I thought we were in the context of the competition between x86 and Arm but sure, what is a non-last century ISA then? RISC-V, a very conservative rehash of an architecture from the 1980s? Realistically there are no other commercially viable contenders, sadly.
If you want to criticize x86 then you may want to support the assertion. Maybe something along the lines of bloated legacy features and horrible power requirements. However, in my opinion it's perfectly fine for a desktop computer. Just not so great for phones, tablets and portable computers.
I'm pretty sure that x86 could be more power efficient than it is now. But I have rarely run into an implementation of x86 that wasn't pretty dang power hungry. Probably for the explicit reason that it isn't a huge priority for the stuff they run it on.
I think the lowest power ones are Atom and Celeron. All the other low wattage CPUs are RISC based. I think AMD is also coming up with something similar.
Nearly all x86 CPU architectures originate from desktop/server CPUs which had much higher thermal and power limits, but nearly all ARM CPU architectures originate from embedded CPUs where there are strict thermal and power limits.
It's not as if there's something fundamental with x86 that makes it use more power. There used to be the case that x86 CPUs had many more transistors (and thus more power usage and heat) due to the need to implement more instructions, but I don't believe this is the case anymore. I think right now is that its easier to scale up an architecture, than it is to scale down.
If you look at something like Project Denver, it started as a x86 compatible CPU that would of had ARM-like power usage.
> I think the lowest power ones are Atom and Celeron. All the other low wattage CPUs are RISC based. I think AMD is also coming up with something similar.
AMD Had Bobcat and later Puma, IIRC there were some <5W parts in both of those families. I still wonder -why- they never did a dual channel version of those parts for desktop, my guess is it would have made Bulldozer look extra bad somehow.
>...horrible power requirements. ... perfectly fine for a desktop computer. Just not so great for phones, tablets and portable computers.
Except no one buys desktop computers any more: everyone's using phones, tablets, and laptop computers. There's also servers, but even here power efficiency is important; reduced power requirements for a datacenter would save a lot of money, not just in direct electricity consumption by the servers, but also from reduced cooling needs.
Ah, that is why Sony and Microsoft are now eyeing PC versions of console games, because no one ever buys gaming rings any longer, aka desktop computers.
Also what do you think most contributors to LLVM, GCC, CUDA, VFX,.. use as daily driver?
I don't think those numbers are correct at all: they appear to be grouping laptops in with "personal computers". We're talking about desktop computers here.
Yeah, and not only that, many of those "desktops" are probably "workstations". We had heavy compute requirements at my last job so we were assigned workstations with dual Xeon CPUs, not standard Intel desktop chips.
Outside of a couple unusual places like that, laptops have been the standard for workplaces over the last couple decades for me.
Before that laptops were not quite limited to managers, but they did signify higher status (if not necessarily pay). Today it‘s iPads that signify status.
