It would be fascinating to see Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Mediatek, and possibly others all competing to build the best ARM SoCs for windows devices, especially after so many years of Intel stagnating and Apple eating their lunch with their ARM SoCs.
do you know how a CPU is designed? it’s just crazy hard to study the design of simple RISC CPUs we studied in college. And those were very simple, old processors.
A modern processor with performance that can match modern CPUs is no task for one indie dev, at all.
You need a team of professionals in the field, a huge budget and the technology to manufacture it, which you would probably end outsourcing to one of the big manufacturers anyway because it’s very rare.
So the answer to your question is never, unless you’re expecting low performance CPUs based on FPGAs.
Windows remains the only relevant platform for commercial software, and x86 remains the only relevant architecture for that platform.
If emulation fixes that - through box86 or similar - that’s still not great news for ARM. Because once architecture doesn’t matter, nobody’s gonna bother licensing one. RISC-V is the obvious contender, already buoyed by engineering toys and some microcontroller-y niches. MIPS is trying to make a comeback. But really, anything can work, so long as it can be targeted by an intermediate representation. Once we start melting down programs into LLVM on-the-fly, it’s gonna be the wild west again.
Ah yes, let’s welcome one device - one operating system myth to the desktops, with people choosing hardware because of software feauture that could be installable. Welcome the expiration date on computers called “years of software support” and welcome overall unfriendlyness for alternative systems.
Performance and efficency is one side of the coin. But let me remind you that Qualcomm (among with Google) is the reason we cannot have lifetime updates for our phones, ROMs build needs to be specific for each model and making a phone with anything but Android is nearly impossible.
I’ll take ARM over x86, but I’ll take AMD/Intel over Qualcomm thousand times more.
But one detail that we cannot forget is that with the increase in ARM architecture in PCs and laptops we will probably see an increase in fully locked hardware. We don’t need the expansion of the ARM architecture for PCs if it doesn’t come with hardware and software freedom
This is just a repeat of the same old pro-RISC myths from decades ago. There is very little performance difference between x86 and any RISC based CPU, at least when pertaining to the ISA itself. Apple merely has the advantage of having far more resources available for CPU development than their competitors.
Modern x86 is a CISC outer layer around a RISC inner core. It didn’t hang on this long by ignoring RISC, but by assimilating it. RISC really did change everything, but not by the way everyone thought.
They don’t look all that fast on GeekBench (more on that in further down) but in real world usage they are incredibly fast. As in an entry level 13" school homework laptop will have performance on par with a high end gaming PC with a thousand watt PSU.
I don’t have a high end gaming PC to compare, but I do have a mid-range one and I’ve stopped using it… my laptop is so much faster, quieter, cooler, that even though the PC has more games… I just put up with the modest selection (about half the games I own) that run on a Mac. It’s not just gaming either… I’m also able to compile software perfectly fast, I can run docker with a dozen containers open at the same time without breaking a sweat (this is particularly impressive on the Mac version of Docker which uses virtual machines instead of running directly on the host), and stable diffusion generates images in about 20 seconds or so with typical generation settings.
The best thing though is I can do all of that on a tiny battery that lasts almost an entire day under heavy load and multiple days under normal load. I’ve calculated the average power draw with typical use is somewhere around 3 watts for the entire system including the screen. It’s hard to believe, especially considering how fast it is.
On the modest GeekBench score Apple ARM processors have - it’s critical to understand GeekBench is designed to test very short bursts and avoid thermal throttling. Intel’s recent i9 processors, with good cooling, will thermal throttle after about 12 seconds and GeekBench is designed to avoid hitting that number by doing much shorter bursts than that. Apple’s processors not only take far longer to thermal throttle, they also “throttle” by reducing performance to barely lower than full speed.
But even worse than that - one of the ways Apple achieves incredible battery life is they don’t run the processors at high clock rates for short bursts. The CPU starts slow and ramps up to full speed when you keep it under high load. So something quick, like loading a webpage, won’t run at full speed and therefore GeekBench also isn’t running at full speed either.
A third difference, and probably the biggest one, is Apple’s processor has very fast memory and also massive memory caches which are even faster. Again that often doesn’t show up on CPU benchmark because it’s not really measuring compute power. But real world software spends a massive amount of time just reading and writing to memory and those operations are fast on Apple’s ARM processors.
You really can’t trust the benchmarks when you’re comparing completely different processors. You need to try real world usage, and the real world usage difference is game changing. Trust me, when proper fast processors (not just a laptop running with a phone CPU) are available on PCs, everyone will realise Mac users were right - ARM is way better than x86. This isn’t like AMD vs Intel. It’s more like HDD vs SSD.
The Mac I use is a few years old and available secondhand for under $500. You can get the same CPU/GPU in an iPad which is available, brand new, for $600. I think that’s a reasonable price for a school computer.
Nah that’s just too much disposable income. If you’re spending more than $200 on anything other than an old Thinkpad to run Linux on, you’re too rich /s
I mean, does your computer even have a nipple? Didn’t think so. Apple would never be bold enough to #freethenipple 😔
Don’t even dare saying anything positive on Lemmy about Apple, even if your comment is constructive and adds to the conversation. Lemmy’s tech community is somehow worse than Reddit unless you’re into Linux. Your comment doesn’t deserve the barrage of downvotes you got.
I’m sure all 19 people are downvoting them for that one sentence and not the usual downvotes for something pro-Apple. OP put more effort into their comment than most people on here despite that being a dumb take on a MacBook.
I’d agree with OP if it were the old Airs because that’s really all you could use them for before they froze up. Definitely overpriced new though, especially on their entry models. Can’t really expect Apple not to ask for loads of money from their customers because, well, they will pay it.
I work on an ARM Mac, it’s fine. If you’re just doing light work on it, it works great! Like any other similarly priced laptop would.
Under load, or doing work outside what it is tuned for, it doesn’t perform spectacularly.
It’s a fine laptop, the battery life is usually great. But as soon as you need to use the x86 translation layer, performance tanks, battery drains, it’s not a great time.
Things are getting better, and for a light user, It works great, but I’m much more excited about modern x86 laptop processors for the time being.
X86 has an incredible amount of cruft built up to support backwards compatibility all the way back to the 8086. ARM isn’t free of cruft, but it’s nowhere on the same level. Most of that isn’t directly visible to customers, though.
What is visible is that more than three companies can license and manufacture them. The x86 market has one company that owns it, another who licenses it but also owns the 64 bit extensions, and a third one who technically exists but is barely worth talking about. It’s also incredibly difficult to optimize, and the people who know how already work for one of main two companies (arguably only one at this point). Even if you could legally license it as a fourth player, you couldn’t get people who could design an x86 core that’s worth a damn.
Conversely, ARM cores are designed by CS students all the time. That’s the real advantage to end users: far more companies who can produce designs. If one of them fails the way Intel has of late, we’re not stuck with just one other possibility.
AI is currently limited in application (and legislation). I think when we start seeing it in things like document ecosystems like Google Workspace or Microsoft Office, or in operating systems like Windows 12 and Android, that’s when we’ll start seeing what it’s really capable of.
Also open-source applications that aren’t necessarily limited by laws or corporate optics.
Thinks like creating helper bots that aid in troubleshooting or “assistants” that can draft/send emails, create calendar events, answer questions based on emails, etc.
But yeah in it’s current state it is mostly just a glorified search engine.
One of the hurdles to ARM is that you need to recompile and maintain a separate version of every piece of software for the different processors.
This is a much easier task for a tightly controlled ecosystem like Mac than the tons of different suppliers Windows ecosystem. You can do some sort of emulation to run non-native stuff, but at the cost of the optimization that you were hoping to gain.
Another OS variation also adds a big cost/burden to enterprise customers where they need to manage patches, security, etc.
I would expect to see more inroads in non-corporate areas following Apple success, but not any sort of explosion.
micrsoft has spent the last few years rebuilding their shit to work on ARM. no idea how far theyve come, but you will absolutely see windows on arm for the enterprise.
Apple has the benefit of having done architecture transitions a few times already. Microsoft has been trying to get everyone out of the “Program Files (x86)” directory for over decade.
Uhh, one reason they don’t is that they have made the switch twice. Even if they didn’t have to deal with any other third party, they still had to convince Adobe, and Adobe doesn’t want to do shit if they don’t have to.
On the other hand, a completely open ecosystem works well too — ARM for Linux feels exactly like ARM on x86/64 in my experience. Granted this is for headless stuff on an (RPi and Orange Pi, both ARM, both running Debian), but really the only difference is the bootloader situation.
Does anyone else worry that the rise of personal computers using super custom SOCs is going to have negative effects on our abilities to build our own machines?
Can’t wait. I recently bought a firewall that gets noticeably warm on idle, even with a little case that has a heat sink. We need more energy efficient PCs.
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