Moving from Intel to ARM is a reason to stay with Mac if you ask me. Intel has been holding computing back with their inefficient architecture, and anything that drives innovation away from x86 is a good thing in my mind.
Much as I dislike some of Apple's practices I think making ARM more mainstream is a trend I want to see continue.
No idea why this is being downvoted. Does anyone here like the X86 ISA? Sure its been made fast, but that's been quite an uphill battle against things like its complex instruction decoders and limited decoder parallelism. If the same engineering had been put into making ARM fast, ARM would be far faster than X86 is today.
I think that you're going a bit too far with 'far' faster - there isn't any evidence that this is the case and a lot of engineering effort has gone into making Arm fast - not least from Apple.
Apple aren't moving to Arm for no reason though so I think it's worth considering the reasons why this might be the case: power efficiency (probably the most important), price, ability to incorporate custom silicon, a single ISA to support, full control over the stack, access to best manufacturing process.
On the last point, I think Apple (Tim Cook especially) has probably lost faith and patience with a company that has overpromised and underdelivered for a number of years.
The fact is that x86 has 4 decades of backwards compatibility which along with the PC architecture means a reasonably open and documented platform. Every ARM system is different and they are all lacking the heritage of public documentation that the PC has. In other words, it's not about performance but freedom. I doubt Apple will ever release as much detailed information on its own chips as Intel and AMD have.
x86 is plenty fast anyway, and still wins on code density in single-threaded scalar (i.e. NOT using the vector units) branchy code of the sort commonly found in average applications.
Essentially all the supposedly merchant SoCs are proprietary. Instead of shipping data sheets, winbond or mediatek want to ship you a reference design with reference linux or android build that only works because of a huge binary blob.
There’s a small hardware consulting company in Palo Alto whose main differentiator is that they have a bunch of folks in China who manage to generate docs they can use. I’m guessing this involves a lot of under the table leaks and late night alcohol-fueled discussions.
Thanks, so it's really about drivers etc rather than the architecture, which makes a lot of sense. A bit surprising that there hasn't been more convergence in the Arm world.
Much as I dislike some of Apple's practices I think making ARM more mainstream is a trend I want to see continue.