Yeah, a standardized ISA extension, but I'd bet Fujitsu spent a ton of time on the implementation details. They have a deep history of making high performance vector processors going back to the 80s, and high performance SPARC cores parallel to that. They may not be huge volume, but they know how to make a fast processor.
[1] no x64 support, limited OpenGL/3D support, no Fax/Scan support... AFAIK.
See, e.g., performance/watt of Altra vs Epyc: https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/03/18/stacking-up-arm-serv...
Apple is, though.
> performance/watt of Altra vs Epyc
Server CPUs are a different matter altogether, IMO.
In this era where all chips are getting power-state and speed-state shifts at millisecond speeds, eeking out even a 40% performance/watt benefit over comparable total-performance x86 SKUs in the laptop, desktop, and workstation categories would be a massive win for Apple and enough justification on top of unbridling themselves from Intel to warrant the shift.
40% benefit won't bring your average 60W desktop SKU down to a passively-coolable target. Or the 45W SKUs of a MacBook Pro class system (the passively cooled MacBooks were using 7W SKUs, and Apple axed that experiment after four years because even casual users found them too anemic to be marketable at Apple prices).
Even Raspberry Pi's are getting fans these days, and that CPU never draws more than 6W: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-needs-...
Lots of the ARM power wins in mobile rely on the light and infrequent use of the device. That's why Intel didn't bother with big.LITTLE style architectures until this year.
This is a good jumping off point if you want to dive more into ARM perf/watt, or see how performance/core is just starting to approach that of high end desktop x86 SKUs (with the A14 likely to approach parity): https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
That's all telling of apple likely dropping 4-16 core mobile and desktop SKUs that pull about 5W/core and are 30-40% more efficient than their x86 competition.
It doesn't help that ARM themselves are not confidently offering any desktop worthy intellectual property, as the smartphone chipmakers are just using ARM's own core designs.
- AWS Graviton 2 is actually a viable option in the public cloud.
- Apple starts transitioning their workhorses to ARM.
- First place in the TOP500, apparently not due to custom magic or GPUs, but due to already existing/standardized ARM vector extensions.
ARM is becoming such a household name that Fujitsu appears to have traded getting a paid ARM license over the royalty free SPARC instruction set they used to work with. I hope POWER can survive this onslaught, as SPARC surely has no hope of survival after this.