
Adrian Branco
3.5K posts

Adrian Branco
@adrianbranco
Senior Tech Reporter, part-time war journo






Russian Foreign Intelligence Service: #French administration under E.Macron is seeking a 'political revanche' in #Africa by foiling coup attempt in #BurkinaFaso, destabilizing #Mali & #CAR, and forging plans to undermine the new leadership in #Madagascar ➡️shorturl.at/j5FTy





ARM vs x86 Power Efficiency: Long ago, ARM CPUs used to be extremely power efficient compared to x86 CPUs (x86 CPUs were power hogs). But that's not the case anymore. x86 Laptop CPUs have successfully reached levels similar to ARM in power efficiency. Both AMD & Intel themselves mentioned that their x86 Laptop CPUs have successfully closed the gap in power efficiency with ARM CPUs like Apple M Series Silicon & Qualcomm Snapdragon Laptop CPUs. That is, AMD's new Ryzen AI Series & Intel's Lunar Lake Series Laptop CPUs are now *almost* equally power efficient compared to ARM counterparts like Apple M Series Macbook CPUs & Snapdragon X Elite Laptop CPUs. [Not the ISA / Not the Decoder] ARM CPUs use RISC ISA, while x86 CPUs use CISC ISA. The RISC instructions are fixed width and are easier to decode compared to variable length CISC instructions that are harder to decode. But Jim Keller himself said that this issue has been completely solved by both AMD & Intel with their new advanced decoders. So, ARM CPUs don't have the ISA/Decoder advantage anymore (see C&C link for details). [What actually happened?] x86 manufacturers were focused on higher performance at the expense of power usage (even in laptops). Both AMD & Intel never really cared about efficiency until Apple started taking their market share. Everything changed only *after* they lost market share. While Apple and Qualcomm kept increasing performance, AMD & Intel kept increasing efficiency. Now the efficiencies of both ARM & x86 are pretty much comparable. For example, this wasn't easy for Intel. It needed a new CEO (Pat Gelsinger), a new vision (Tiles/Chiplets), new architectures (Lion Cove/Skymont) and 4 years to make Lunar Lake happen. [Node Parity] Also, AMD & Intel were previously using older process nodes with lesser PPW compared to newer leading-edge nodes Apple was using. Now that too has changed. [What's the current status?] In short, ARM Laptop CPUs like Apple M Series & Qualcomm Snapdragon aren't the king of power efficiency anymore. x86 CPUs from AMD & Intel have already caught up. Also, x86 CPUs have the advantage where they don't have to go thru a virtualization layer to execute x86 binaries like ARM CPUs (which reduces user experience). Please feel free to share your thoughts... Follow for interesting posts! Repost/Share if you like. 🔁💘👍 Reference: AMD: techpowerup.com/340779/amd-cla… Intel: x.com/Silicon_Fly/st… C&C: old.chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm…
































