We hear all the time that a smartphone with 8 cores is nowhere near as powerful as a desktop PC with 8 cores, and this is mostly chalked up to the smartphone having 8 ARM cores which are weaker computationally than 8 x86 cores, but what aspect of a CPU core design makes it better or worse at computing than another design? Hypothetically, if I wanted to make an ARM core as powerful as an x86 core, what would I change about it?
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So if powerful were to mean the ability to solve a range of X compute tasks and think lots, then the differences show between the two approaches to cores in various ways, power consumption favours ARM, time taken to solve compute could be x86, a look a the chip set between the core types and the way the os kernel uses the cores to complete the tasks as requested by applications all comes to play. So to address a global scale large compute problem – whole computer design, compiler and coder skill all play a factor. Take the whole worlds email, or excel platform it very difficult to compare non x86 to this and likewise Arm machines and phones. Price, heat, chip features, dev community, are all factors contributing to the powerful core. I would caution against a simple look at clock speed, size of various caches, while I note these have a contribution.
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