Re:Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
by sharikous on Saturday October 16, 2021 @04:36PM
(#28891252)
ARM is not a magic bullet but the M1 stems from the trend of phone processors growing up to be competitive in the PC market.
Since almost (all?) mobile phones use ARM I can see a similar process of adapting other ARM processors to the PC market.
But of course Apple is so far ahead that we really don't know wether and when there will be a competitive alternative, so it may as well be a streamlined x64, or a new ISA, sure.
It seems to all depend on some very experienced CPU design teams and it seems that actually Apple lost some of them in the last year, I would track these news to get a better model of predicting the future than the ARM/x64 divide.
Since almost (all?) mobile phones use ARM I can see a similar process of adapting other ARM processors to the PC market.
But of course Apple is so far ahead that we really don't know wether and when there will be a competitive alternative, so it may as well be a streamlined x64, or a new ISA, sure.
It seems to all depend on some very experienced CPU design teams and it seems that actually Apple lost some of them in the last year, I would track these news to get a better model of predicting the future than the ARM/x64 divide.