> Are CPU manufacturers mad? No they are not. But in the early 90ties when most of these decisions were mande, the situation was very different. Processors got

> Are CPU manufacturers mad? No they are not. But in the early 90ties when most of these decisions were mande, the situation was very different. Processors got twice as fast every two process generations. Shared memory multiprocessors were an exotic niche. But then we hit the power wall, and all of a sudden shared memory multiprocessors became the norm. Today, you can not just wait for a new processor to make your program magically faster, you have to rewrite it. If you asked the same people who took these decisions in the 90ies today, many would (and many actually did so publically) say that they regret this decision. On, complexity. Yes, software is incredibly complex. That's why you don't want to add even more complexity to it! > How does ARM manage significantly lower power consumption? Easy, ARM is targetting the low power market. So they don't need to build the fastest chip. When you try to build the fastest chip, energy efficiency suffers a lot. Once ARM starts to compete with Intel on performance, their power usage will skyrocket.