Where will ARM CPUs take us?
ARM CPUs are what are in generally all phones and tablets. X86 is the desktop and laptop standard. ARM CPUs are generally more efficient when it comes to power, but fall behind in some situations. X86 CPUs are usually less efficient but power through workloads without second thought. Though sometimes ARM is more powerful than X86. Take basically any Celeron older than 2 or 3 years old, and the Snapdragon 835 from last year will beat it. Take the Apple A11 Bionic chip, it is about as powerful as the I5 7360U, which is impressive given it’s a phone CPU.
It is impressive that a CPU designed to be low power, and even then not to it’s full potential as to not overheat, can beat a laptop CPU, is really good to say the least. The A11 just chews on 5 watts of power. With such a low power draw, this creates less need for a heat-sink, although you still need one. This can make for a really thin laptop if it was to be used in a Macbook. Tuning it up to 10w and putting more pure power would get more performance and higher clock speeds, this would probably be ideal for a Macbook Pro.
The next generation A chip from Apple will probably still take 5w, but maybe we can see a increase to 8 cores, maybe 6 performance and 2 efficiency. To make it possible for an all day laptop to compete with the LG Gram would be an understatement for a 5w CPU, even if you put other normal parts it would probably last atleast 12 hours? This would be a great step towards a true 24 hour laptop.
Another popular ARM cpu is the Snapdragon 845, used in the new Galaxy S9, the soon Note 9 (maybe Note X??) and it is definitely a good CPU, last generation’s 835 was even used in a laptop from HP. The Apple A11 would definitely beat a 835 in a laptop.
But let’s be honest. We aren’t going to see the 845, and probably not even the 855 in serious business class laptops or desktops. I’d be surprised if ARM CPUs get into full tower desktops within the decade. Their biggest advantage is more cores, less power and much cheaper. In some areas where the I9 series or the Xeon W series exceeds, they might just be always stronger. Maybe someday we will see ARM CPUs exceed and get into workstations or servers.
Right now the Snapdragon 600/800 series could probably not make it too well into laptops much more powerful than an average chromebook. A snapdragon chromebook might happen soon since Android and Chrome OS are coming together.
As of now there are no readily available, socketed, ARM CPUs. They probably won’t make their DIY/enthusiast markets until they are adopted by Intel or AMD. ARM CPUs will probably be less Intel and AMD dominated, since the ARM market has already been dominated for years by Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm. Of course since Intel and AMD are huge brand names, they will make a huge dent and debut to the ARM market. ARM CPUs if adapted to the DIY and consumer market will probably have a higher efficiency, TSMC is the manufacturer of Apple A chips, and have already announced plans for 7 NM, and already have 10 NM while Intel and AMD are stuck at 14NM. Even then in the DIY and enthusiast markets, CPUs are much bigger than ARM CPUs are. This could mean 24 core CPUs, if they want to take up as much space. Even with a stronger IGPU and more integrated IGPU cores, they could easily have 4X the cores on half the size. Even with that there are architectural changes that *could* make X86 CPUs still more powerful for certain workloads.
ARM CPUs are still just in phones and tablets. The Surface RT is a Windows tablet that has an ARM CPU inside. The Snapdragon 845 was launched into a few laptops that are supposed to be “always connected”. And X86 still dominates. Maybe X86 is just old, and might need to be replaced.
While wrapping up research for this article, I came across a TechCrunch article that brings a very interesting idea to the table and examples of how it is used. (The article) TL:DR Apple has been using ARM co processors in the iMac Pro and Macbook Pro to handle smaller controllers like Touch ID, and the touch bar in the MBP and Speakers, fans, and microphone in the iMac Pro.
That can launch me on a whole new topic. ARM CPUs used to handle small workloads : a very interesting idea. What comes to my mind when I think of it is maybe Windows setting aside tasks that would take up smaller amounts of the main CPU (let’s say .1%-5%) and just send it to be done by the ARM CPU.
