miskMicrosoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
jqubedI don’t really know if ARM adds benefits I’d really notice as an end user, but it’ll be interesting to see if this really goes through and upends the dominant architecture we’ve seen for really 40+ years.
SMillerNLAs an ARM Mac user, I wouldn’t trade all this new battery life for an x86 processor
There’s nothing stopping x86-64 processors from being power efficient. This article is pretty technical but does a really good explanation of why that’s the case: chipsandcheese.com/…/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/
It’s just that traditionally Intel and AMD earn most of their money from the server and enterprise sectors where high performance is more important than super low power usage. And even with that, AMD’s Z1 Extreme also gets within striking distance of the M3 at a similar power draw. It also helps that Apple is generally one node ahead.
If there’s ‘nothing stopping’ it then why has nobody done it? Apple moved from x86 to ARM. Mobile is all ARM. All the big cloud providers are doing their own ARM chips. Intel killed off much of the architectural competition with Itanic in the early 2000’s. Why stop?
Their primary money makers are what’s stopping them I reckon. Apple’s move to ARM is because they already had a ton of experience with building their own in house processors for their mobile devices and ARM licenses stock chip designs, making it easier for other companies to come up with their own custom chips whereas there really isn’t any equivalent for x86-64. There were some disagreements between Intel and AMD over patents on the x86 instruction set too.