Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> writes:
There is the whole RISC (ARM) vs CISC (x86) situation to consider.
Erm, AMD64 CPUs are RISC under the hood.
OTOH, an x86 chip with the latest power saving technologies gives fuller complex instruction set (CIS part of CISC) ...
AFAIK this is gibberish (unless you're in the habit of hand-writing assembly).
this can mean the that CPU handles a task extremely efficiently and therefore more quickly, allowing the CPU to fall back to a lower power setting (ala idle state) or give you more grunt when you need it
I don't see how the ISA has any relevance to ACPI C states & their ARM equivalents.
At then end of the day, comparing ARM with x86 is like comparing apples with oranges.
If you only look at the clock, sure. That's true even between microarchitectures implementing the same ISA. You can meaningfully compare unalike systems using a benchmark like SPECint, though. (Synthetic benchmarks like dmips or bogomips are unlikely to give useful numbers.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhrystone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips
Or perhaps more so in the computing world, Motorola vs Intel. For many years Apple made use of Motorola to great benefit, but they've moved to Intel for various reasons
Um, you're missing a big chunk of history there, namely the POWER derivatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture AFAIK the biggest drivers for Apple moving to Intel weren't "zomg it's fastaaaar" but fungibility, economies of scale, and politics.