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by phendrenad2 108 days ago
I don't think my gaming PC will ever use an ARM core. When you want true "big iron" you want x86. Intel and AMD have a duopoly on high-performance, no-TDP-spared chips, and they aren't sharing that market with anyone.

The reason ARM is making inroads in the server market is we've reached the point where cooling is a significant cost factor in server farms, so lowering TDP is starting to become a relevant factor in total cost.

3 comments

Hardcore gamers are not a big enough market segment to sustain x86. If everyone else switches to ARM/RISC-V, games will too, eventually.
Hardcore gamers were the reason behind a whole new chip type being introduced - the GPU. This was also when this market was a lot smaller. I don’t see this changing. The market will continue rewarding chips that cater to it. It is absolutely big enough to sustain several different completely bespoke chip types, regardless of what non-gamers are doing.

x86 will lose to ARM/RISC in gaming only if those chips provide a better gaming experience.

Also when the CPU is just an I/O peripheral for the NPU/TPU it doesn't matter so much what the architecture is.
Yeah things like heat and energy use don't matter much for gamers. Most of that comes from the GPU anyway.