[kaelinl]

This isn't the point of the article.

The article is commenting on CPU design: area efficiency, power efficiency, design cost, etc. They're proposing that the reason x86 CPUs have historically beat ARM CPUs in performance, and the reason ARM CPUs have historically beat x86 CPUs in power efficiency, has nothing to do with the design of the ISA itself. You could build an ARM CPU to beat an x86 CPU in high performance computing, or vice versa. They're saying that the format of the instructions and the particular way the operations are structured isn't the driving factor. Instead, it's just a historical arteract of how the ISAs were used.

In other words, yes, there are plenty of ecosystem reasons that these two (and potentially, more) families of chips are better for some things vs. others, but if the two companies swapped their ISAs 30 years ago we might see exactly the same ecosystem just with different instruction formats.

[Jasper_]

Yeah, ARM's big advantage is that they are willing to make absolutely zero margin on chips, which allows them to play both ends of the spectrum. They can make Celeron-tier chips that don't take any power and practically given away for free and use that as evidence of ARM's superiority in things like the M1 and supercomputers.

Even as Intel is declining, it still makes way, way more money than ARM does. If Intel wanted to play in the lose-money business, it could make something to kick the pants off of ARM's chips. It just would rather not.

[IshKebab]

I'm not sure I buy that. x86 chips have targeted laptops for decades, yet they were absolutely walloped by Apple's ARM chips. IIRC a big part of that is that the ARM ISA has 2/4 byte instructions whereas x86 can be crazy sizes which made it easier for Apple to have 8 instruction decoders. At least that's the best theory I heard for why it is so fast.