Intel gets a lot of criticism for its management, and Apple get a lot of credit for the M1, but it's worth keeping in mind the tradeoffs/sacrifices for backward compatibility. I'm guessing Intel could create something radically more power efficient and performant if they gave up on decades worth of drop-in compatibility.
Lots of the M1's efficiency comes from business decisions. Apple chooses to use an expensive, low clock TSMC node. They use a lot of expensive die area on wide cores and cache, so they can keep clocks and voltages (relatively) low. And they use packaged memory for efficiency, but at higher cost and with no modularity.
Not saying it isn't a great design, but Intel/AMD could make a far more efficient CPU if they had the right market incentives to try. We have already seen a hint of this with Van Gogh (the Steam Deck chip) and their rumored "premium" laptop chips with big GPUs and an M1 Pro-like memory bus.
A not insignificant part comes from the fact that they can better parallelize instruction decoding because ARM is simpler and more regular than x86. x86's compressed variable length representation hurts it here. They try to make up for it but there's meaningful benefit from Apple's approach. The other bit is that ARM concurrency is better aligned with how HW wants to work/better able to optimize performance than x64 is (ability for acquire/release semantics vs sequential)
That being said, it's not like we're talking about deprecating that part of the instruction set which they really should do (i.e. build your application for x64.risc which tells the CPU the instruction set is going to be an alternate fixed-representation x64). Could maybe even have a special instruction where you can switch out of it temporarily so that you have back-compat with normal assembly to give software writers time to port.
I'm all in favor of this though. Getting rid of cruft that's more than 20 years old is well beyond time.
I don't know enough technically to comment on, but am curious how this plays into the mobile gaming device SOC/CPUs from AMD. I can say, really like my M1 air, generally good enough battery life and great i/o responsiveness in general. Of course, then I price out a M2 mini, and once I add enough storage/ram it's no longer feels worth the price. Why they even sell a model with under 512gb storage or 16gb memory other than to have a lower "starting from", and even getting to 1tb disk and 16gb or 32gb memory already feels like way too much of a price hike.
There are none! Van Gogh (in the Steam Deck) was the first and last one!
AMD had a whole family of low power (~9W), graphics heavy chips on their roadmap... And when the time for the first one came, not a single laptop maker picked it up. So AMD seemingly canceled the line, but Valve swooped in and used the only survivor in their handheld.
What you see in the ROG Zephyrus and such are rebranded high power laptop chips, which is why they suck so much battery compared to the Steam Deck (even though the Deck chip is much older).
That's fair. On the other hand, you can still run x86_64 applications on Apple Silicon through Rosetta. Sure, it's not 32-bit x86, but there are ways to provide backwards compatibility without supporting decades of legacy in hardware.
That seems very unlikely. How much overhead do you believe there to be? Intel is about equal to apple silicon in performance and work per joule and per watt. If either of them could do much better, they would.
They made the marketing blunder of calling the ARM OS "windows" when it couldn't run existing software. It's borderline fraud. Many people, (probably most) returned their RT devices to the store because of this.
Windows ARM laptops were more expensive, slower, & under-speced than x86 ones.
Microsoft restricted software download to store only - pretty dumb to me.
x86 Emulation was eventually released after win10 arm was released but it was slow and probably wasn't reliable.
Summary, high price but low performance, dumb os restrictions, & non existent ecosystem killed ms ARM efforts.
The performance issues weren't locked in by their exclusive deal with Qualcomm?
I mean, sure there were other issues, they can call it "Windows" all they like, just like switching mac from PPC to Intel to ARM is still MacOS/OSX. Even if not everything is 100% compatible over time. That they made other dumb decisions doesn't make it less so.
Much like ARM on Linux doesn't run everything out of the box, doesn't make it not Linux.
