- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
2024 might be the breakout year for efficient ARM chips in desktop and laptop PCs.
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It says it a few times about x86 being decades old…but so is ARM? I dont know whats supposed to be game changing about it.
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 don’t have a high end gaming PC to compare, but I do have a mid-range one and I’ve stopped using it… my laptop is so much faster, quieter, cooler, that even though the PC has more games… I just put up with the modest selection (about half the games I own) that run on a Mac. It’s not just gaming either… I’m also able to compile software perfectly fast, 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. Trust me, when proper fast processors (not just a laptop running with a phone CPU) are available on PCs, everyone will realise Mac users were right - ARM is way better than x86. This isn’t like AMD vs Intel. It’s more like HDD vs SSD.
Haha “entry level school homework Mac” Hahahahaha Sure thing Richy Rich
The Mac I use is a few years old and available secondhand for under $500. You can get the same CPU/GPU in an iPad which is available, brand new, for $600. I think that’s a reasonable price for a school computer.
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.
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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.
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they are getting dowvoted because they said macbooks are “entry-level school laptops”, which I find hilarious.
macbooks are a luxury, paying way more for the same specs (with more battery life, I’ll grant you that).
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Personally I down voted once I read that somehow one of these laptops are on par with a high end gaming PC which is simply not true at all.
This is a Qualcomm marketing piece.
And no, the most exciting 2024 tech won’t be a CPU with similar or lower performance to other comparable CPUs on the market, with the added benefit of less software compatibility.
Can’t wait. I recently bought a firewall that gets noticeably warm on idle, even with a little case that has a heat sink. We need more energy efficient PCs.
One of the hurdles to ARM is that you need to recompile and maintain a separate version of every piece of software for the different processors.
This is a much easier task for a tightly controlled ecosystem like Mac than the tons of different suppliers Windows ecosystem. You can do some sort of emulation to run non-native stuff, but at the cost of the optimization that you were hoping to gain.
Another OS variation also adds a big cost/burden to enterprise customers where they need to manage patches, security, etc.
I would expect to see more inroads in non-corporate areas following Apple success, but not any sort of explosion.
On the other hand, a completely open ecosystem works well too — ARM for Linux feels exactly like ARM on x86/64 in my experience. Granted this is for headless stuff on an (RPi and Orange Pi, both ARM, both running Debian), but really the only difference is the bootloader situation.
Wake me up when risc-v has performance parity and more software
This is just a repeat of the same old pro-RISC myths from decades ago. There is very little performance difference between x86 and any RISC based CPU, at least when pertaining to the ISA itself. Apple merely has the advantage of having far more resources available for CPU development than their competitors.
2024 might be the year I win a million dollars.
I will tell you how to win 2 million if you give me 1
It would be fascinating to see Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Mediatek, and possibly others all competing to build the best ARM SoCs for windows devices, especially after so many years of Intel stagnating and Apple eating their lunch with their ARM SoCs.
competing to build the best ARM SoCs for windows devices
You mean desktop, and not Windows? Because if anything Windows is becoming a botnet device. I hope linux support is OOB.
Windows arm devices boot with UEFI, so standard ARM UEFI images should work, just like on x86. I would bet drivers should be alright too, since these ARM SoCs will likely be similar to ones used in Linux SBCs and Android devices.
Does anyone else worry that the rise of personal computers using super custom SOCs is going to have negative effects on our abilities to build our own machines?
“The most exciting tech isn’t the thing that currently exists and is being improved and integrated daily, it’s this other thing we don’t even know for sure will maybe happen.”
Right, it’s less exciting now because it’s already here. I’m not expecting radically improved GPT models or whatever in 2024, probably just more iteration. The most exciting stuff there might be local AI tech becoming more usable, like we’ve seen with stable diffusion.
I’m just expecting performance optimisations, especially for local LLMs. Right now there are models as good as GPT-4 (Goliath 120B), but they require 2 RTX 4090 to run.
The models that require less powerful equipment are not as good, of course.
But hopefully, given enough time, good enough models will be able to run with mid end hardware.
“Forget about the possibility that we may finally have developed machines that think, that comprehend the world in a way similar to how humans do and can communicate with us on our level. This new chip design might end up with comparable capabilities to the existing chip design!”
Yeah, there was no need to try to hype this up as the biggest thing ever.
Ah yes, let’s welcome one device - one operating system myth to the desktops, with people choosing hardware because of software feauture that could be installable. Welcome the expiration date on computers called “years of software support” and welcome overall unfriendlyness for alternative systems.
Performance and efficency is one side of the coin. But let me remind you that Qualcomm (among with Google) is the reason we cannot have lifetime updates for our phones, ROMs build needs to be specific for each model and making a phone with anything but Android is nearly impossible.
I’ll take ARM over x86, but I’ll take AMD/Intel over Qualcomm thousand times more.
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But one detail that we cannot forget is that with the increase in ARM architecture in PCs and laptops we will probably see an increase in fully locked hardware. We don’t need the expansion of the ARM architecture for PCs if it doesn’t come with hardware and software freedom
How long before indie devs can make their own custom processor chips?
Now? FPGAs have been a thing for decades and are the closest thing I can see to getting custom chips made without massive investments.
Yup. But was thinking more of ultra-small-run ARM or RISC-V processors. Be cool if we ever get there.
do you know how a CPU is designed? it’s just crazy hard to study the design of simple RISC CPUs we studied in college. And those were very simple, old processors.
A modern processor with performance that can match modern CPUs is no task for one indie dev, at all.
You need a team of professionals in the field, a huge budget and the technology to manufacture it, which you would probably end outsourcing to one of the big manufacturers anyway because it’s very rare.
So the answer to your question is never, unless you’re expecting low performance CPUs based on FPGAs.
