1/ Yet again it's worth reminding people that ARM/RISC processors do not have a power efficiency advantage at the high-end. Yes, ARM processors are popular in mobile devices, but they consume less power because they are slower, not because they are more efficient.
2/ Yes, at the low end when you have CPUs with only 100,000 gates, RISC has an advantage. At the high end, with billions of gates, that disappears.
3/ In high end CPUs, like the iPhone CPU and the Intel CPU, it takes the same number of pipeline stages to translate ARM/x86 instructions into uops, and this is bypassed half the time by the uops cache anyway.
4/ What little power is lost on the more complex instructions is gained back again by the more efficient encoding (x86 code is smaller than ARM code).
5/ People point to the following as proof otherwise. No, it's not proof, you just don't understand it. CloudFlare gets two benefits from the chips.
datacenterknowledge.com/design/cloudfl…
datacenterknowledge.com/design/cloudfl…
6/ The first is that these are "system on a chip" or SoC that comes with stuff network appliances like, such as crypto and compression accelerators. Equivalent Intel appliances has these as addons or just do them in software.
7/ The second is that they contain more slower chips. This works well for CloudFlare since they have a ton of independent network streams. It works less well for the server market where Intel sells most of its CPUs.
8/ Intel's flaw is not x86/CISC, it's the fact that it sells general purpose chips that struggle to be optimized for specific needs. ARM's advantage is that there are a ton of vendors customizing chips to specific needs, like CloudFlare's.
9/ As for the news Apple is going to replace Intel in Macintoshes, it's still speculative. Apple's fastest CPU in the iPad is certainly competitive against the slowest Macbook....
anandtech.com/show/9766/the-…
anandtech.com/show/9766/the-…
10/ And estimates are that Apple's custom CPU costs $15 vs Intel charging $300, so that would make a lot of sense. On the other hand, it's unlikely Apple could produce a competitive chip for high-end desktops.
11/ I mean, Apple already produces the best ARM CPU in its iPhone, so if anybody can, they can. But my guess is that this is a ploy to bring down Intel's ridiculously high margins.
12/ Either way Intel loses, either losing Apple's business, or losing margins, so this is bad new for Intel. They can't keep their high margins forever.
