Apple already did though. Even specifically replacing Intel chips because Intel’s offering was dogshit that was destroying their ability to offer the design they wanted with their stupid power draw.
The rest of ARM is behind, and Windows has done a shit job of ARM support, but that doesn’t mean that’s forever.
Also, Chromebooks. And the more powerful CPUs the more they’ll be purchased too.
And low-end Windows laptops.
Maybe not a giant piece of the pie of the current market, but definitely a dent as these more powerful CPUs come online.
The rest of ARM is behind
That might change with Snapdragon X. It isn’t out yet but competition to the top will hopefully start getting the prices down.
Especially when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Windows isn’t the future. Windows has maintained dominance because it is great at backwards compatibility. ARM erodes that advantage because of architectural differences, coupled with the difficulty and drawbacks of emulating x86 on ARM. Mobile is eating more and more market share, and devs aren’t making enterprise software for Windows like they use to.
No one working on a greenfield project says “let’s develop our systems on Windows server” unless they already were doing that. Windows as a service is the more likely future, funneled by Azure.
Even some shops working with Windows Server are asking “wait, why are we paying for these licenses?”
Then it comes down to whether it’s cheaper to rewrite legacy applications or continue to pay for licenses.
Windows also seems more concerned with going all in on cloud computing, the whole “you will own nothing and like it” paradigm. So making a faster and more efficient mobile platform isn’t probably a high priority for them.
Them trying to force control away from users is bad.
But arm’s efficiency make it a damn good option for a thin client.
Yah, I’m really not enthused with the idea of having to pay monthly rent for my computers ability to function.
I wonder if intel just values their existing experience with 86 more than any potential efficiency gains since the efficiency matters a lot less when the whole system is just a glorified screen and antenna.
I’d say their recent trend towards packing in E(fficiency)-cores along with their previously standard P(erformance)-core design shows that they’re sensitive to and reacting to both the higher core counts of AMD and the greater efficiency of ARM
I think it matters more.
Apple’s battery life is so good in large part because ARM is way better at low end power draw.
Them taking control away from me makes me not use them. Not a problem at all.
I was never too deep because I always hated everything about Windows UX, but I was stuck with them for gaming for a bit. Luckily Steam fixed that for pretty much everything I wanted to play but Madden (and after hours of it also not working on a separate Windows install I tried just for that purpose, I threw in the towel on that, too).
The funny thing is I actually kind of like the idea of a thin client as a general rule. Not for gaming or anything else latency sensitive, but offloading heavy lifting is perfectly fine with me. Just not in a way I don’t have control of.
I’m stuck with it because of work. Luckily, “Industry 4.0” is completely fucking fed up with M$ and they’re abandoning Windows in droves. I’m just waiting for my vendor to finish polishing their MacOS and Linux alternatives.
I love my ARMed Mac because battery life. I almost never use the power cable outside.
And it’s really responsive even on battery. It’s actually a little bad because I can have too many windows open and can’t find anything.
MacOS doesn’t throttle performance on battery like many Windows power plans do, that’s why
MacOS doesn’t need to throttle performance because ARM and other RISC architectures are naturally very power efficient
They didn’t do it on x86 either I believe.
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Well those Intel CPUs used to thermal throttle anyway in their outlandishly inadequate cooling designs so they did not need to throttle power either way. Now they could throttle power but don’t have to
Well it can when it needs to. It just doesn’t need to much
If only I could get wifi to work on a linux partition, it would be the perfect linux machine.
The wifi worked fine for me on Fedora Asahi, macbook air m2.
Maybe you can buy a USB-C Wifi interface that’s small enough. Assuming there’s something like that.
Well they should be afraid. I want a ARM Linux laptop as well. Or even better RISC-V! Yes plz… THE WORLD NEED RISC-V, Yesterday.
I wish the Pinebook Pro was updated cause I’d give that a shot. Or better, an ARM powered Framework laptop
I wonder if intel is betting on increased centralized cloud computing as the way forward for personal computers. So the efficiency benefits of ARM are irrelevant in their minds since they think the real power will come from big data centers.
AWS has a shitton of in-house “Graviton” ARM stuff available and the ARM server chips from Ampere are popping up in more and more places as well. Most Linux servery distros have ARM images available now, and most software builds without major changes. It’s a slow transition but it’s already happening.
Yeah and ARM servers are cheap. You can often get twice the processor cores and memory for the same price.
That doesn’t always map to twice the performance, though some benchmarks would suggest it could for certain applications.
Do they not realize data centers are powered by electricity that costs money? Why not also use ARM there and cut costs?
If they have to emulate x86 stuff it may pose some issues with efficiency
But that will likely only be in the short term
The problem with ARM laptops is all of the x86 windows software that will never get ARM support and all of the users that will complain about poor performance if an emulator is used to run the x86 software.
Most Linux software already supports ARM natively. I would love to have an ARM laptop as long as it has a decent GPU with good open source drivers. It would need full OpenGL and Vulkan support and not that OpenGL ES crap though.
Modern ARM GPUs already support OpenGL and Vulkan, that’s not a problem. Just some platforms chose to go mobile APIs due to running Android.
The trick with emulation that Apple did was to add custom instructions to the CPU that are used by the emulation layer to efficiently run x86_64 code. Nothing is stopping other CPU manufacturers from doing the same, the only issue is that they have to collaborate with the emulation developer.
The driver situation is less than ideal. Mesa got support for Mali but that’s not the only GPU that comes with ARM chips and you get bonkers situations. E.g. with my rk3399-based NanoPC, a couple of years ago (haven’t checked in a while and yes it’s a Mali) rockchip’s blob supported vulkan for android but only gles for linux as rockchip never paid ARM the licensing fees for that.
And honestly ARM is on the way down: Chip producers are antsy about the whole Qualcomm thing and Qualcomm itself is definitely moving away from ARM, as such my bets for the long and even mid-term are firmly on RISC-V. Still lack desktop performance but with mobile players getting into the game laptops aren’t far off.
Windows as always turn out to be the main villain.
Windows has nothing to do with it. They are talking about software applications that were made for x86. Stuff like Adobe CC, etc.
Windows runs on ARM (and has for a decade) and the apps available in the Windows app store run on ARM.
Except software applications like Adobe CC have supported ARM for nearly 5 years now. As do most software because mobile exists (and mobile is exclusively ARM) and these days, apps need to cover desktop and mobile and web. ARM has essentially been forced on everyone because of mobile. Whether they like it or not, ARM is here to stay.
But none of this is a technical limitation. It’s a political one. Companies like MS don’t care about the technology, they just care about moving in a way that gives them control so they can maintain and expand their monopoly through licensing and other restrictions.
Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.
But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.
But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.
IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.
That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.
Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.
It’s less that they’ll adapt, and more that they don’t really care. And particularly in the case of Apple users: their apps are (mostly) available on their Macs already. The vast majority of people couldn’t tell you what architecture their computer runs on and will just happily use whatever works and doesn’t cost them the earth.
I didn’t mean the customers, but sure.
Virtually all modern x86 chips work that way
Microcoding has been a thing since the 1950s, it’s the default. Early RISCs tried to get away with it and for a brief time RISCs weren’t microcoded kinda by definition, but it snuck back in because it’s just too useful to not hard-wire everything. You maybe get away with it on MIPS but Arm? Tough luck. RISC-V can be done and it can make microcontroller-scale chips simpler, but you can also implement the RV32I (full) insn set in terms of RVC (compressed subset) and be faster. Not to mention that when you get to things like the vector extensions you definitely want to use microcode. The Cray-1 was hardwired, but they, too, dropped it for a reason.
I guess in modern days RISC more or less means “a decent chunk of the instruction set will not be microcoded but can instead be used as microcode”, whereas with modern CISC processors the instruction set and the microcode may have no direct correspondences at all.
And if it wasn’t for these meddling gnu followers it would have gotten away with it too.
Microsoft is actually pushing Windows on ARM right now, since their exclusivity deal with Qualcom expired. This is going to get interesting.
Doesn’t Microsoft have something similar to Apple’s Rosetta 2 JIT x86 -> ARM code translation kajigger? I could swear I’ve seen something like that mentioned
Edit: not sure whether it was WOW64 that I read about, that seems to only work for running 32 bit intel code on ARM (although I have no idea if that’s actually a problem or not when running modern Windows binaries, the last Windows I ran was Vista)
They have, and in my experience it works nicer than Rosetta.
Windows 10 had it limited to 32bit binaries (but Windows 10 on ARM is generally very broken). Windows 11 can handle both 32 and 64bit emulation.
Yeah I recall it somehow being better designed than Rosetta but I can’t dig up where I read about this
Don’t want to go into too much details - from a high level perspective the Windows version integrates better into the overall system. In Rosetta, once you’re in the emulation layer it can be rather complicated to execute native components from there. In Windows - with some exceptions - that’s not a problem.
This sounds very familiar to when Steve Ballmer wasn’t worried about the iPhone at all.
Or when Kodak didn’t worry about digital cameras
lol it’s already out there on tens of millions of laptops, but I guess hubris is the way to go
Bollocks! 64k RAM is enough for anything!
A more recent example:
“Nobody needs more than 4 cores for personal use!”
I don’t know who said this, but my bet would be Intel. Without AMD, we would probably still stuck on 4 cores.
Yep it’s Intel.
They said it up until their competitor started offering more than 4 cores as a standard.
It’s possible this is a result of improvements Intel is planning for their x86 chips. They’ve already mirrored the efficiency and performance core designs that AFAIK originated in ARM.
In a way, this might be Intel making a prediction based on how years ago Intel launched an x86 replacement, and AMD launched x86-64 … and AMD won because people didn’t want to rebuild all their software/couldn’t get their software.
yeah but back then it was not 90% web apps. also programming languages are way better supporting both platforms. ARM is far from being a little player anymore
My m1 MacBook Air is hands down the most incredible laptop I’ve ever owned. I’ve had it for 3ish years now and it just doesn’t fucking stop. Battery life is still amazing and runs just as fast as it did day 1.
I’ve NEVER had that experience with any Intel/PC laptop, ever. Honestly I’m never going back.
If Intel or AMD ever bolted RAM straight on to the CPU the way Apple does with ARM, their CPUs would offer similar performance and battery life. Apple gets its performance gains from increased I/O bandwidth, not radical design. But there is a tradeoff with reduced expandability. Which may well be worth it in the laptop space. But not desktops and workstations.
that is a big part of the performance, but the battery life savings also come from clever chip design and and the fact that TSMC has been ahead of Intel on feature size for years now.
Intel planning to abuse its quasi-monopoly to stifle competition and innovation? They wouldn’t dare, would they? /s
Intel is in denial.
Denial inside.
I replaced my old Intel Core i7 HP ProLiant server with an Odroid M1 (ARM Based) and it consumes 2 watts compared to 72 that the Intel Server did.
The only thing I can’t do with it is my Minecraft server, it runs all else perfectly. Even the Lemmy instance of this account is powered by the same server! And what’s more it basically runs for free, as solar generates enough power for the server to consume, even when it’s cloudy.
Yes, I believe Intel should be afraid.
You can’t do the Minecraft server because of performance right?
Yeah it’s mostly performance related. I have like 10 different websites running all at once, and while CPU and RAM aren’t 100% all the time, with a heavy load I don’t have enough free to do it
that must be the reason seeing as java is available for just about everything these days
modern arm socs are impressive but i seriously doubt that 2 watt chip is beating the 75 watt chip it replaced
The server was a second hand server that has 32GB RAM and 2 i7 CPU’s, it was made in 2015 so quite old. The Odroid has only 8GB of RAM but for my purposes that’s enough, and given the power it saves it’s absolutely a bargain!
If I ever need this much memory again I can just temporarily spin up something more powerful, for all other 24/7 tasks I can keep up the efficient ARM server.
it’s great that the new machine suits your needs with so little power. whatever gets the job done with the least energy and cost is almost always the best option.
we are just questioning whether its performance is truly comparable with the old one. because arm cannot replace x86 on performance per watt alone, many applications need more performance regardless of wattage. i think your old machine was overkill for your use case
Yeah makes sense! It probably doesn’t although I have no benchmarks to prove it, it just is enough for me. I know this much though: even if the x86 server had the same specs (ram, GHz) as the arm version it likely still draws more power
Well, Java can call into native code. I’m pretty sure Mojang isn’t doing that sort of thing, but I wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t depending on a subset of the JVM or a native library that is defacto standard in the x86 world.
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Impressive!
I don’t understand the comments in this thread, why would anyone want their laptops to act like their mobile devices? They have less privacy and they’re harder to control. Am I missing something?
what does that have to do with the ISA your CPU uses?
What you are talking about is the operating system, not the cpu.
The ARM architecture allows much more performance for less power when compared to AMD64, because it runs simpler instructions.
The change to ARM chips on laptops will not make them work like phones, with the exception of much better standby.
I think I remember Intel saying that 64 bit on the desktop was not needed. They are great at making meaningless predictions it seems.
Intel is evidently not paying attention.
