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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not sure which ARM cores are the "most fair" to compare to laptop/desktop x86oids and Apple M series; The N2, the A710, something else?

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The ARM Cortex-A7xx and Neoverse N cores are intended to be comparable to the Intel E-cores (Atom cores, like in Alder Lake N, such as Intel N100, or in the small cores of Raptor Lake) and to the AMD compact cores (like in Bergamo or future mobile CPUs). These cores are optimized for low area and low power consumption, with the expectation that a good throughput can be obtained by using a large number of cores.

The ARM Cortex-X and Neoverse V cores are intended to compete with the Intel P-cores (like in Sapphire Rapids or the big cores of Raptor Lake) and with the AMD normal cores. These cores are optimized for high single-thread performance and for workloads where low latency is important.

The ARM Cortex-A5xx cores are much smaller and slower than any Intel or AMD cores.

I think the Cortex-X series cores are the ones starting to make their way into laptops and the like (Cortex-X4 is the latest). These are Arm's "flagship" cores.

If by fair you mean the same cost to produce on the same process node, then an Arm V class core should be the same as an AMD compact core, roughly. The Arm N cores are a lot smaller, closer to Intel's E cores. Full sized Intel P cores or AMD's non-C Ryzens are closer to an Apple M core.

The irony, where Apple M series is an ARM core...

ARM as in "Designed by ARM Ltd." not ARM as in "Uses the aarch64 ISA"

While Apple M runs Arm instructions, it is not any of the cores designed by Arm like the cortex A7 series or the X series. While those chips come in packages from other manufacturers (ie Mediatek, Qualcom, or even Google's tensor) the actual core design is from ARM, but is tweaked (usually things like cache sizes can be adjusted) and integrated with other supporting hardware by the manufacturer. Apple's cores are actually completely custom, with no input from ARM the company.

> While Apple M runs Arm instructions, it is not any of the cores designed by Arm like the cortex A7 series or the X series

How can we be sure about this since Apple does not disclose any details about their chips?

> Apple's cores are actually completely custom, with no input from ARM the company.

Apple is one of the founders of ARM, with other two being Acorn Computers and VLSI Technology.

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