reason to switch to ARM is to get better performance, especially per-watt. If the supplier that's making your graphics card can deliver that, then why risk onboarding someone new?

jwells89 3y ago
In addition to better perf per watt, it’d allow them to shrink the console, potentially to something as small as a Mac Mini or NUC. Less need for cooling means a smaller console. This could help them make inroads to people who might not have considered a home console before due to their relatively large size. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch did well with this market and now MS wants a slice of that pie.
isthatafact 3y ago
> The reason to switch to ARM is to get better performance, especially per-watt. I am not expert, but I cannot remember ever hearing that before. Why would arm have better absolute performance than x86? As a spectator, reading tech press about architectures gave me the impression that even in performance per watt, the advantage arm has over x86 is fairly small, just that arm chip makers have always focused on optimizing for low power performance for phones.
- lmm 3y ago
  > I am not expert, but I cannot remember ever hearing that before. Why would arm have better absolute performance than x86? Better general design, or easier to include more cache. All the normal reasons one architecture might perform better than another. I mean, you heard about Apple switching all their processors to ARM, right? > As a spectator, reading tech press about architectures gave me the impression that even in performance per watt, the advantage arm has over x86 is fairly small, just that arm chip makers have always focused on optimizing for low power performance for phones. Intel would certainly like you to believe that. But for all their talk of good low-power x86s being possible, no-one's ever actually managed to make one.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    There's an anecdote from Jim Keller that Zen is so modular that it'd be possible to swap out the x86 instruction decode block with an ARM one with relatively little effort. He's also been saying for a while now that ISA has little bearing on performance and efficiency anymore. Apple's decision to switch to ARM had many reasons, licensing being just as important as performance, perhaps more so. The low power variants of Zen are very efficient. You're still looking at Intel, but they've been leapfrogged by AMD on most fronts over the past half decade (still not market share, but Intel still has their fabrication advantage).
    - lmm 3y ago
      I'll believe that when I see a Zen-based phone with a non-awful battery life. Yes AMD are ahead of Intel in some areas, but they've got the same vested interest in talking up how power-efficient their x86 cores can be that may not actually be based in reality.
      - scheeseman486 3y ago
        You won't see that happen because AMD have no interest in targeting phones. Why bother? Margins are thin, one of x86's biggest advantages is binary backwards compatibility but that's mostly meaningless on Android, there's additional IP and regulatory pain points like integration of cellular modems. Intel tried and ran into most of those same problems. Their Atom-based SoCs were pretty competitive with ARM chips of the day, it was the reliance on an external modem, friction with x86 on Android and a brutally competitive landscape that resulted in their failure. Regardless of architectural advantages from one vendor or another, the point remains that the arguable preeminent expert in CPU architecture believes that ISA makes little difference and given their employment history it's hard to make the argument of bias.
        lmm 3y ago
        > Intel tried and ran into most of those same problems. Their Atom-based SoCs were pretty competitive with ARM chips of the day, it was the reliance on an external modem, friction with x86 on Android and a brutally competitive landscape that resulted in their failure. The way I remember it the performance and battery life never quite lived up to what they said it would. > Regardless of architectural advantages from one vendor or another, the point remains that the arguable preeminent expert in CPU architecture believes that ISA makes little difference and given their employment history it's hard to make the argument of bias. Current employer is a much heavier influence than prior employers, and someone who's moved around and designed for multiple ISAs and presumably likes doing so has a vested interest in claiming that any ISA can be used for any use case. There's a long history of people claiming architecture X can be used effectively for purpose Y and then failing to actually deliver that. So I'm sticking to "I'll believe it when I'll see it".

by lmm 3y ago

The reason to switch to ARM is to get better performance, especially per-watt. If the supplier that's making your graphics card can deliver that, then why risk onboarding someone new?

jwells89 3y ago

In addition to better perf per watt, it’d allow them to shrink the console, potentially to something as small as a Mac Mini or NUC. Less need for cooling means a smaller console. This could help them make inroads to people who might not have considered a home console before due to their relatively large size. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch did well with this market and now MS wants a slice of that pie.

isthatafact 3y ago

> The reason to switch to ARM is to get better performance, especially per-watt. I am not expert, but I cannot remember ever hearing that before. Why would arm have better absolute performance than x86? As a spectator, reading tech press about architectures gave me the impression that even in performance per watt, the advantage arm has over x86 is fairly small, just that arm chip makers have always focused on optimizing for low power performance for phones.

lmm 3y ago
> I am not expert, but I cannot remember ever hearing that before. Why would arm have better absolute performance than x86? Better general design, or easier to include more cache. All the normal reasons one architecture might perform better than another. I mean, you heard about Apple switching all their processors to ARM, right? > As a spectator, reading tech press about architectures gave me the impression that even in performance per watt, the advantage arm has over x86 is fairly small, just that arm chip makers have always focused on optimizing for low power performance for phones. Intel would certainly like you to believe that. But for all their talk of good low-power x86s being possible, no-one's ever actually managed to make one.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  There's an anecdote from Jim Keller that Zen is so modular that it'd be possible to swap out the x86 instruction decode block with an ARM one with relatively little effort. He's also been saying for a while now that ISA has little bearing on performance and efficiency anymore. Apple's decision to switch to ARM had many reasons, licensing being just as important as performance, perhaps more so. The low power variants of Zen are very efficient. You're still looking at Intel, but they've been leapfrogged by AMD on most fronts over the past half decade (still not market share, but Intel still has their fabrication advantage).
  - lmm 3y ago
    I'll believe that when I see a Zen-based phone with a non-awful battery life. Yes AMD are ahead of Intel in some areas, but they've got the same vested interest in talking up how power-efficient their x86 cores can be that may not actually be based in reality.
    - scheeseman486 3y ago
      You won't see that happen because AMD have no interest in targeting phones. Why bother? Margins are thin, one of x86's biggest advantages is binary backwards compatibility but that's mostly meaningless on Android, there's additional IP and regulatory pain points like integration of cellular modems. Intel tried and ran into most of those same problems. Their Atom-based SoCs were pretty competitive with ARM chips of the day, it was the reliance on an external modem, friction with x86 on Android and a brutally competitive landscape that resulted in their failure. Regardless of architectural advantages from one vendor or another, the point remains that the arguable preeminent expert in CPU architecture believes that ISA makes little difference and given their employment history it's hard to make the argument of bias.
      - lmm 3y ago
        > Intel tried and ran into most of those same problems. Their Atom-based SoCs were pretty competitive with ARM chips of the day, it was the reliance on an external modem, friction with x86 on Android and a brutally competitive landscape that resulted in their failure. The way I remember it the performance and battery life never quite lived up to what they said it would. > Regardless of architectural advantages from one vendor or another, the point remains that the arguable preeminent expert in CPU architecture believes that ISA makes little difference and given their employment history it's hard to make the argument of bias. Current employer is a much heavier influence than prior employers, and someone who's moved around and designed for multiple ISAs and presumably likes doing so has a vested interest in claiming that any ISA can be used for any use case. There's a long history of people claiming architecture X can be used effectively for purpose Y and then failing to actually deliver that. So I'm sticking to "I'll believe it when I'll see it".