From the little that I have read, their MT performance (or even TCO) isn’t really as great as some of the early previews would lead one to believe…
TCO is “total cost of ownership” a very important piece to that in the future is power consumption. Energy prices are rising. This isn’t just the electricity consumed by the CPU but also the cooling needed to exhaust the heat. Many of these highest performance x86 CPUs will cost substantially more to operate as the energy prices continue to rise.
I just don’t see ARM being a universal silver bullet (a straight line upgrade from x86)
Its not there yet, but with Intel fumbling on this one, leaving AMD the only leader in the space, trading one company being dominate over the other doesn’t really serve us well. What I’m pointing out is that its not a “straight line” upgrade, but its curving ever more toward a non-x86 future.
and with SoftBank trying to extract more cash out of ARM, things could get interesting.
I agree which is why I keep making references to RISC-V where I think the future will likely go instead. However, ARM showed (the industry as a whole) that we don’t need to stay with x86 forever as was the notion before. As in, “if we’ve successfully shown we can replace x86 with ARM, what would prevent us from replacing ARM with something else? Not much”.
TCO is “total cost of ownership” a very important piece to that in the future is power consumption. Energy prices are rising. This isn’t just the electricity consumed by the CPU but also the cooling needed to exhaust the heat. Many of these highest performance x86 CPUs will cost substantially more to operate as the energy prices continue to rise.
Its not there yet, but with Intel fumbling on this one, leaving AMD the only leader in the space, trading one company being dominate over the other doesn’t really serve us well. What I’m pointing out is that its not a “straight line” upgrade, but its curving ever more toward a non-x86 future.
I agree which is why I keep making references to RISC-V where I think the future will likely go instead. However, ARM showed (the industry as a whole) that we don’t need to stay with x86 forever as was the notion before. As in, “if we’ve successfully shown we can replace x86 with ARM, what would prevent us from replacing ARM with something else? Not much”.
I guess we’ll see what happens. I remain unconvinced about ARM replacing x86.
Risc-V is indeed very interesting. Although the performance numbers I’ve seen require a lot more work.