I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.
The people working on Snapdragon X Elite are supposedly the same people that worked on the M1 and M2 chips. They made their own company to make ARM chips before being acquired by qualcomm. I was hoping for similar gains…
I’ve been a general skeptic of exactly how much the power and performance to power stats are attributable to the ARM instruction set or architecture versus the fact that Apple just locks up TSMC’s latest and greatest node for a year before everyone else. AMD’s CPUs are still x86_64 but achieve similar performance per watt as the Apple silicon on the same node and similar TDPs.
So if it turns out that TSMC has the secret sauce, then maybe we don’t need to move laptops over to ARM at all.
I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.
The people working on Snapdragon X Elite are supposedly the same people that worked on the M1 and M2 chips. They made their own company to make ARM chips before being acquired by qualcomm. I was hoping for similar gains…
…but you’ve got Microsoft writing the OS.
Power draw is not all hardware.
I’ve been a general skeptic of exactly how much the power and performance to power stats are attributable to the ARM instruction set or architecture versus the fact that Apple just locks up TSMC’s latest and greatest node for a year before everyone else. AMD’s CPUs are still x86_64 but achieve similar performance per watt as the Apple silicon on the same node and similar TDPs.
So if it turns out that TSMC has the secret sauce, then maybe we don’t need to move laptops over to ARM at all.
I thought it was the deal with (what was it, TSMC?), they got the new nm generation first?
It’s a mixed bag. The smaller nodes have bigger problems with static leakage power, Vs dynamic switching power (which goes down)