I have no problem with ARM chips in PCs. I’ve loved every Apple Silicon Macbook I’ve had (one personal, 2 for different jobs). But for my gaming PC, I want the raw power of x86-64 and I want a socketed CPU and a GPU that goes in the PCI-E slot, not an SoC soldered onto the motherboard that includes everything.
I think ARM servers are also an interesting use case. The efficiency advantage is more significant at the data center level than for most desktop or laptop users (yea 25 hours of battery life is cool, but my work laptop is docked all the time anyway)
I don’t think ARM will compete in the gaming market anytime soon, and Intel has already fucked up that market for themselves.
ARM will probably gain a sizable portion of the office laptop share instead. Many people want to bring their laptop to a conference room without the charger and all that stuff. A good battery life is more prioritized in these cases than raw power.
There will be a point where APUs will make dGPUs obsolete. Their advantages are huge and it’s just the raw power and bandwidth that needs to catch up. Things like lower latency between CPU and GPU, and the big one: being able to use a shared address space. I don’t think even today’s APUs generally do that and instead set aside some system RAM to act as video RAM, but that setup involves a lot of copying data back and forth between video memory and system memory. If they both can just access the same memory space, that no longer needs to happen at all.
So it’s just a matter of fitting more compute cores on that package (which isn’t limited by chip size with chiplets) and scaling up the memory bandwidth until those advantages above reach parity with a dGPU.
Chiplets are still fairly close to each other, they need to be cooled. We’re going to need some massive cooling solutions here. Fortunately ARM has great power efficiency at least compared to x86.
Of course SoCs are also the death of upgradablity. You upgrade everything at once or nothing at all, since CPU, GPU and RAM are all part of the same package.
Don’t underestimate how much Intel can fuck up.
AMD is still here though.
I have no problem with ARM chips in PCs. I’ve loved every Apple Silicon Macbook I’ve had (one personal, 2 for different jobs). But for my gaming PC, I want the raw power of x86-64 and I want a socketed CPU and a GPU that goes in the PCI-E slot, not an SoC soldered onto the motherboard that includes everything.
I think ARM servers are also an interesting use case. The efficiency advantage is more significant at the data center level than for most desktop or laptop users (yea 25 hours of battery life is cool, but my work laptop is docked all the time anyway)
I don’t think ARM will compete in the gaming market anytime soon, and Intel has already fucked up that market for themselves.
ARM will probably gain a sizable portion of the office laptop share instead. Many people want to bring their laptop to a conference room without the charger and all that stuff. A good battery life is more prioritized in these cases than raw power.
Definitely.
I know a person who likes going to a national park and work from there. All day battery is crucial for that.
There will be a point where APUs will make dGPUs obsolete. Their advantages are huge and it’s just the raw power and bandwidth that needs to catch up. Things like lower latency between CPU and GPU, and the big one: being able to use a shared address space. I don’t think even today’s APUs generally do that and instead set aside some system RAM to act as video RAM, but that setup involves a lot of copying data back and forth between video memory and system memory. If they both can just access the same memory space, that no longer needs to happen at all.
So it’s just a matter of fitting more compute cores on that package (which isn’t limited by chip size with chiplets) and scaling up the memory bandwidth until those advantages above reach parity with a dGPU.
Apple does share address space I believe.
Chiplets are still fairly close to each other, they need to be cooled. We’re going to need some massive cooling solutions here. Fortunately ARM has great power efficiency at least compared to x86.
Of course SoCs are also the death of upgradablity. You upgrade everything at once or nothing at all, since CPU, GPU and RAM are all part of the same package.
It would be on them to move to ARM for that to happen not them fucking up
The new Lunar Lake mobile soc sounds surpringly solid.