this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Apple's A18 delivers solid performance gains, challenges Ryzen 9 9950X in single-core Geekbench (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.

Probably two things:

  • Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn't necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
  • The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec'ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.

All those fancy "CoPilot ready" Qualcomm machines? They're following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you're looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they're used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm's history with support.

I'd love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn't a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.