Comment by cloudbonsai
11 hours ago
Reading the article, it seems to boil down to the following two observations:
1. ARM64 is actually less "smart" than x64. While Intel's Core i9 tries to be clever by aggressive boosting and throttling, Snapdragon just delivers steady and consistent performance. This lack of variability makes it easier for the OS to schedule tasks.
2. It is possible that the ARM build is more efficient than the x64 build, because Windows has less historical clutter on ARM than x64.
So, has CPU throttling become too smart to the point it hurts?
It should be noted that this is a server OS, but it has been tested on a desktop x86 CPU.
The x86 server CPUs, like AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, have a lower range within which the clock frequency may vary and their policies for changing the clock frequency are less aggressive than for desktop CPUs, so they provide a more constant and predictable performance, which favors multi-threaded workloads, unlike in desktop CPUs, where the clock frequency control algorithms are tuned for obtaining the best single-thread performance, even if that hurts multi-threaded performance.
That makes a lot of sense!
> The x86 server CPUs, like AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, have a lower range within which the clock frequency may vary and their policies for changing the clock frequency are less aggressive than for desktop CPUs
Probably we need to compare Xeon/EPYC with something like AWS Graviton or Ampere Altra to get an accurate picture here. That said, I think "Windows Server works fast on Snapdragon" is both crazy and fascinating; I wasn't even sure if that was possible.