| Even if it should be possible to design Arm CPUs competitive with the x86 CPUs, there are a lot of application domains for which no vendor of Arm CPUs has ever attempted to make competitive Arm CPUs. For example, for scientific computation and computer-aided design, Fujitsu is the only company that has designed Arm CPUs that can compete with the x86 CPUs, but they do not sell their CPUs on the free market. For a huge company, the floating-point performance of the CPUs is less important, because they can use datacenter GPUs with even greater throughput, so the existing Arm server CPUs could be good enough even for a supercomputer, as they only have to move the data to and from the GPUs. However the small businesses and the individuals cannot use datacenter GPUs, which have huge prices, so they can use only x86 CPUs and there is not the slightest chance of any alternative that would appear soon. Another application domain for which no Arm vendor has ever made competitive devices is for cheap personal computers. Nothing what Apple does matters, because they do not sell computers, they only lend computers that remain under their control and which are much more expensive than their alternatives anyway. Besides Apple, only Qualcomm, Mediatek and NVIDIA are able to make Arm CPUs with a performance similar to the cheapest of the Intel and AMD CPUs, but all these 3 companies demand for their CPUs prices that are several times higher than the prices of comparable x86 CPUs. Like for CPUs with high floating-point or big integer performance, there is not the slightest chance for the appearance of any company that would be willing to sell Arm CPUs that are both cheap and fast. Also for server CPUs, all the companies that have attempted to design Arm-based server CPUs have never designed models suitable for small businesses or individuals, but only models that can be bought only by very big companies. I would not mind to switch from x86 to Arm, but there is absolutely no perspective for that. If the x86 CPUs would disappear, that would be a catastrophe for the people who do not want to depend on the mercy of the big companies. That would be a return to the times from before the personal computers, when all computing had to be done remotely, in the computing centers of big companies, which have been renamed now as "clouds". |
I agree that Qualcomm/Mediatek/Rockchip/Nvidia pricing is really terrible but I guess prices don't matter when there's almost no demand anyway.