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Comment by 5ilv3r | Hacker News Reader

Can you just imagine how long the battery would last on an arm based macbook? Days?!

It is actually quite difficult to beat Intel on power efficiency once you start talking about laptop class CPUs. The combination of Intel's advanced fabrication tech and their highly efficient core family of microarchitectures gives them a significant advantage outside of the ultra-low-power space.

I don't think that's true. Arm chips just don't clock as high as intels can, and no one* cares about clock speed any more. That ship has sailed. Multiprocess web browsers will drive the sales of massively multicore arms (with tons of ram!), and intel will be sunk.

It's not just about clock speed. While Intel Core CPUs don't scale down to power budgets as low as ARM cores, they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis. Smart phones achieve high battery life mostly by being very aggressive about reducing CPU load in software (see iOS killing apps the moment they go into the background). General purpose operating systems don't work like that so there's more reliance on the hardware to keep power draw down.

they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis

Is that true? I thought people were trying out ARM rack servers because of the power efficiency vs perf.

The key word there is "trying". ARM servers have had a tough time gaining traction in no small part because the hoped for power efficiency gains have not been realized.

sounds like Intel hit a pretty sweet work/watt by increasing work while keeping lid on wattage. ARM delivers battery life by lowering work.

No that's not how it works at all. ARM has always been power efficiency focused.

There are ARM Chromebooks and I don't think they last for days. I'm pretty sure most of the power draw on a laptop is the monitor

Mine goes 8 hours with a mainline kernel. I usually charge it once a week. Apple could/would/should do better.

It would definitely be advertised as such.

No, but I can imagine how slim Apple would make an ARM-based Macbook.

about 5 hours, just imagine how thin new macs could get!!1

look at iPhone 6 for clues - Apple replaced 0.1 mm thick piece of metal rf shield with a sticker to make it thinner, that removed metal can was reinforcing pcb and all the bga chips, without it iPhone 6/6+ bends, cracks balls under important ICs and develops touch disease.

I would last 12 hours... but the battery would be half the size.

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