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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there will soon be room for a non-x86 PC due to the rise of mobile devices. Don't think there's been one available since the demise of the Power Mac.

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Well, the raspberry pi ( and others like it ) could be argued to be it, to an extend...

Apple have smoothly changed processor architecture twice before, they could do it again. Maybe they'll go ARM everywhere at some point.

Is ARM objectively better than x86?

It is objectively cheaper.

ARM is better for <5W applications when performance is secondary to power consumption, but Intel is beating them at performance/watt ratio everywhere else.

So why not use both? Just like iPhones use a M9 processor for some dedicated computations, why can't MacBooks offload some less intensive computations to an energy efficient ARM processor.

This in no way eats the x86 market but in fact grows the ARM market.

If they bring TouchID to the Mac maybe that is what they'll do as it uses the secure enclave inside the A series processors.

You can't say that, because there aren't 45W and more ARM chips to compare with Intels...

The ARM ecosystem is objectively healthier than x86, due to competition from multiple vendors.

I was there for both. It wasn't particularly smooth. Backwards compatibility was... what's the word I'm looking for? Laughable. That's it.

These days "good enough" CPUs are cheap enough that they could probably field a generation of switchover machines which had both x86 and ARM processors and just build a virtual machine style environment into the OS to more or less seamlessly run the "legacy" apps on "legacy" hardware without the need for all of that software backward compatibility. Running old apps on a cheap i3 would be far better than trying to do x86-64 software emulation on ARM.

Of course, the business relationship side is not quite as clear as the technology side if you want to ensure consistent delivery of a lot of parts -- "sell us a bunch of CPUs for this machine designed as a stopgap until we don't need your CPUs anymore", though maybe that is solvable by dealing with AMD.

All that said... I'm perfectly happy with x86 on the desktop and have yet to see any indication that ARM can compete on the types of jobs I still do with "desktop"-class (whether they be actual desktops or laptops) machines, like code compiling, RAW photo editing, video editing, etc.

I believe Apple tried to do just that in the early days of the 68K to PowerPC switchover (I may be confusing them with another company), but it ended up not working very well.

Only if both Google and Microsoft focus on making that happen. Microsoft seems to have given up on it, so now we're only left with the new Play Store-enabled Chromebooks, that should actually give a slight advantage to ARM chips in terms of efficiency of running those apps. But so far Google hasn't been too enthusiastic about promoting ARM-based Chromebooks either, and has preferred to bring over Intel's monopoly to Chromebooks as well. But we'll see. At the very least we should be seeing some AMD Zen APUs in Chromebooks next year.

Apple could help a great deal here, too, if it decides to turn the iPad Pro, into something more like an iOS-based Remix OS-like notebook. In other words, make the iPad Pro more useful by giving it an actual notebook keyboard, and redesign the OS interface a little more to accommodate a desktop environment. Keep the price at least $300 less than a Macbook Air.

>> so far Google hasn't been too enthusiastic about promoting ARM-based Chromebooks either, and has preferred to bring over Intel's monopoly to Chromebooks as well.

Is it Google's doing ? or just Intel competing to the max, and desperately ?

I could see such a thing but in the server market. OpenPower (eg; Power8/Power9 when it comes out) could be damaging to Intel.

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