I’m currently contemplating on buying a new laptop with the new snapdragon x elite chips but can’t fully grasp the pros/cons of owning an ARMM-native pc vs the more common x86 one. I guess my main concern is if it will be a worry long-term wise? I only have a low-moderate info on tech hence the question. TIA!
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It’s similar to the differences between western vs eastern written language. x86 has more instructions, like characters that represent specific things. You can write out a thought in chinese calligraphy much faster than with the 26 character latin alphabet (ARM). As a result of having more instructions that can be used in niche cases, x86 is generally faster than ARM which might have to take multiple more general steps to yield one specific step. However since ARM has reduced instructions, it can be optimized for efficiency and low power usage. More recently Apple took low power consumption ARM based chips, and made them massive so they could run as fast as x86 chips while using less power. Qualcomm is now also doing this with their mobile processors.
The biggest con to ARM right now is lack of compatibility. Almost everything was designed to run on x86, ARM struggles to run a lot of software. Even Apple took years to transition its OS to take advantage of ARM and they have total control over it. Make sure the computer you are buying will run all the software you plan to use, and that it wont have weird bugs when it emulates x86 for legacy programs (windows on ARM has historically had a lot of issues, i’m not sure how resolved they are now).
These new “ARM” chips are actually an entire computer on a single chip, meaning your CPU, GPU, NPU, SSD, and RAM are all on the same chip and therefore really close together requiring less energy to do things.
So, the result is faster, quieter, cooler, and much, much longer battery life.
Another way to look at it, if it normally takes 8 hours to drive to grammas house, and then she moves in with you, the energy (effort) to get to her is considerably less.
I for one welcome our new ARM overlords! So much better …
Give it a few years, the industry, especially Microsoft is slowly turning towards Arm processors and developing good translators for x86 code but right now it’s not worth it
Bottom line, The only advantage to ARM is lower power usage. ARM has risk of not being useful. X86 is king and is not risky.
The microprocessors are completely different. x86 (and its extension amd64) is design to be able to do complex instructions. This means a program can do more work in fewer steps.
ARM uses only simple instructions which mean more steps to do a calculation, but the strategy is that it has many many processors so it can do equal work. This utilizes parallel programming paradigm. The big advantage is you use less electricity, which is great for mobile.
The problem you have is that x86 has dominated the computer industry for 40+ years. So we’re really good at writing software for x86 in a non-parallel style.
Writing for ARM with parallel style is radically different, so a lot of experience doesn’t apply. The good news is smart phones use this approach so we have learned a lot there.
As a computer guy, I think ARM is exciting. I also am surprised that it has not become more popular. I would have thought the technology could do well in laptops or even desktops.
To guide your purchase, I think the fact Microsoft is the only one trying to sell these things is telling about the performance capability. If it were great, everyone would be making them as the hot new thing. I think there is potential, but it’s not there yet.
Still, smart phones are no slouches and do well. I think the leap here is if I want a cheap long battery life laptop, I can use a tablet with a keyboard peripheral. I don’t see the jump need to jump to a laptop and Windows.
I think the key factor is can it do what you need and is it comfortably fast enough for you?
I haven’t tried it. Maybe Microsoft office is a dream come true on these things.
ARM64 is more energy efficient, thus why you have better battery life with notebooks than x86 equivalent in terms of raw power. But when it comes to having a single CPU with best raw power, nothing beats x86 currently.
Because they are different platforms, applications compiled for one platform cannot run on other one. So we have big legacy issue, because many people are still using some old tools compiled for x86 and if some tool won’t work on someone’s new notebook, they won’t migrate to ARM64. That’s why to make migration easier companies come up with emulators like Apple’s Rosetta which also uses special piece of hardware included with M chips to make that emulation faster and more accurate. Windows solution is still average.
In both cases this is not 100% foolproof solution.
X86 is still the choice of PC Master Race because of how many games still are compiled only for x86 and you can get the best performance in games only by buying the most power hungry x86 chips.
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