[mattcoles]

This is nowhere near the end of Intel, performance desktops and servers will still be running Intel processors for many years to come, ARM simply cannot match the performance - despite how impressive that demo video might look.

Intel was already dead in the water for mobile so I doubt they're too bothered.

[jmull]

No doubt we're talking about years.

But, thinking about servers, for years now the default has been to build software systems that scale horizontally (by adding more computing cores) rather than vertically (by using faster cores).

In such systems, you may find, e.g., that 20 slower cores performs about as well as 10 faster ones.

In that case, you start looking at other factors. A big one is power efficiency. You have to pay to pull electricity into your servers and pay to get the heat away from them. This might be ARM's big advantage.

Now, in general systems, a single core has to be able to achieve a certain level of performance to be considered at all. It has to have enough power that people are confident that it will support a wide range of potential applications before servers using them will be widely deployed. But it's arguable that we're already there now, or almost there.

I think the way this is going to go down is AWS (and/or their competitors) will add an ARM option for EC2 and other compute services. It will be cheaper than the Intel option. People will try it and find it works fine for a wide range of uses. Then the dam will break and things will transition quickly.

Now, I'm kind of assuming here that ARM will continue to improve but will hit limits and will settle in to a place where it offers performance in the ballpark of Intel yet maintain significantly better power efficiency. If ARM somehow finds a way to surpass Intel then things will move more quickly and if it stagnates only a partial transition will occur.

[chx]

So far ARM in servers has proven to be a disaster performance per watt-wise. Intel's Xeon D CPUs are not even the latest microarchitecture and yet they are wiping the floor with any other chip trying to get the performance per watt crown. Look up some Xeon D-1587 benchmarks (16 Broadwell cores at 1.7 GHz in a 65W envelope).

And since then Intel has picked up another 30% at least in performance/watt by going from Broadwell to Kaby Lake and soon Coffee Lake and so they can answer any challenger if they so want.

The reason there's no Skylake Xeon D is that Intel doesn't need it yet.

[ccurrens]

Microsoft has plans on moving some of its Azure services to run on ARM, among other things for Windows Server on ARM.[0]

> "We feel ARM servers represent a real opportunity and some Microsoft cloud services already have future deployment plans on ARM servers," he wrote ahead of the conference.

> "We have been running evaluations side by side with our production workloads and what we see is quite compelling.

> "The high Instruction Per Cycle (IPC) counts, high core and thread counts, the connectivity options and the integration that we see across the ARM ecosystem are very exciting and continues to improve."

[0] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-server-on-arm-mi...

[mattcoles]

Again, the ARM benchmarks/demos recently are very impressive but there is no way they'll be able to match the higher end Xeon's, if for no other reason than you have to do x86 emulation.

I think they'll definitely be able to take some market share from Intel at the lower-end, but they won't be going anywhere any time soon.

[my123]

AMD K12 is still slated for release in 2017 somehow - they didn't discontinue it. It'll have Zen levels of performance if it's released. For the time being, only Apple cores are remotely near competitive in single-core performance.

[ksec]

Well they have't been any mention of K12 since 2015/2016. And the last Financial Analyst day didn't have have K12 on it at all.

Again it doesn't make any sense to put ARM on server. There just aren't any advantage yet. And the forseeable future.

[my123]

Yeah, it's interesting that it wasn't officially dropped from the plans, even if no-one hears anything about it.

[gman83]

They're bothered:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...

[bluthru]

The iPad Pro is already neck and neck with the MacBook Pro: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCV4rQtW0AAe3R2.jpg

[slantyyz]

>> The iPad Pro is already neck and neck with the MacBook Pro

A nitpick with the use of "the" with Macbook Pro.

I think you need to qualify that as the 13" Macbook Pro. The 13" models use ultrabook class processors, while the 15" models use much faster quad core i7 processors. IMO, the 13" and 15" are very different beasts because of that.

[photojosh]

You must be confusing the 13" MacBook Pro (i5-7267U, i5-7287U, i7-7567U) with the 13" MacBook Air (i5-5350U) or 12" MacBook. Only the latter has a true "ultrabook class" processor.

[slantyyz]

Call me a snob, but I consider anything suffixed with a U to be an ultrabook class processor, and anything with an M to be something worse. On the Windows side, those high end U CPUs are typically put in laptops that the manufacturers themselves call "ultrabooks".

Either way, a U processor doesn't really compare to the MQ/HQ suffixed CPUs in terms of perforamnce.

[photojosh]

Yup, I'm going to call you a snob. ;) Purely because you're distinguishing based on a naming convention, rather than actual performance. But of course you're entitled to your opinion!

Checking the Geekbench comparisons, performance of the 13" and 15" MacBook Pros are mixed in together.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2017) Intel Core i5-7360U @ 2.3 GHz (2 cores): 4330 MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.8 GHz (4 cores): 4339

That's a negligible difference.

Of course multi-core changes the picture dramatically due to 2 vs 4 cores and the different TDPs, etc...

[1]: https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

[slantyyz]

The multi-core matters more if you're going to call a laptop "pro", imo.