> Imagine that power efficiency on servers. Saving so much energy.

There's no magic in those chips. Power efficiency is a design parameter you may optimize for or not, and ARM server chips dissipate more power because they have a lot more cores, more memory controllers, more cache, more IO, and, in general, a lot more stuff than a personal computer CPU would make sense to have. Computation per computation, they are not far from each other.

Intel's x86 ISA mandates a more computation to happen per amount of useful computation served - lots of memory write reordering, lots of instruction alignment (instructions can have from 1 to 15 bytes, IIRC) and other operations that do not translate into anything useful for the user beyond a higher IPC if your instruction stream is just right, but, also dissipate a lot of power for that.

Dropping the M2 into the same entry level Macbook Pro they sold last year gains you a couple of hours of battery life as well as a performance increase.

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-l...

That's pretty impressive for staying on the same process node.

Truly amazing, most people (including me) thought after M1 perf gains will be marginal

That battery life test is understating the advantage Apple has over x86, probably because it's idling too much. The gap in a more CPU intensive web browsing test is more like 2x more than competing x86 ultralights [1].

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-L...

But is Apple ever going to allow their CPUs to be used for anything other than their own products? If it isn't even an option then it is mostly irrelevant. I can't get a Windows laptop with an Apple M2 so it isn't worth checking how efficient of a CPU it is compared to Intel and AMD.

Actually it’s not irrelevant. Lots of people choose between a Mac and Windows and the M chips up the competitive pressure on Intel and AMD to improve their offerings.

My workplace gave me a choice between an M1 Macbook or an Intel-based Lenovo. Even though I'd never used a Mac full-time before, it was a no-brainer and I picked the Macbook. It absolutely does matter.

This is the argument Apple fans used to make during the PowerPC G4 days – “it doesn’t matter that Intel makes faster CPUs, because I can’t buy a Mac with them, so the comparison is irrelevant and not worth looking at”. Except, over time, it did matter as sales bled off to Windows machines.

Yeah, the OS matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters to most people (and with the web, the loss-of-applications cost of switching your OS is a lot lower than it used to be).

Apple has set a high benchmark. AMD, Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft are under pressure and have plans for M1 competitor.

Lots of Windows users migrating to Mac for performance reasons

It is exceptional work, but the system-on-a-chip design is a form of compromise, especially with regard to the availability and pricing of RAM configurations. The current MacBooks ship with the same amount of RAM as my Android phone.