I 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.

As 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.

This article fails to mention the single biggest differentiator between x86 and ARM: their memory models. Considering the sheer amount of everyday software that is going multithreaded, this is a huge issue, and the reason why ARM drastically outperforms x86 running software like modern web browsers.

Do you mind elaborating what is it about the difference on their memory models that makes a difference?

On the x86 architecture, RAM is used by the CPU and the GPU has a huge penalty when accessing main RAM. It therefore has onboard graphics memory.

On ARM this is unified so GPU and CPU can both access the same memory, at the same penalty. This means a huge class of embarrassingly parallel problems can be solved quicker on this architecture.