Comment by bluGill

8 hours ago

Why do you need ARM? There is nothing magic, most CPUs are an internal instruction set with a decoder on top. bad as x86 is, decoding is not the issue. they can make lower power use x86 if they want. They can also make mips or riskv chips that are good.

4 comments

bluGill

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pdpi  8 hours ago

There's nothing special about ARM, sure. Hence "for whatever reason". Still, ARM is a known quantity, and the leading alternative to x86 for desktop CPUs. The article is titled "reaching desktop performance".

We know how Apple's hardware performs on native workloads. We know how it performs emulating x86 workloads (and why). Surely "... and this is how this hardware measures up against the other guys trying to achieve the exact same thing" is a relevant comparison? I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"

  • wamatt  5 hours ago

    >I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"

    You're not. IMHO it's a fairly obvious, narrow and uncontroversial observation (and hence why its the top comment). That said, I personally still enjoyed the back and forth as many others one could imagine. There can be value in the counterarguments from multiple other usernames, as this facilitates sharpening reasoning for the conclusion from readers. (even when the original premise stays in tact)

    The lack of others agreeing could be the result of many reasons. IMHO, a not insignificant one could be the incentive structure skews heavily towards lurking as HN rightfully disincentives "me too" type replies and not everyone always has something interesting to add

    2c not an epistemologist ymmv

  • GoblinSlayer  5 hours ago

    If you know how your favorite CPUs (and you can have many, even ppc) work in desktop performance units, then you have the numbers to compare. Are you sure you can migrate from Apple?

amluto  2 hours ago

Sometimes the ISA matters. For example, modern ARM has flexible and lightweight atomics, whereas x86 is almost entirely missing non-totally-ordered RMW operations.