Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64

[Joakim]

On Saturday, 1 December 2018 at 09:53:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 14 November 2018 at 11:27:03 UTC, kinke wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 13 November 2018 at 23:20:08 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> As my first post notes, 64-bit ARM laptops are now shipping 
>>> and more are on the way:
>>>
>>> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13498/samsung-unveils-galaxy-book2-12inch-snapdragon-850-with-x20-lte-20-hrs
>>>
>>> https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-8180-new-details-octacore-soc/
>>
>> We'll see where that goes, the Windows ARM adventure with x86 
>> emulation had to fail of course.
>
> It works fine, performance is good enough for most.
>
>> If the power efficiency of ARM was really much better than 
>> x86, I wonder why it hasn't exploded in the server market yet, 
>> where software compatibility shouldn't play that big a role. 
>> Judging by the performance of the AArch64 boxes provided by 
>> Shippable/Packet (using -j16 leading to a performance similar 
>> to -j3 for an x86 CI service, for the LDC CI suite, but 
>> requiring obviously a lot more memory for that throughput), I 
>> guess it's not that much better when the x86 chips are tweaked 
>> for throughput (server CPUs: lower frequencies, lower 
>> voltages, much more cores).
>
> Amazon just announced their own custom-designed AArch64 server 
> core for AWS:
>
> https://www.servethehome.com/putting-aws-graviton-its-arm-cpu-performance-in-context/
>
> I mentioned the Cloudflare server benchmarks against Intel 
> earlier in this thread, comparable performance with half the 
> electric power dissipation:
>
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
>
> All that said, I don't think cloud will matter that much, as 
> mobile p2p is poised to replace a lot of it.

Qualcomm just announced their ARM laptop chip for next year, the 
Snapdragon 8cx, alongside their latest top-end mobile chip, the 
855:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13688/qualcomm-tech-summit-day-3-snapdragon-8cx-the-new-acpc-soc

This likely is a tweaked ARM Cortex-A76, which is the first chip 
design where ARM claims laptop performance:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/arm-promises-laptop-level-performance-in-2019/

Qualcomm claims 2X the performance of an unnamed 15W Intel laptop 
chip when (both are?) running at 7W, and much lower power 
consumption overall. Not exactly apples-to-apples since they're 
using the latest 7nm process for their unreleased chip, but 
interesting claims nonetheless.

For software, Windows 10 Enterprise, Firefox, Office 365/Azure, 
and of course the just-announced Chromium-based Edge will all be 
optimized for 64-bit ARM. Microsoft released a 64-bit ARM SDK for 
Windows this year, so you can build native apps.

It appears that WinDragon is making a big push for ARM-based 
laptops over the next year or two. I think ARM will do well, as 
they have many other OS options, including iOS and the Samsung 
Android devices with multi-window DeX support. I'm skeptical 
about Windows surviving this ARM transition because of all the 
legacy cruft, but let's see.