The most exciting 2024 tech isn't AI

X86 has an incredible amount of cruft built up to support backwards compatibility all the way back to the 8086. ARM isn't free of cruft, but it's nowhere on the same level. Most of that isn't directly visible to customers, though.

What is visible is that more than three companies can license and manufacture them. The x86 market has one company that owns it, another who licenses it but also owns the 64 bit extensions, and a third one who technically exists but is barely worth talking about. It's also incredibly difficult to optimize, and the people who know how already work for one of main two companies (arguably only one at this point). Even if you could legally license it as a fourth player, you couldn't get people who could design an x86 core that's worth a damn.

Conversely, ARM cores are designed by CS students all the time. That's the real advantage to end users: far more companies who can produce designs. If one of them fails the way Intel has of late, we're not stuck with just one other possibility.

I'm guessing you've never used an ARM Mac.

They don't look all that fast on GeekBench (more on that in further down) but in real world usage they are incredibly fast. As in an entry level 13" school homework laptop will have performance on par with a high end gaming PC with a thousand watt PSU.

I don't have a high end gaming PC to compare, but I do have a mid-range one and I've stopped using it... my laptop is so much faster, quieter, cooler, that even though the PC has more games... I just put up with the modest selection (about half the games I own) that run on a Mac. It's not just gaming either... I'm also able to compile software perfectly fast, I can run docker with a dozen containers open at the same time without breaking a sweat (this is particularly impressive on the Mac version of Docker which uses virtual machines instead of running directly on the host), and stable diffusion generates images in about 20 seconds or so with typical generation settings.

The best thing though is I can do all of that on a tiny battery that lasts almost an entire day under heavy load and multiple days under normal load. I've calculated the average power draw with typical use is somewhere around 3 watts for the entire system including the screen. It's hard to believe, especially considering how fast it is.

On the modest GeekBench score Apple ARM processors have - it's critical to understand GeekBench is designed to test very short bursts and avoid thermal throttling. Intel's recent i9 processors, with good cooling, will thermal throttle after about 12 seconds and GeekBench is designed to avoid hitting that number by doing much shorter bursts than that. Apple's processors not only take far longer to thermal throttle, they also "throttle" by reducing performance to barely lower than full speed.

But even worse than that - one of the ways Apple achieves incredible battery life is they don't run the processors at high clock rates for short bursts. The CPU starts slow and ramps up to full speed when you keep it under high load. So something quick, like loading a webpage, won't run at full speed and therefore GeekBench also isn't running at full speed either.

A third difference, and probably the biggest one, is Apple's processor has very fast memory and also massive memory caches which are even faster. Again that often doesn't show up on CPU benchmark because it's not really measuring compute power. But real world software spends a massive amount of time just reading and writing to memory and those operations are fast on Apple's ARM processors.

You really can't trust the benchmarks when you're comparing completely different processors. You need to try real world usage, and the real world usage difference is game changing. Trust me, when proper fast processors (not just a laptop running with a phone CPU) are available on PCs, everyone will realise Mac users were right - ARM is way better than x86. This isn't like AMD vs Intel. It's more like HDD vs SSD.