Arm in inevitable for the server. It's interesting how now days, efficiency/power consumption is a consideration over pure raw performance.
BTW, I'm not even speaking to whether x86 can compete at the same power per watt... I think it just won't make sense financially to be out of sync with the industry.
Are we reading the same scores?
The top consists of what appears to be an Intel i3-10100 overclocked past 13GHz(!), a Ryzen 7 5800H at 2.8GHz, and then an i9-14900K at just below 800MHz.
The i9-14900K and M3 actually haven't appeared in the official chart, but you can search for them as they already have thousands of test runs[0][1]. Both of them score around 3100 in single core, and around 21000 in multicore (for the M3 Max).
[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=i9-149... [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mac15
Personally, I do not consider geekbench a viable kit.
ISA doesn't imply performance characteristics.
It's like saying that programming language (syntax) has performance implication.
No, it doesn't. Everything is up to the compiler, runtime and standard library.
Of course there may be some feature that make compiler's life easier, but still things are way, way more complicated than "just take ARM ISA and you'll be king"
https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...
Microsoft isn't Apple or Google in this regard, dragging developers into new worlds, and it is quite telling that they had now to put up some kind of ARM advocacy action.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/10/16/window...
For example, for scientific computation and computer-aided design, Fujitsu is the only company that has designed Arm CPUs that can compete with the x86 CPUs, but they do not sell their CPUs on the free market.
For a huge company, the floating-point performance of the CPUs is less important, because they can use datacenter GPUs with even greater throughput, so the existing Arm server CPUs could be good enough even for a supercomputer, as they only have to move the data to and from the GPUs. However the small businesses and the individuals cannot use datacenter GPUs, which have huge prices, so they can use only x86 CPUs and there is not the slightest chance of any alternative that would appear soon.
Another application domain for which no Arm vendor has ever made competitive devices is for cheap personal computers.
Nothing what Apple does matters, because they do not sell computers, they only lend computers that remain under their control and which are much more expensive than their alternatives anyway.
Besides Apple, only Qualcomm, Mediatek and NVIDIA are able to make Arm CPUs with a performance similar to the cheapest of the Intel and AMD CPUs, but all these 3 companies demand for their CPUs prices that are several times higher than the prices of comparable x86 CPUs.
Like for CPUs with high floating-point or big integer performance, there is not the slightest chance for the appearance of any company that would be willing to sell Arm CPUs that are both cheap and fast.
Also for server CPUs, all the companies that have attempted to design Arm-based server CPUs have never designed models suitable for small businesses or individuals, but only models that can be bought only by very big companies.
I would not mind to switch from x86 to Arm, but there is absolutely no perspective for that.
If the x86 CPUs would disappear, that would be a catastrophe for the people who do not want to depend on the mercy of the big companies. That would be a return to the times from before the personal computers, when all computing had to be done remotely, in the computing centers of big companies, which have been renamed now as "clouds".
I agree that Qualcomm/Mediatek/Rockchip/Nvidia pricing is really terrible but I guess prices don't matter when there's almost no demand anyway.
ARM is ok only for reasonable performance at low power (if we forget about VIA).
It's like saying that programming language (syntax) has performance implication.
No, it doesn't. Everything is up to the compiler, runtime and standard library.
Of course there may be some feature that make compiler's life easier, but still things are way, way more complicated than "just take ARM ISA and you'll be king".
https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...
Also even if you assume that ARM has 1-2% better perf than x86, then how many people will risk transition over that? Some will, but majority will no.
I'd never tell the higher ups this but it was pretty easy, too. I'll let them bask in my glory of saving the company $60k/month.
Because right now I'm looking to save up for a majorly spec'd Apple MacbookPro just to be able to do this stuff on a *nix operating system. I have no great love for Apple but the abilities of their chips and the vast software offerings are tempting this Linux guy in that direction.
Something that Microsoft cannot seem to do any more. I used Windows from 3.x-WinME; NT3.51-WinXP, getting off before Vista. What I've seen since then has done nothing to tempt me back to their side. Since I unfortunately must deal with Windows 10 at work, it definitely reinforces my distaste for their systems....
So despite thinking OSX has been rendered ugly for the past ten years now, I'm still thinking heavily in that direction, even with the high costs. Snapdragon X sounds nice enough but I have zero expectations based on past behavior at those getting decent Linux support any time soon. And no one else seems to even be trying, that one Thinkpad aside.
I’d expect a future hypothetical Microsoft ARM laptop to be like a surface-RT; some Windows dropped on a third party ARM chip. Microsoft is a software company, after all. So it is more of a matter of, do they happen to have bought a chip that supports Linux (probably yes, because what hardware manufacturer wants to be dependent on one company for OS support?) and can you get past Secureboot (probably yes, after a couple years at least, when the jailbreak happens).