[pseudosavant]

> Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive even with emulation.

I'd modify that to: Apple is the only one making ARM chips fast enough to be competitive, period. All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, just maybe more efficient. It is the reason Windows has continued to fail on ARM, because they have to use the same slow off-the-shelf cores as everyone else.

I'm a big Surface fan, and wish they had a version with an Apple M-class SoC in it, but every ARM version (which used the fastest non-Apple ARM core at the time) has been a dog compared to the same model with Intel. Just give me the iPad Air SoC in a Surface...

[marmaduke]

> All of the other cores from ARM or Qualcomm aren't as fast as the top Intel and AMD x86

I don’t think top cpu perf is relevant. I was working on some C code for science stuff inside Termux on a Pixel 7a, and would’ve been perfectly ok having that perf on a standard format laptop. I even noticed some branch prediction was better than x86. It’s more an issue that no one is making a decent arm in laptop format with nvme, enough ram etc.

[MadnessASAP]

> I was working on some C code for science stuff inside Termux on a Pixel 7a

I don't want this to come across as rude or condescending, but who hurt you?

[marmaduke]

Ha, I was benchmarking arm really, not writing from scratch.

[solarkraft]

> just maybe more efficient

Isn’t efficiency all that matters nowadays? It’s exactly what gives Apple the crazy battery life and allows them a lot of thermal headroom to drive the chips with high power.

[layer8]

It’s not clear to what extent this is necessitated by the ISA as opposed to caused by the implementation. Recent x86 chips have caught up a lot in terms of efficiency.