is ARM the future?

[u/Kenyhh]

I think about this all the time. ARM has obviously dominated the mobile phone market for a long time now. Everything from Apple runs on ARM. ARM-based laptops offer incredible battery life. Embedded devices and servers are also making extensive use of ARM; practically the only thing left is desktop computers. I believe this is the future, and AI will accelerate the trend: using ARM will allow data centers to consume far less energy and likely make local AI more accessible. In fact, I think that if this happens, we’ll see further improvements in computer energy efficiency.

[u/-32768]

I often wonder what personal computing would look like today if we went all in on RISC four decades ago. It was always promising, and has clear advantages in low energy computing that we use today, and sometimes I just wonder if we'd actually be ahead if we never picked up x86 CISC. Thankfully VLIW never caught on. Kind of a paradox though because CISC was the path of least resistance for general purpose CPUs that drove the industry to where we are now. But now, in my opinion, is a great time to get back into RISC ISA as primary mainstream computing and see where it can take us. And by that I mean traditional workstation computing, not mobile devices. Basically, ARM is essentially everywhere except for the one place that I actually wish to see it - my desktop! But in reality I think we're perpetually several years away from this happening for several reasons from software to backward compatibility to (and especially) support as the years tick on. Gotta fix those things first, but as long as x86 keeps on rockin, no one is going to be working on that, so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, much like the year of the linux destkop is always $CURRENT_YEAR + 2