[josephg]

What is the RAM and storage on each of these machines? Is it possible the Snapdragon has packaged RAM (with faster interconnects as a result), and the x86 machine is using DIMMs with longer traces? And what about storage? For that matter, what CPUs are you using?

Its possible ARM is a better architecture. But a lot of benchmarks end up stressing one part of the system more than any other. And if thats the case, faster RAM or faster syscalls or faster SSD performance or something could be whats really driving this performance difference.

[jasoneckert]

Both systems have DDR5 soldered to the mainboard and NVMe SSDs (the Intel system has a faster Samsung model compared to the Foresee model in the Snapdragon system).

[Melatonic]

Would be good test those SSD to see when they thermally throttle. Most hit pretty fast (on desktop drives it's quite easy to add heat sinks and they make a big difference)

[josephg]

Yep. There's lots of things I'd want to test before assuming the ARM architecture is fundamentally better than x86 in some way.

[josephg]

What CPUs are they both running? Is the ARM chip simply faster?