Agreed - Arm has to catch up in a lot of software areas. But it has the potential to be the CPU of choice. Power usage is going to be a big thing in future years. Here, there's worries about Electricity supplies this winter, and Government is looking for peak power time savings from data centres, which use a large fraction of the nation's power.

One way of doing that is switching to Arm servers now. Amazon even pimp out their own Amazon 32 core Arm servers on linux. In fact it's probably fair to say that if Ireland's servers were 100% Arm based, Ireland's Electric data centre power consumption issues would go away. It's the usual combination of low wind, low winter light, lower inland water limiting hydroelectric power generation, coupled with higher power demand. Ireland has a desparate shortage of accomodation, but doesn't have enough power for more Apartment Blocks/Housing estates and no new data centres are getting on to the power grid.

I use virtualization with parallels on m1 and I have no issues with it, it works just fine. Of course, that's not actually testing it in production, but I don't think arm is so bad in this area.

I'm not sure how many of you have actually used M1, but the difference from the previous models and other laptops is *huge*, I can assure you. I've never heard the sound of my cooler despite opening dozens of tabs (I use two firefox profiles at that, so I actually open two browsers), having VMs running and a bunch of other applications. It does get a little bit warmer, sure, but my previous macbook pro would take off with that kind of load. And I simply don't care about battery consumption, I have to say. This is the first time I've experienced this on a laptop.

When I talk about virtualisation in my post above, I'm talking about infrastructure level.

Just thinking on a separate track to virtualisation.

Software support also has the potential to be a road block for Arm. Take a random program I use - Zoom. Zoom won't bother to build an arm64 port. So they don't support it. So folks who need Zoom won't buy Arm, etc. Ditto AutoCad, etc.

The other area is GPUs. Today's top tier GPUs are very power hungry. That will change as they shrink the lithography to build the same chip on a smaller scale but that's a serious redesign, not changing one number. What will probably happen is new models will be on a smaller fab size.

I have the feeling that you might be underestimating a little bit the pace of development for arm (at least for M1) all in all. Initially, when Apple released M1, there was a lot of software that didn't support arm. Not even Adobe had released its arm-based suite. It took another few months. In the meantime things had changed dramatically. Docker Desktop also started supporting arm, parallels (which works great, as I've said) also supports it, etc.

I use, I don't know, maybe more than 30 applications on m1 of which only Joplin doesn't support m1 natively. For Discord it took quite a lot of time to release a decent version and a stable version isn't available even now, but the beta can be used (more or less with their blessing) without any issues and it works fast.

Zoom is supported on M1, it runs natively. I'm not sure about other arm-based devices, but clearly (to my mind) there're no arm-based laptops now that are very interesting at this point except for Apple's (I use macbook grudgingly though, given their practices).
Moreover Rosetta can do a really great job in certain respects and can make up for the handicap, depending on the software. I've used amd64-based indesign and it doesn't work bad at all. But that last part can be slightly a little bit out of scope.

An octa core ARM cpu installed on a cellphone or tablet uses 4 cores for many tasks.

When there are jobs demanding more processing power the other 4 cores come to help

2 cores at a time. In general in a many-core cpu "power budgetting" reduces the cpu

performance no matter what the brand is. Why? because the VLSI technology hit the

power wall years ago!!!

So, ARM or x64 which architecture is is the future? I say both because it depends to the

application.

If you insist on ARM and have no regard for the term "application", I advise you to visit

the MikroTik website. There you will see many successful network appliacations using neither

ARM nor x64. They use TILE and MISPBE architectures for example.

I think you missed the thrust of what folks were saying.

Yes, I have an octa-core Exynos and the priority spin is

1. power consumption
2. performance.

Yes there are 23 architectures supported by linux at the last count. But when it comes to the volume & value markets of pcs, servers, & mobile, that's where it gets interesting. Arm dominate mobile, are encroaching on servers, and have the potential to take over in all three areas. Whether it gets to do that or not is what we were speculating on. Most other architectures haven't got

• 64 bit support
• multicore models
• Go-faster optimisations

Somebody may yet outsine Arm, build a better x86 processor than AMD or Intel. I personally feel Arm is the one to watch.