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by mschuster91 1610 days ago
> It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw performance.

Raw performance does not matter for 99% of the market (which is PCs for corporate drones shifting data around in Word, Excel and a data warehouse application). Your average Snapdragon is performance-constrained on mobile anyway because of cooling and power usage concerns - put that flagship CPU in a laptop or a NUC-sized case, and you will get more than enough to satisfy said corporate drones. Especially those who have some KPI target for "corporate sustainability" - claiming to have halved your IT fleet's energy consumption will net your average VP/C-level exec quite the bonus.

All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.
1 comments
OldTimeCoffee 1610 days ago
>All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.

It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop. Intel will survive, they've been doing this for 50+ years. With far, far fiercer competition in the past.

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mschuster91 1610 days ago
> It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop

Yeah, because Dell and HP are enterprise vendors - and as long as there is no ARM Windows version that offers x86 backward compatibility, no enterprises (and frankly, most private customers) will shift to ARM.

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OldTimeCoffee 1610 days ago
Every ARM version of Windows has an x86 emulation layer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...

"Windows on ARM can also run Win32 desktop appps[sic] compiled natively for ARM64 as well as your existing x86 Win32 apps unmodified, with good performance and a seamless user experience, just like any PC. These x86 Win32 apps don’t have to be recompiled for ARM and don’t even realize they are running on an ARM processor."

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monocasa 1610 days ago
It doesn't work well for multithreaded applications because of the difference in memory model. It uses some heuristics to try and not issue memory barriers after each memory access, and sometimes gets it wrong at the expense of correctness.
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