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?
In: Technology
This is a very complex question if I get in depth on the engineering decisions that make them different, but without that, it becomes oversimplified.
Heat. Think of phones as ultra small computers. Unless you want a fan in your phone, they depend on passive cooling, and unless you want the phone to be heavy, batteries can’t be very big.
Now, luckily, if a chip takes less energy to work, battery needed to keep it running is smaller, and that energy which is dissipated as heat is less of a problem.
With this in mind, the whole concept of a portable phone requires low power chips, and low power means lower performance, even if performance per watt (power and energy required) is better.
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