[hajile]

M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.

This has both a technical and human component.

On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.

At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.

[bigyabai]

> M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC.

> teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.

These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric. If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.

x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM. Intel invested early on big.LITTLE, and AMD drilled down on denser nodes for their preexisting designs. As both businesses converge on each other's ideas, their SOCs have adapted most of ARMs' greatest mobile innovations. Even before that, x86 hardware was always usable - AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.

All of this makes sense, nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient. Arm LTD. would have gouged any of those vendors for their IP, and even with an architectural license it's not like AMD or Intel would get usable core designs from Arm. There was no reason to pivot to ARM for either company, they both saw Qualcomm and could read the writing on the wall.

> x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86

That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market. Apple's early ARM hardware was outright ignored for server/HPC applications, leading to the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.

The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving, and Grace for the high-end of "we need CUDA and enough bandwidth for Infiniband" that made trillions in the HPC market.

[tedd4u]

>AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.

At 30 watts TDP?

[hajile]

> These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric.

Even if you think IPC is a stupid metric (it's not), ARM is still wiping the floor in total performance, performance per area, and performance per watt.

> If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.

Fujitsu also makes a 512-bit SIMD that has very good performance, but that large SIMD eats area and power while giving very little back to consumers. Honestly, SME co-processors or 6-wide SVE are much closer to "space age" than simply making a wider packed SIMD.

> x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM.

AMD actually bought an architectural license and Intel used to have one too. They could (and should) undercut ARM entirely by making x86+RISC-V cores. You can talk about Intel's E-cores or AMD C-cores, but they still don't compare in the key metrics.

> AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.

Which GPUs are you talking about? 4800U (Vega 8) was around 50% slower than M1's GPU. 5700G released in April 2021 and also had the same Vega 8 GPU design. They didn't see a bump until RDNA2 in Rembrandt in 2022 (by which point Apple was already on M2).

> nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient.

Citation needed. This is like saying nothing prevents branch delay slots from being good or VLIW/EPIC/Itanium is just as good as anything else. uop cache, extra pipeline stages for decoding, and memory ordering prediction are enough by themselves to use more power when under load. If you have actual proof that x86 workarounds have absolutely ZERO energy/area/latency, then show it.

> That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market.

Linus Torvalds pointed out that ARM server wouldn't take off until devs could run ARM natively on their laptops. Apple provided those laptops.

MS claims Cobalt 200 lowers carbon footprint by 40% vs x86 (which should mostly reflect power consumption per unit of work). ARM accounted for over a third of Azure deployments in 2025 and should increase as C200 becomes available.

> The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving

That hasn't been true for a long time now. Graviton5 in particular is a big deal. It removes the NUMA issues resulting in much lower latencies (and higher performance) for a lot of things. It gives 2.6x more cache per core and a general ~25% performance uplift (SAP said it was up to 60% for their workloads) which is more than the difference between graviton4 and Zen5 for most workloads. Graviton accounts for more than 50% of all new servers in AWS and basically all of their 1000 largest customers are using them.

> Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.

Apple wasn't incapable -- they didn't want to because they aren't in the server market. That is the entire reason X-Elite/Nuvia exists. GPU stack is completely orthogonal to making server CPUs (you can make good CPUs without making good GPUs).