this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Nah ARM is barely more efficient than X86. As soon as AMD went TSMC 3nm they got almost similar power efficiency. As the Apple M chips.
Apples "magic sauce" is just being the first one on the new TSMC nodes.
AMD is getting there by optimizing the shit out of memory access and cache. RISC designs by nature have far simpler memory models. AMD has to throw tons of resources into making the x86 pig stay in the air, and they're already flirting with a move towards ARM.
Most of the people who know how to keep that pig flying already work at AMD or Intel. They certainly don't work at VIA Technologies (the third x86 company that nobody talks about, for a good reason). In contrast, any given Fortune 500 could probably hire an ARM team to make a custom chip for their needs provided they had a good enough reason.
Bruh just check, whenever Apple makes massive performance gains it's on a new TSMC node.
I'm not gonna bullshit you and say AMD and Intel do nothing, sure they got some amazing tricks. But in the end it's mostly TSMC making everyone's chips faster and more power efficient.
New Nvidia GPU's magically got power efficient. Why? Check the node of the 3000 series and the 4000. AMD is currently way less power efficient in GPU. Why? They're not on the latest node like Nvidia.
What I'm getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there's not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn't always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
While partially true, the biggest problem is software compatibility. Most software is compiled and optimized for X86 and it won't run on ARM unless recompiled.
How are we going to get everyone to jump ship? Apple had their magic emulation sauce but windows doesn't seem to have that and especially not for Risc5
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
People put far too much weight on games.