X86 has an incredible amount of cruft built up to support backwards compatibility all the way back to the 8086. ARM isn’t free of cruft, but it’s nowhere on the same level. Most of that isn’t directly visible to customers, though.
What is visible is that more than three companies can license and manufacture them. The x86 market has one company that owns it, another who licenses it but also owns the 64 bit extensions, and a third one who technically exists but is barely worth talking about. It’s also incredibly difficult to optimize, and the people who know how already work for one of main two companies (arguably only one at this point). Even if you could legally license it as a fourth player, you couldn’t get people who could design an x86 core that’s worth a damn.
Conversely, ARM cores are designed by CS students all the time. That’s the real advantage to end users: far more companies who can produce designs. If one of them fails the way Intel has of late, we’re not stuck with just one other possibility.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m guessing you’ve never used an ARM Mac.
They don’t look all that fast on GeekBench (more on that in further down) but in real world usage they are incredibly fast. As in an entry level 13" school homework laptop will have performance on par with a high end gaming PC with a thousand watt PSU.
I’m able to play games with ghat 3k resolution with good settings while running on battery power and it lasts several hours on battery. Not a big battery either, it’s about half the size/weight of a typical gaming laptop battery. I’m also able to compile software nice and quickly, I can run docker with a dozen containers open at the same time without breaking a sweat (this is particularly impressive on the Mac version of Docker which uses virtual machines instead of running directly on the host), and stable diffusion generates images in about 20 seconds or so with typical generation settings.
The best thing though is I can do all of that on a tiny battery that lasts almost an entire day under heavy load and multiple days under normal load. I’ve calculated the average power draw with typical use is somewhere around 3 watts for the entire system including the screen. It’s hard to believe, especially considering how fast it is.
On the modest GeekBench score Apple ARM processors have - it’s critical to understand GeekBench is designed to test very short bursts and avoid thermal throttling. Intel’s recent i9 processors, with good cooling, will thermal throttle after about 12 seconds and GeekBench is designed to avoid hitting that number by doing much shorter bursts than that. Apple’s processors not only take far longer to thermal throttle, they also “throttle” by reducing performance to barely lower than full speed.
But even worse than that - one of the ways Apple achieves incredible battery life is they don’t run the processors at high clock rates for short bursts. The CPU starts slow and ramps up to full speed when you keep it under high load. So something quick, like loading a webpage, won’t run at full speed and therefore GeekBench also isn’t running at full speed either.
A third difference, and probably the biggest one, is Apple’s processor has very fast memory and also massive memory caches which are even faster. Again that often doesn’t show up on CPU benchmark because it’s not really measuring compute power. But real world software spends a massive amount of time just reading and writing to memory and those operations are fast on Apple’s ARM processors.
You really can’t trust the benchmarks when you’re comparing completely different processors. You need to try real world usage, and the real world usage difference is game changing.
0ddysseus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Haha “entry level school homework Mac” Hahahahaha Sure thing Richy Rich
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The Mac I use is available secondhand for about $400.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You can buy a PC running Linux or Windows that stomps that for the same price, new.
Macs are over priced for what you get.
soren446@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nah that’s just too much disposable income. If you’re spending more than $200 on anything other than an old Thinkpad to run Linux on, you’re too rich /s
I mean, does your computer even have a nipple? Didn’t think so. Apple would never be bold enough to #freethenipple 😔
soren446@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Don’t even dare saying anything positive on Lemmy about Apple, even if your comment is constructive and adds to the conversation. Lemmy’s tech community is somehow worse than Reddit unless you’re into Linux. Your comment doesn’t deserve the barrage of downvotes you got.
I use arch btw.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 10 months ago
they are getting dowvoted because they said macbooks are “entry-level school laptop”, which I find hilarious.
macbooks are a luxury, paying way more for the same specs (with more battery life, I’ll grant you that).
soren446@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m sure all 19 people are downvoting them for that one sentence and not the usual downvotes for something pro-Apple. OP put more effort into their comment than most people on here despite that being a dumb take on a MacBook.
I’d agree with OP if it were the old Airs because that’s really all you could use them for before they froze up. Definitely overpriced new though, especially on their entry models. Can’t really expect Apple not to ask for loads of money from their customers because, well, they will pay it.
joshhsoj1902@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I work on an ARM Mac, it’s fine. If you’re just doing light work on it, it works great! Like any other similarly priced laptop would.
Under load, or doing work outside what it is tuned for, it doesn’t perform spectacularly.
It’s a fine laptop, the battery life is usually great. But as soon as you need to use the x86 translation layer, performance tanks, battery drains, it’s not a great time.
Things are getting better, and for a light user, It works great, but I’m much more excited about modern x86 laptop processors for the time being.