Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market
"They've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business."
Apple already did though. Even specifically replacing Intel chips because Intel's offering was dogshit that was destroying their ability to offer the design they wanted with their stupid power draw.
The rest of ARM is behind, and Windows has done a shit job of ARM support, but that doesn't mean that's forever.
Windows also seems more concerned with going all in on cloud computing, the whole “you will own nothing and like it” paradigm. So making a faster and more efficient mobile platform isn’t probably a high priority for them.
Especially when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Windows isn’t the future. Windows has maintained dominance because it is great at backwards compatibility. ARM erodes that advantage because of architectural differences, coupled with the difficulty and drawbacks of emulating x86 on ARM. Mobile is eating more and more market share, and devs aren’t making enterprise software for Windows like they use to.
No one working on a greenfield project says “let’s develop our systems on Windows server” unless they already were doing that. Windows as a service is the more likely future, funneled by Azure.
Also, Chromebooks. And the more powerful CPUs the more they'll be purchased too.
And low-end Windows laptops.
Maybe not a giant piece of the pie of the current market, but definitely a dent as these more powerful CPUs come online.
The rest of ARM is behind
That might change with Snapdragon X. It isn't out yet but competition to the top will hopefully start getting the prices down.
The problem with ARM laptops is all of the x86 windows software that will never get ARM support and all of the users that will complain about poor performance if an emulator is used to run the x86 software.
Most Linux software already supports ARM natively. I would love to have an ARM laptop as long as it has a decent GPU with good open source drivers. It would need full OpenGL and Vulkan support and not that OpenGL ES crap though.
Windows as always turn out to be the main villain.
And if it wasn't for these meddling gnu followers it would have gotten away with it too.
Microsoft is actually pushing Windows on ARM right now, since their exclusivity deal with Qualcom expired. This is going to get interesting.
Modern ARM GPUs already support OpenGL and Vulkan, that’s not a problem. Just some platforms chose to go mobile APIs due to running Android.
The trick with emulation that Apple did was to add custom instructions to the CPU that are used by the emulation layer to efficiently run x86_64 code. Nothing is stopping other CPU manufacturers from doing the same, the only issue is that they have to collaborate with the emulation developer.
The driver situation is less than ideal. Mesa got support for Mali but that's not the only GPU that comes with ARM chips and you get bonkers situations. E.g. with my rk3399-based NanoPC, a couple of years ago (haven't checked in a while and yes it's a Mali) rockchip's blob supported vulkan for android but only gles for linux as rockchip never paid ARM the licensing fees for that.
And honestly ARM is on the way down: Chip producers are antsy about the whole Qualcomm thing and Qualcomm itself is definitely moving away from ARM, as such my bets for the long and even mid-term are firmly on RISC-V. Still lack desktop performance but with mobile players getting into the game laptops aren't far off.
Doesn't Microsoft have something similar to Apple's Rosetta 2 JIT x86 -> ARM code translation kajigger? I could swear I've seen something like that mentioned
Edit: not sure whether it was WOW64 that I read about, that seems to only work for running 32 bit intel code on ARM (although I have no idea if that's actually a problem or not when running modern Windows binaries, the last Windows I ran was Vista)
I love my ARMed Mac because battery life. I almost never use the power cable outside.
If only I could get wifi to work on a linux partition, it would be the perfect linux machine.
The wifi worked fine for me on Fedora Asahi, macbook air m2.
Maybe you can buy a USB-C Wifi interface that's small enough. Assuming there's something like that.
This sounds very familiar to when Steve Ballmer wasn’t worried about the iPhone at all.
Or when Kodak didn't worry about digital cameras
I hope Risc-V will make it. Even though idk? But it literally has no weird proprietary shit like ARM and it actually makes sense.
Going away from x86_64 is important, even for the environment
Much like the open source movement before it, the open hardware movement will have a slow crawl to a bare victory.
It'll first be used a lot by labs, embedded applications and general infrastructure, far away from the consumer space with only a little bit of overlap.
Then, hopefully, some new Apple-like company manages to slam dunk their presentation and introduction to market, effectively disrupting the market - in a good way.
Follow me for more hopeful divining. We'll have the shaking of sticks, a dead goat boy and symbols written in the floor.
Bring candles.
Whats also awesome is, that SiFives devices run Coreboot out of the box.
I own a Thinkpad T430 and soon a Clevo NV41 and both are also Coreboot compatible. Most excited about the new hardware, even though it will need a fully blobbed Coreboot... SiFive on the other hand is probably fully FOSS?? This is crazy!
My hopes for RISC V are higher than I like to admit.
I really hope it goes mainstream and gives us ARM benefits with the open nature awesomeness
Well they should be afraid. I want a ARM Linux laptop as well. Or even better RISC-V! Yes plz.. THE WORLD NEED RISC-V, Yesterday.
I wish the Pinebook Pro was updated cause I'd give that a shot. Or better, an ARM powered Framework laptop
I replaced my old Intel Core i7 HP ProLiant server with an Odroid M1 (ARM Based) and it consumes 2 watts compared to 72 that the Intel Server did.
The only thing I can't do with it is my Minecraft server, it runs all else perfectly. Even the Lemmy instance of this account is powered by the same server! And what's more it basically runs for free, as solar generates enough power for the server to consume, even when it's cloudy.
Yes, I believe Intel should be afraid.
Impressive!
You can't do the Minecraft server because of performance right?
Yeah it's mostly performance related. I have like 10 different websites running all at once, and while CPU and RAM aren't 100% all the time, with a heavy load I don't have enough free to do it
I run my lemmy instance on a pine64 quartz64 which uses an rk3566. It runs really well and power consumption is totally negligible. Didn’t notice any increase in my power bill since it’s been running.
Nice, cool to see more people have an arm Lemmy instance
I think I remember Intel saying that 64 bit on the desktop was not needed. They are great at making meaningless predictions it seems.
My m1 MacBook Air is hands down the most incredible laptop I've ever owned. I've had it for 3ish years now and it just doesn't fucking stop. Battery life is still amazing and runs just as fast as it did day 1.
I've NEVER had that experience with any Intel/PC laptop, ever. Honestly I'm never going back.
They're of course exaggerating a little and speaking confidently because theyre in the business of selling a product and not in the business of trash talking what they sell or reducing confidence in their product.
That said the M1/M2 silicon battery life gains were a huge leap forward when they first launched but in terms of battery efficiency and power AMD has been nipping at their heels, and in due time intel will likely get it's stuff together and join them. You can already get ryzen laptops efficient enough and cool running enough that the fan is off during most light usage, and they can get hours into the mid to high teens on some models.
Likewise even macs will start to drain quite a bit when say watching an hd video 1.75x speed, or playing a video game, or encoding something using max CPU power. So while the Macs do have a power per watt advantage, you'll still need to be plugged in.
And thats BEST arm vs intel and amd as they catch up. Samsung, google, and qualcom dont really have anything like the m2 at play and while qualcom is rumored to be close the samsung fab'd chips definitely arent.
So as things are the death Intel and AMD has been greatly exaggerated and in part due a combination of the usual apple hype combined with that hype being VERY VERY justified this go around.
Likewise even macs will start to drain quite a bit when say watching an hd video 1.75x speed, or playing a video game
That's not my experience. I can play demanding games (CPU/GPU flat out) for several hours on battery on my Mac, and it only has a 50Wh battery.
With "normal" use I get about 18 hours on a charge.
I generally charge it overnight, like a phone, except I don't do it every night. I often don't even have access to a charger for days at a time, a laptop charger isn't part of my normal travel kit. If I notice the battery "running low" that means I need to find a charger in, like, five hours time.
The high end MacBook Pros, with a 12 core CPU and 38 core GPU... yeah those can draw a lot of power. In fact they even drain the battery while plugged into a charger if you really push them. But I don't think of those as "proper" laptops. They're more like a portable desktop.
A demanding game on a macbook air m2 will still draw close to 30 watts and while that is actually still good for a laptop relative to what the output is, and you can probably do things to improve that by tweaking in game settings, it's still going to suck power out of a 50Whr battery.
Steamdecks also run an efficient ryzen apu that lets them play games for 2-8 hours depending on how things are tweaked. Likewise on my 39Whr ryzen thinkpad(intel got a 59whr battery dont get me started on that nonsense) I can get 8-12 hours depending on usage normal browsing as well.
This isnt to take down the m1 & m2. They are definitively more powerful, theyre definitively more efficient, I'm not disputing that. But the gap isnt as huge as it was when the m1 launched.
Yeah, I hope so, but they also cannot just lie about the direction they think they are headed like that as a public company. With the kind of progress translation has made it just seems inevitable that the switch will happen for lower power consumer devices at least. (Lower power being relative to a high end workstation) interesting to see if maybe this means a pivot to commercial only products.
Intel is in denial.
Denial inside.
My hope, no... dream, is that we get both ARM and x86 compatible chips on the same motherboard one day. Off course the operating system needs to support dual architectures. Then they could run ARM binaries directly without any major compatibility or performance hit, without the need for recompilation.
A man can only hope. Is this something that could happen? Technically it should be possible, but realistically, probably not.
But then you end up with the downsides of having both and none of the upsides? Wouldn't that incur an enormous effort on the software side to make it all possible, so you could run a less efficient chip in the end (practically two instead of one)
Having compatibility to legacy software is a pretty upside. Either you use an application that runs power efficient, maybe the entire operating system uses the power efficient ARM at default and then for compatibility or for faster calculation (games?) the x86 cores could be used. Intel already does two different kind of cores, performance and efficiency cores. And smartphones have something similar too. I imagine this would be expensive and it is not for everyone. And who knows what other cutbacks and drawbacks it would require.
This isn't all that different from having a coprocessor. I don't think it's very useful to have an ARM or x86 coprocessor though because the major benefit to ARM is lower power consumption... Adding in a whole coprocessor is just going to increase power consumption.
Things like Rosetta are probably the better way.
Or maybe we see Java/the JVM make a comeback. This is the exact sort of world Java was built for. It just turned out that right around the time Java was taking off, everyone basically went for Windows and x86 chips... Which became the defacto standard.
Granted, at this point, folks would probably be going for more WASM (in browser or not) than JVM.
But Java and WASM doesn't solve the compatibility issue on ARM. Games and other programs for x86 are still something people want to execute on ARM machines. That's why compatibility layers and emulators are build for. And having a dedicated CPU would help with that. And if you do not use the x86 "extension", then you won't pay for power consumption. And if you aren't interested into x86, then you simply don't buy a dual architecture motherboard.
I'm not looking this from the perspective of laptops or handhelds BTW, but from the perspective of desktop PC. Overall I think its not practical to have them both on a single motherboard. But you know, the industry is full of non practical ideas. So it's not unimaginable this could be reality someday. Maybe just for a small audience.
Macs are pretty popular
Their market share is up but still less than 10%.
It's possible this is a result of improvements Intel is planning for their x86 chips. They've already mirrored the efficiency and performance core designs that AFAIK originated in ARM.
In a way, this might be Intel making a prediction based on how years ago Intel launched an x86 replacement, and AMD launched x86-64 ... and AMD won because people didn't want to rebuild all their software/couldn't get their software.
yeah but back then it was not 90% web apps. also programming languages are way better supporting both platforms. ARM is far from being a little player anymore
That's true, but Windows ARM and Linux desktop ARM are still pretty niche.
The web apps thing definitely makes this a lot easier for ARM to takeoff in the PC segment. Though, a lot of those devices are pretty well served by Chromebooks ... of which, I think many are already ARM.
Intel is evidently not paying attention.
Intel planning to abuse its quasi-monopoly to stifle competition and innovation? They wouldn't dare, would they? /s
I wonder if intel is betting on increased centralized cloud computing as the way forward for personal computers. So the efficiency benefits of ARM are irrelevant in their minds since they think the real power will come from big data centers.
AWS has a shitton of in-house "Graviton" ARM stuff available and the ARM server chips from Ampere are popping up in more and more places as well. Most Linux servery distros have ARM images available now, and most software builds without major changes. It's a slow transition but it's already happening.
Yeah and ARM servers are cheap. You can often get twice the processor cores and memory for the same price.
That doesn't always map to twice the performance, though some benchmarks would suggest it could for certain applications.
Do they not realize data centers are powered by electricity that costs money? Why not also use ARM there and cut costs?
If they have to emulate x86 stuff it may pose some issues with efficiency
But that will likely only be in the short term
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn't seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company's most recent earnings call (via Seeking Alpha).
"Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally, they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," said Gelsinger.
Ideally, Arm-based PCs promise performance on par with x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but with dramatically better power efficiency that allows for long-lasting battery life and fanless PC designs.
Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon chip for PCs, the 8cx Gen 3 (also called the Microsoft SQ3), appears in two consumer Windows devices.
Even if Gelsinger is wrong, he's trying to spin the rise of Arm PCs as a potentially positive thing, saying that Intel would be happy to manufacture these chips for its competitors.
Right now, TSMC has an effective monopoly on cutting-edge chip manufacturing, making high-end silicon for Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and (tellingly) Intel itself.
Saved 71% of original text. :::
Not if they still suck ass
I don't understand the comments in this thread, why would anyone want their laptops to act like their mobile devices? They have less privacy and they're harder to control. Am I missing something?
What you are talking about is the operating system, not the cpu.
The ARM architecture allows much more performance for less power when compared to AMD64, because it runs simpler instructions.
The change to ARM chips on laptops will not make them work like phones, with the exception of much better standby.
I'm obviously not techy, but when I was looking for a tablet, I was told I want a laptop or a 2 in 1 and I didn't want the ARM architecture because that's like mobile. I got a 2 in 1 tablet and they were right that I love it, so that's why I was asking.
what does that have to do with the ISA your CPU uses?
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