Mostly ARMless?

The ARM architecture has made huge strides on macOS and – to a lesser extent – Windows. Is there life in the old x86 dog yet?

Efficiency over pure raw power has driven processors forward. First, we saw it with laptops, when Intel developed its efficient Core architecture for notebooks, later transitioning the architecture into its desktop products. Now, the inspiration is coming from mobile chips designed by ARM, which until recently were predominantly used in mobile phones and embedded devices.

Apple has taken the lead, with its ARM-based M1 chips powering everything from its entry-level laptops to the high-end Mac Studio. Key to the design is using power-efficient cores, but using a lot of them. The MacBook Air, for example, has eight cores as a starting point (four powerful cores for high-end tasks and four low-power ones for background tasks and efficiency), while the Mac Studio uses the M1 Ultra with up to 20 cores in total (16 highperformance and four low-power).

Rather than being budget chips, Apple has shown the true advantages of ARM architecture: low-power chips that improve battery life and are easier to cool (the MacBook Air doesn’t have fans), and lots of highperformance cores in its desktop products. While Intel’s latest chips may offer better performance on a single core, Apple competes by adding core after core after core.

Intel lost both face and money when Apple stopped using its chips, so it’s no wonder that the company has thought differently with its processor architecture. Nor is it a surprise that its latest 12th generation Alder Lake chips use a similar layout to ARM ones: big P-cores, little E-cores.

But will this be enough to stave off the threat from ARM? After all, the CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, boldly announced on stage at CES 2022 in January that a shift to ARM on Windows was “inevitable” due to the shift towards working anywhere.

Versions of Windows 10 and 11 already run on ARM architecture, and there are some laptops and mini PCs that use Snapdragon chips. These computers can’t compete performance-wise with Intel and AMD, but if Apple continues to surge ahead, how long will it be before PC manufacturers turn to ARM as the solution?

We aren’t as bullish as Cristiano Amon. After all, Apple’s advantage is that it makes the hardware and software, so it controls everything; PC manufacturers rely on components and software from lots of different sources, so it’s harder for the market to make the same co-ordinated shift that Apple has done. But one thing’s for certain: we’re at an interesting crossroads for processors, and more competition is never a bad thing.