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Comment by ceronman | Hacker News Reader

x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. And M4 is about to arrive. I'm a bit disappointed because I really want more competition for Apple, but they're just not there yet, nor x86 nor Qualcomm.

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Apple will also run into the diminishing returns, but they will retain the real killer advantage over general purpose CPU vendors that the have in other hardware areas: being able to retire or rework old or misconceived parts of the architecture entirely in future versions unilaterally. If they want to drop M1 support in some future MacOS version, all it will take will be a WWDC announcement that the next version won't simply work on that generation it earlier of machines.

Yeah, that all makes senses. But having legacy software that you support has been a big advantage for x86 for, basically, forever. For a lot of purposes, that is way more important than performance per watt.

> x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt.

Do you have a source for this? I havent seen a good review of Lunar Lake yet. The article this HN story links to is pretty bad.

I think they're running out of optimizations (hacks). They moved memory on package and bought the latest TSMC node. I guess they could keep buying the latest node but I don't expect any more large leaps.

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