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If the IBM PC used an ARM (or related) CPU instead of the Intel 8088, would smartphones ultimately have sucked less?
(self.explainlikeimfive)
Why do you keep comparing phones and PCs? They're not comparable and never will. My PC can draw probably close to 1000W when running full bore. Mobile chips have a TDP of like 10-20W. My PC can throw 50-100x more power at the problem than your phone can. In the absolute worst case, it would have a dozen or two of those power efficient ARM chips because it can. And PC games would make use of all of them and you circle back to PC superiority. My netbook is within the same range and crappier than my phone in many aspects, around 5-10W. My new Framework 16 has a TDP of 45W, already like 2-4x more than a high end phone has.
Even looking at Apple, the M2 has a TDP of 20W because it was spun off their iPad chips, and primarily targets mobile devices like MacBooks. So while the performance is impressive in the efficiency department, I could build an ARM server with 10x the core count and have a 10x more powerful computer than the top of the line M3 iMac.
PCs running ARM would have no effect on the mobile ecosystem whatsoever. Android runs Linux, and Linux runs on a lot of CPU architectures. You can run Android on RISC-V today if you want to spend the time building it. Or MIPS. Or PowerPC. There's literally nothing stopping you from doing that.
The gaming experience on mobile sucks because gaming on mobile sucks. If you ran your phone at full power to game and have the best graphics it would probably be dead in 1-2 hours. Nobody would play games that murders their battery. And most people that do play games on mobile want like 10 minute games to play while sitting on the toilet, or on a bus or train or whatever. Thus, battery life is an important factor in making a game: you don't want your game to chew through battery because then people start rationing their gameplay to make it to the end of the day or the next charger.
PCs are better not because of IBM, or even the x86 architecture, not even because of Windows. They're better because PCs can be built with any part you want, and you can throw as many CPUs and GPUs and NPUs and FPGAs at the problem as you want. Heck there's even SBC PCs on PCI/PCIe cards so you can have multiple PCs in your PC.
Whatever you can come up with that fits in a mobile device, I can make a 10-20x more powerful PC if anything by throwing 10-20 phones in it and split the load across all of them.
PC games are ambitious and make use of as much hardware as it can deal with. If you want to show off your 3D tech you don't limit yourself to mobile, you target dual RTX 4090 Ti graphics cards. There are great games made for lower end hardware, and consoles like the switch runs ARM, like the Zelda games. The switch is vastly inferior to modern phones, and Yuzu can run those games better than the switch can. My PC will happily run BotW and TotK at 4K 240Hz HDR if I ask it to. But it was designed for the Switch and it's pretty darn good games. So the limitation clearly isn't that PCs exist, it's what developers write their games for. CPU architecture isn't a problem, we have emulators, we have Rosetta, we have Box64, we have FEX.
If PCs didn't exist, something else would have taken its place a long time ago, and we'd circle back to the exact same problem/question. Heck there's routers and firewalls that run games better than your phone.