this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
260 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
3099 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Yes and no, it's not about the instruction set size but about general overhead.

The x86 architecture makes a lot of assumptions that require a bunch of circuitry to be powered on continously unless you spend a ton if effort on power management and making sure anything not currently needed can go into idle - for mobile CPUs there's a lot of talk about "race to idle" as a way to minimize power consumption for this exact reason, you try to run everything in batches and then cut power.

The more you try to make ARM cover the same usecases and emulate x86 the more overhead you add, but you can keep all that extra stuff powered off when not in use. So you wouldn't increase baseline power usage much, but once you turn everything on at once then efficiency ends up being very similar.