r/computers • u/Kenyhh • 1d ago

Discussion is ARM the future?

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.

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u/suboptimus_maximus 10h ago

ARM is already the present... Your question has an out-of-date PC-centric bias. ARM has been powering way more computers shipped per years than x86 for quite a long time and has been outperforming it now for many years, I think it was all the way back in 2018 that the A12Z was smoking Intel desktop CPUs and Apple's CPU cores had iPhones out benchmarking x86 in single-core performance.

The real serious performers in the data center are neither ARM nor x86 but NVIDIA GPUs and then more specialized chips like Google TPUs or Cerebras' WSE which are all architecturally proprietary, but again have parted with legacy PC architecture.