> Wonder why ARM consumes much less than x86? That's one (small) reason why.
Consumes much less what than x86?
Power? Quad A57s @ 1.9ghz hits the 7 watt mark. You want performance you pay for it in power. At the end of the day the ISA doesn't actually change any of that.
Die size? Sure, but "high end" ARM chips are still pathetic 512kb or 1mb L2 caches with no L3. Pretty much the same as above - you want performance, you pay for it in transistors. ISA doesn't change the end result much.
If you want a real fight of ARM vs. X86 just look at the server market where ARM has attempted to challenge Intel. But Xeons have not just better overall performance, but also better performance/watt.
It's all about who can make the best transistor, not which ISA is the most elegant or simplest or any of that. Those days are long, long gone. The complexity cost of legacy or "bloated" instructions/features is such an insignificant amount of the total transistors it just doesn't matter to perf or power.
I don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but Apple‘s A-series chips have a lot of cache, something around 8MB in the last generations iirc.
The A11 is only 88mm², with 8MB of cache, compared to the Skylake quad-core i7 CPUs with 122mm² and the same amount of cache (using Intel's 14nm process).
The Snapdragon 820 (Samsung 14nm process) also clocked in at 144mm² with only 1.5 MB of cache. Apple's chips aren't the only large ARM chips.
Consumes much less what than x86?
Power? Quad A57s @ 1.9ghz hits the 7 watt mark. You want performance you pay for it in power. At the end of the day the ISA doesn't actually change any of that.
Die size? Sure, but "high end" ARM chips are still pathetic 512kb or 1mb L2 caches with no L3. Pretty much the same as above - you want performance, you pay for it in transistors. ISA doesn't change the end result much.
If you want a real fight of ARM vs. X86 just look at the server market where ARM has attempted to challenge Intel. But Xeons have not just better overall performance, but also better performance/watt.
It's all about who can make the best transistor, not which ISA is the most elegant or simplest or any of that. Those days are long, long gone. The complexity cost of legacy or "bloated" instructions/features is such an insignificant amount of the total transistors it just doesn't matter to perf or power.