The iPad Pro
&quot;The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead platform walking. The future belongs to ARM, and Apple’s A-series SoC’s are leading the way.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t believe that lines like this are still being written. I devoted the better part of a career to successfully debunking this idea that ARM has some sort of magical power efficiency advantages over x86. I can, however, console myself that such claims are exceedingly rare. Most people who lived through the &quot;RISC vs. CISC&quot; platform wars and made such claims conceded defeat a long time ago.<p>Anyway, I addressed this issue in one of my last CPU articles for Ars back in 2011:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;nvidia-30-and-the-ri...</a><p>Quote:<p>&quot;It&#x27;s also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe in magical little ARM performance elves.&quot;<p>Also, I think that benchmarks run in this article for the purpose of comparing the iPad to the MacBook are pretty worthless. I don&#x27;t have a good answer for how to comparatively benchmark them, or even if that makes sense. Meaningful cross-platform benchmarking is really hard, just ask the SPEC people.<p>Finally, in the article linked above, I predicted that the only way ARM is a threat to x86 is because it&#x27;s cheaper, and that if ARM can get within something like 2X the performance of Intel&#x27;s higher end CPUs, it might have a shot by virtue of being widely and inexpensively licensed.<p>Anyway, the TL;DR here is that those benchmarks say more about the software stack (the benchmark software included) than the do about the CPU and GPU hardware, and the reports of x86&#x27;s death at the hands of PowerPC^H^H^H ARM are, as always, greatly exaggerated.