You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
There are reasons beyond pure power efficiency to use ARM processors. It is a nice architecture to work with, especially if you plan to write low-level code. Also, you might want to deploy on ARM servers.
Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?
If you want an ARM CPU, there are now a few single-board computers with a quadruple Cortex-A78 CPU in the "Qualcomm Dragonwing QCM6490" SoC (similar to a Snapdragon from the flagships of 2021), which run circles around Raspberry Pi and the like.
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
array_key_first|12 days ago
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
_ph_|11 days ago
Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?
adrian_b|11 days ago
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
bigyabai|12 days ago
_ph_|11 days ago