With the current launch of the M1 chip of apple and the good benchmarks we see, I was wondering which tasks work better on x86 processors. I understand that ARM has a simpler instruction set, but in which workload is this relevant (especially workloads of a “normal” user)?
Thanks in advance.
In: Technology
general purpose workloads. you pick 100 apps and run them on x86 vs arm. arm won’t be able to run 50 of them. it’ll run 25 of them worse than x64, and 25 of them faster than x86. something like that. but, the answer is basically if the app was optimized for arm or x86. they can both do the same thing.
ARM is making great gains over the years, which is good. and what allows ARM to do that is being able to completely redesign their architecture/instruction set whenever they want. this is the reason why some phones/tablets/etc don’t support newer versions of some OS’s and why some apps require a certain OS or later to run. Every generation, ARM can get rid of the deadweight and optimize based on what the “modern” workloads are.
This also puts pressure on developers, because if they don’t continually update their apps, sooner or later, that app will no longer be supported on the newer hardware/OS, and users will have to continuously buy new hardware if they want to run the latest apps. emulators are always an option, but those never work well and apple typically only supports them during transition periods and then drops support entirely.
whereas in contrast, x86 retains every single instruction since the beginning of time. so even your 10 year old apps will work fine. if it doesn’t then it might be windows that’s the problem. but you can just install the original OS to run it.
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