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by bserge 2022 days ago
Wasn't that simply because there was less software available for ARM? And the first ARM chips were quite anemic in performance.

That's not the case anymore, but the stereotype will persist for a while.

2 comments

The first ARM chips were blazingly fast and made their competitors performance look anaemic - they have been around since the mid-1980s. The real difference is they went the low-power route while retaining as much performance as possible, rather than depending on desktop power supplies and industrial cooling.

One of the reasons this new chip is so performant is the "headroom" that this approach has given them.

I wish I understood better why Acorn Archimedes did not do better in the market. It looked like they had many great computer models.
Easy, IBM PC clones happened.

Apple are the survivors of the vertical integrated home computers, and they only managed to survive by reverse acquisition of NeXT, and diversifying outside of the desktop market.

One of the three major consoles is ARM based and one of the best selling systems of all time. From last gen, the PS Vita was ARM based and considered high end for mobile graphics at the time. Apple has already crushed Intel in on chip graphics and Nvidia is heavily invested in ARM.

I don’t think ARM and graphics will long be known for poor performance.

As a fan of AMD, I hope they see the writing on the wall and are planning accordingly. It would not be surprising to see the successors to the PS5 and Xbox Series running on ARM.