By compare Intel's been making small but OK revs to the Atom cores. And the new E-core on the new n100 replacement is monstrously faster, yet still small. A potential core-m moment for Intel, a great small chip that expands.
It's a shame, because it was the best design from ARM; they're now focusing on Cortex-A7x and Cortex-X, which aren't anywhere as power efficient[0].
Meanwhile, their revised Cortex-A57 has been surpassed in performance/power/area by several RISC-V microarchitectures, such as SiFive's U74[1], used in the VisionFive2 and Star64, or even the open source XuanTie C910[2][3].
0. https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY?t=790
1. https://www.sifive.com/cores/u74
A72 in Raspberry 4 is really the pinnacle low power CPU performance if you count $ and compatibility (linux <-> GPU). ~3x can saturate symmetric 1Gb/s with advanced computation and still have calculations left.
You can buy neither, we'll see if the 4 ever comes back. The only thing I'm 100% of is that the 5 will have some drawback compared to both the 2 and the 4.
I can concur the peak of A55; the 5W TDP 22nm RK3566 in my RG353M is mind boggling! HL1 at 60 FPS and soon HL 2 at 30 FPS.
But Risc-V is not progressing with linux, mainly GPU drivers and integration is the problem. Historically the Chinese boards never got any attention and unfortunately you cannot depend on attention happening this time either.
Partly because now companies across the board(ers) are hiding kernel configs again. And "board support packages" are slow to be mainlined if ever.
If you have one hold on to it... I knew it was special!
They are removing 32-bit from modern ARM... but Intel will always have 32-bit!
But now I'm planning a 64-bit linux ARM distro that only runs 32-bit apps!
32-bit is extremely useful. For intel, 16-bit is also very useful. The problem is that there is a strong divide between the people who find 32-bit and 16-bit useful at Intel, and the people who feel a need to force everyone onto UEFI "Class 3+" [1] and that everything else must be squeezed out, shamed, and moved to an emulator.
It sounds like Arm 32-bit support might be around for a while. I mainly wanted to clarify that Intel is dropping their 32-bit and 16-bit support.
Which is a very bold, and probably bad move.