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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Cortex-A55 cores are almost half a decade old at this point. If anything, this just proves that Moore's law is dead as disco.

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And also the best mid-core ARM has to offer. What a dead ass useless company. Maybe maybe maybe the A510 they announced year ago[1] can span half the gap, but given what a fantastically unimpressive useless thud of an impact A55 made versus A53, given the half decade cycles it takes to deliver woefully meager improvememts, I could not have less faith in ARM. We should be shipping more advanced Intel Lakeview+ in phones, Galileo++++ in sbc, x86 everywhere.

Yet still RISC-V has so far to go to even start to compete. This stuff is not easy. But wow, after a decade of thinking arm may some day turn the corner & start delivering (amd "seattle" a1100 anyone?), I see so little hope for this plodding lumbering archticture. It has been designed/refined to sell flagship phones (now well over $1000) and fuck all the rest.

Rockchip seems to be the only company even making a consumer-available arm core of any note at all, and the only systems we're seeing on the radar are nearly $200 A76's. With like 1/20th the connectivity/io bandwidth we get from a cheaper celeron system.

x86 keeps getting better. Arm archticture & cores are just defined by a bunch of miserly vultures keeping the cellphone market in thrall, the incremental of incrememtalist gains. Moore's law is getting more complex but is fine. ARM just is nads, worthless.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16693/arm-announces-mobile-ar...

I'm inclined to agree. x86 seems to have the most performance still "left on the table" so-to-speak, at least of the major architectures. My fingers are crossed that the next 5 years of RISC-V development come swiftly so we can finally kick ARM back down to the microcontroller market that it performed best in. I seriously doubt ARM will be able to compete when x86 chips are at the same transistor density, we might need an even bigger scam performance metric than "performance-per-watt"... "performance-per-watt-per-area" perhaps?

I guess in terms of a computer that a normal person can buy, you do have PowerPC as an option now

> Cortex-A55 cores are almost half a decade old at this point. If anything, this just proves that Moore's law is dead as disco.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 is not a design from a decade ago, nor is it fabbed on a process node from a decade ago. It's Qualcomm's current flagship, regardless of the design choices they make.

Also, ARM's successor A510 efficiency cores that Qualcomm is expected to ship this year don't sound like they will be an improvement on power efficiency.

>We’ll have to wait for the new generation SoCs to actually hit the market for us to test the new A510 cores, but if indeed they come with larger power consumption operating points to achieve higher performance, then Arm won't be much nearer in catching up to what Apple has been doing with their efficiency cores. As of the latest generation of SoCs, Apple’s efficiency cores were around 4x faster than any Cortex-A55 based SoC. Which, running at roughly the same system active power, also made them 3-4x more efficient in the traditional benchmarks. As presented, a theoretical A510 SoC won't be able to close that efficiency gap at all.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16693/arm-announces-mobile-ar...

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