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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Probably a mixture of both, I think NVIDIA had a chance to push ARM to new heights it would also have forced them to be far more open.

No way. Even losing the most popular electronics brand (Apple) didn't sway NVIDIA from its course.

> ARM on the other hand would need to undergo a massive change to get into the position they arguably deserve to be in.

Intel has completely botched the last six-ish years, and Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just compete with Intel's offerings but outright destroy them, while still keeping backwards compatibility. All that ARM (as an architecture) needs now is Microsoft also offering ARM support and runtime emulation in Windows and a CPU vendor willing to sell decently powerful chips to vendors... and then, snap, Intel is gone.

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> Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just compete with Intel's offerings but outright destroy them

Your average ARM processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon or Amazon Graviton, it's not going to win any performance awards. Even the M1 loses out to most Desktop processors once you start talking about multi-threaded performance. It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw performance.

ETA: We hear this same rhetoric every time AMD would come out with a part that was better than Intel (Athlon, Ryzen, etc). Intel isn't going anywhere, give them 4-5 years and they'll optimize and sell a part the eliminates the advantages. They've been doing exactly that for 30+ years.

> It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw performance.

Raw performance does not matter for 99% of the market (which is PCs for corporate drones shifting data around in Word, Excel and a data warehouse application). Your average Snapdragon is performance-constrained on mobile anyway because of cooling and power usage concerns - put that flagship CPU in a laptop or a NUC-sized case, and you will get more than enough to satisfy said corporate drones. Especially those who have some KPI target for "corporate sustainability" - claiming to have halved your IT fleet's energy consumption will net your average VP/C-level exec quite the bonus.

All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.

>All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.

It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop. Intel will survive, they've been doing this for 50+ years. With far, far fiercer competition in the past.

> It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop

Yeah, because Dell and HP are enterprise vendors - and as long as there is no ARM Windows version that offers x86 backward compatibility, no enterprises (and frankly, most private customers) will shift to ARM.

Every ARM version of Windows has an x86 emulation layer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...

"Windows on ARM can also run Win32 desktop appps[sic] compiled natively for ARM64 as well as your existing x86 Win32 apps unmodified, with good performance and a seamless user experience, just like any PC. These x86 Win32 apps don’t have to be recompiled for ARM and don’t even realize they are running on an ARM processor."

It doesn't work well for multithreaded applications because of the difference in memory model. It uses some heuristics to try and not issue memory barriers after each memory access, and sometimes gets it wrong at the expense of correctness.

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