To be fair, battery life on Intel's Haswell i3's is comparable and performance is much better. As much as I like ARM rising up to the challenge of the high-end Intel monopoly, they're not even close yet (though getting closer every year).
Nothing from Intel or AMD will come close as it relates to battery life. While there are arm options that have great battery life, the performance doesn't come near to that of a Mac.
realistically ARM currently lacks the raw power intel chips provide. you can argue about battery life but most work is still done in offices where power sockets are not an issue.
it might change in the future but.. i don't think arm will catch up with x86 for at least a couple of years - in the meantime intel won't sit around doing nothing.
Well... yeah. Apple is running 5nm silicon, there's no way Intel can squeeze the same battery life out of that performance profile on their 10nm node. The flip side of this coin is that it's really good battery life for casual use, and it's not like that performance is going nowhere: it's thrashing the M1 in benchmarks.
I think things will get a lot more interesting in 2024, when Intel and Apple are on similar nodes. Right now Apple is making chips with transistors that are 2-3 times as dense, but they're consistently losing the performance crown to x86 machines on dinosaur silicon. The performance-per-watt gap is bound to start closing, and when it does there won't be much of a benefit left to using ARM, especially if your casual users can get Macbook-beating battery life with it.
Nobody said anything about performance/watt. It doesn't have to be more efficient. It only has to draw less power, most of the time. And most of the time you're staring at a computer screen, you're not asking it to do anything - you're reading, or thinking about what to type next. So idle power is the most relevant predictor of battery life for a mobile chipset. And ARM definitely has the advantage there.
As well as weighing less and being cheaper. So there's no call for laughing and crying.
We all wish intel could release a processor with similar power consumption to the m1, but it's not like they just overlooked battery life. x86 is just fundamentally not competitive with arm on that front, unfortunately. The only advantage it seems to have from an architecture standpoint is raw performance
Low power Intel is not as good as low power ARM. "High power" ARM competitive with desktop doesn't quite exist yet, although the iPhones are very close (and better than a desktop of a few years ago)
ARM is better for <5W applications when performance is secondary to power consumption, but Intel is beating them at performance/watt ratio everywhere else.
The problem is Intel has already lost on the performance side. Intel has always needed 3 things to beat ARM, and they need all 3 to be competitive: performance, energy efficiency, price.
With Atom, they've always had the performance advantage. In fact they've had a big advantage over ARM at the time when when Atom came out. It was like several times more powerful than the ARM chip inside iPhone 3G.
But to be competitive, Intel needed to compete on the other 2 levels, as well. So they kept Atom's performance mostly the same, while they tried over the years to push Atom down from a 10W TDP. But while Intel tried to lower the power consumption, ARM's chips were gaining in performance - faster than Intel. So now when Intel has finally reached parity with ARM in energy efficiency, ARM has surpassed it in performance with Cortex A15, and from what I've seen so far, by a lot.
Then there's also the pricing issue. I think they've improved there quite a bit. An Atom chip used to be close to $100. Now it's probably more like $40-$50 (this dual core version). But that's still like at least 50% more than an ARM chip.
So Intel still has a lot of catching up to do in "overall competitiveness", because right now it looks like they've only switched the much bigger performance leadership for "energy efficiency parity", and are losing at the other two. I'd like to see how high they are willing to go with Atom on performance, until they realize that it's going to cannibalize their Core i3 market.
Intel may maintain a performance lead on certain tasks that take advantage of things like AVX, though Apple may be able to make up with more cores. AFAIK ARM has no equivalent to the more advanced vector instruction sets of X64 chips.
I do expect ARM to have an instant heat and battery life advantage. It may be sizable if you combine a more efficient chips with smaller process nodes. I expect a bigger gap here than in raw speed.
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