I definitely have less exposure to enterprise CPUs. From the little that I have read, their MT performance (or even TCO) isn’t really as great as some of the early previews would lead one to believe…
Mind you, I am not saying ARM isn’t an excellent platform. Just look at Apple’s M and A series, but their approach also comes with its own set of tradeoffs.
I just don’t see ARM being a universal silver bullet (a straight line upgrade from x86) and with SoftBank trying to extract more cash out of ARM, things could get interesting.
From the little that I have read, their MT performance (or even TCO) isn’t really as great as some of the early previews would lead one to believe…
TCO is “total cost of ownership” a very important piece to that in the future is power consumption. Energy prices are rising. This isn’t just the electricity consumed by the CPU but also the cooling needed to exhaust the heat. Many of these highest performance x86 CPUs will cost substantially more to operate as the energy prices continue to rise.
I just don’t see ARM being a universal silver bullet (a straight line upgrade from x86)
Its not there yet, but with Intel fumbling on this one, leaving AMD the only leader in the space, trading one company being dominate over the other doesn’t really serve us well. What I’m pointing out is that its not a “straight line” upgrade, but its curving ever more toward a non-x86 future.
and with SoftBank trying to extract more cash out of ARM, things could get interesting.
I agree which is why I keep making references to RISC-V where I think the future will likely go instead. However, ARM showed (the industry as a whole) that we don’t need to stay with x86 forever as was the notion before. As in, “if we’ve successfully shown we can replace x86 with ARM, what would prevent us from replacing ARM with something else? Not much”.
Is that really true though?
I believe there are only two high performance cores with ARM (Apple M series and ARM’s own X series), real-world benchmarks for Oryon are shit.
In terms of smartphone SoCs, you’re stuck with Qualcomm or Apple A series.
There is honestly not that much choice even though there may be many licensees.
And with ARM building out their own SoC, you’re going to have even more challenges with openness moving forward.
I think you’re only looking in the retail space.
Check out the Datacenter grade ARM CPUs like:
Ampere with their 192 core ARM CPUs.
Google Axion with their 72 core CPUs and more than 576B of addressable RAM.
Amazon Graviton 4 with its 96 core CPUs.
I definitely have less exposure to enterprise CPUs. From the little that I have read, their MT performance (or even TCO) isn’t really as great as some of the early previews would lead one to believe…
Mind you, I am not saying ARM isn’t an excellent platform. Just look at Apple’s M and A series, but their approach also comes with its own set of tradeoffs.
I just don’t see ARM being a universal silver bullet (a straight line upgrade from x86) and with SoftBank trying to extract more cash out of ARM, things could get interesting.
TCO is “total cost of ownership” a very important piece to that in the future is power consumption. Energy prices are rising. This isn’t just the electricity consumed by the CPU but also the cooling needed to exhaust the heat. Many of these highest performance x86 CPUs will cost substantially more to operate as the energy prices continue to rise.
Its not there yet, but with Intel fumbling on this one, leaving AMD the only leader in the space, trading one company being dominate over the other doesn’t really serve us well. What I’m pointing out is that its not a “straight line” upgrade, but its curving ever more toward a non-x86 future.
I agree which is why I keep making references to RISC-V where I think the future will likely go instead. However, ARM showed (the industry as a whole) that we don’t need to stay with x86 forever as was the notion before. As in, “if we’ve successfully shown we can replace x86 with ARM, what would prevent us from replacing ARM with something else? Not much”.
I guess we’ll see what happens. I remain unconvinced about ARM replacing x86.
Risc-V is indeed very interesting. Although the performance numbers I’ve seen require a lot more work.