@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #2409960
2025-09-09 05:09 UTC
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social They were doing their own silicon for mobile and knew their SoCs in particular were on a trajectory where it was more than competitive for the laptop/desktop parts as well, and they don't have an x86 license, so even if they wanted to they could not make their own x86s. But they can make ARMs.
So they made ARMs with a bunch of added features to make x86 emulation minimal friction.
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-09-09 05:14
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social M1-M4 are not substantially more power-efficient than all x86s as of 2020 (and note that this gap has closed a lot since, especially with Lunar Lake) because ARM has magic power efficiency juice, but rather because their uArch (not ISA) decided to go for higher IPC, lower clock frequencies. If you compare vs. AMD or Intel (both of which, conveniently, also have all their recent compute tiles on TSMC, same as Apple!) you can see that.