you are overstating things significantly, ARM is still way behind (an order of magnitude or more) on single thread preformance. Nobody cares about preformance per watt if it means everything lags a massive amount.

> Nobody cares about preformance per watt if it means everything lags a massive amount.

As evidenced by the fact that Intel has failed to compete in mobile, this is obviously false.

We've been hearing nonstop from message board enthusiasts that Intel is going to kill ARM for years and years now. In reality there's absolutely no sign of that happening, and in fact their recent deep cuts to the Atom line suggest the opposite.

Totally depends on the workload, well threaded workloads with a desktop ARM clock speed of 3Ghz~ or so could perform quite well for say PostgreSQL if properly deployed, but yes - for an interpreted language with a strict GIL like Python it may not perform so well; having said that, Xeon professors are dropping in clock speed each iteration, where we used to see 3+Ghz perform, it's now common to see those processors replaces with 2.2Gjz max clock speed - yes the cache can be larger, there might be more cores etc but with languages such as python you quickly run into the single core maxed out problem pretty quickly regardless.

*edit: would be interesting to see an elasticsearch cluster running on a high clock speed arm cluster... I wonder how it'd run... (and yes I know it's not that simple)

Apple's A10 silicon (from the iPhone 7) already beats Intel's 12-core Xeon from the Mac Pro in single-thread.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusi...

In a _single_ 100% synthetic benchmark. The apple chip preforms so much better than other comparable arm cores (3-4x faster) on this benchmark I view it with a lot of suspicion.

I can list about 150 programming languages that are "faster than C" if you apply similar restrictions.

http://wiki.c2.com/?AsFastAsCee

Does the A10 have 12 cores? No, it has 2 (technically has 4 but only 2 can be active at any time).

Also it's 4 year old Xeon. If you're going to compare it to a 4 year old Xeon, compare it to the 2 core versions, which will have much higher clocks.