Again, ISA doesn't really matter especially when you consider how complex modern CPUs are. The x86 bloat is mostly vestigial at the moment and doesn't really affects the ability to make highly efficient chips


Well, they do, see AMD APUs on the PS5/Series X consoles for an example (not directly comparable to Apple Silicon as AMD will need to design them with a budget in mind, after all those consoles cost around 500USD and both Sony/Microsoft still have to sell them at a loss and recoup the loss through game sales and subscriptions)

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: May 11 2024, 04:25 PM

Again, no, according to Jim Keller who worked at AMD/Apple/DEC/PA Semi (probably one of the best acquisitions Apple made) and is responsible for CPUs like the AMD K8:



https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-ana...person-at-tesla

...and it's not like ARM is a 'bloat free' ISA either

RISC-V? Probably but unless there is a chip that is commercially available and has a large enough software library then there's little reason for that ISA to take off. Note that the success of ISA goes way beyond performance/efficiency, so that's why back in the 1990s Intel was able to defeat a lot of alternate ISAs (such as Alpha/MIPS/Itanium/SPARC) despite those ISAs are far superior to x86, due to its strong install base, as well as the massive economies of scale it offers

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: May 11 2024, 04:39 PM

Socketed ARM chips do exist, but yeah you don't have to really worry about the state of x86 right now

One of the reasons why x86 couldn't compete with ARM chips on efficiency is that there's really not much innovation and progress going on in the x86 realm (especially power efficiency) for over a decade, due to a severe lack of competition. AMD's Phenom series of chips are lukewarm at best from a performance/price standpoint, and Bulldozer was a huge disaster to the point of driving AMD towards near bankruptcy and probably lead Intel to making small iterations on their CPUs. It wasn't until 2017 where Ryzen arrived to the scene, and even that AMD didn't return to proper competition all around with Zen 2

On the other hand, Apple has been designing low powered ARM chips for iPhones and iPads for over a decade now (they have been dabbling in semiconductors since the early 1980s), and their offerings have been outperforming lots of SoCs from Android competitors significantly for many years, even today. By doing so they have gathered quite a lot of know-how on how to design high performance low powered SoCs coupled with the stagnant x86 market it's not hard to see why they switched to their in house silicon (note that the M series chips are not just a scaled up A series chip)

x86 incumbents, by comparison hasn't really focused on efficiency-minded chips, with their design targets being mostly performance and areal efficiency. Power efficiency for x86 was sort of a niche thing back them outside of netbooks/subnotebooks (remember those?)

That being said however it seems both AMD/Intel are starting to focusing on power efficiency (see Phoenix and the upcoming Strix Point APUs, along with Intel's new Meteor Lake chips) on mobile chips. It certainly isn't as groundbreaking as Apple Silicon but it sure is a good stepping stone at that after many years of stagnancy (note that chip design and manufacturing can be incredibly time intensive)

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: May 11 2024, 11:51 PM

Even SD X Elite isn't that much of a competitor compared to modern x86 chips either, despite being designed by a team ex-Apple Silicon engineers