After 40+ years, finally :) I really want x86 and ARM to push each other for better power efficiency and performance instead of one side winning out. I’m using an ARM laptop nowadays and the battery life is so impressive.
I thought the big advantage tended to be when not much was going on, either idle or simple tasks. And that’s where the big ARM advantage in power was.
Laptops are populated mostly with crap x86 and good ARM (apart from snapdragon which is a crap ARM)
By good ARM, do you mean specifically (and only) Apple? Given their budgets (both financial and transistor), their very long history and investment into their chips, their deep integration of stuff like memory and GPU, and their tendency to be a process node ahead of their competitors, Apple is a particularly hard example to interpret when it comes to ISA impact.
Hard to imagine another company making all those choices, since they all have costs too, which many won't be willing or able to bear, and some of those costs (like the lack of flexibility due to the deep integration) are possibly a non-starter for many niches.
It's mentioned in the article too. Ampere performs really poorly on idle (101W vs EPYC's meager 19W). I haven't witnessed that problem on my Snapdragon X laptop.
I'm not saying Ampere is bad myself though. It's obviously very competitive being a relatively new player and all. But, it's not as polished for desktop/laptop workloads as it seems.