alt Hacker News> ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price
Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point
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I thought PPC was supposed to be highly performant, but not very efficient. I didn’t think ARM (at least non-Apple ARM) was hitting that level of performance yet. I thought ARM was by far more efficient, but not quite there in terms of raw performance.
But I could be wrong… I’m going from a historical perspective. I haven’t checked PPC benchmarks in quite a while.
There isn't really an arm64 processor available that runs as fast as a Power10 processor, and there isn't really a Power10 processor that runs as efficiently as an arm64 processor, so 'competitive' is probably the wrong word.
I do not think that I have seen any public benchmark for more than a decade that can compare ARM-based CPUs with IBM POWER CPUs.
The recent generations of IBM POWER CPUs have not been designed for good single-thread performance but only for excellent multi-threaded performance.
So I believe that an ARM CPU from a flagship smartphone should be much faster in single thread that any existing IBM POWER CPU.
On the other hand, I do not know if there exists any ARM-based server CPU that can match the multi-threaded performance of the latest IBM POWER CPUs.
At least for some workloads the performance of the ARM-based CPUs must be much lower, as the IBM CPUs have huge cache memories and very fast memory and I/O interfaces.
The ARM-based server CPUs should win in performance per watt (due to using recent TSMC processes vs. older Samsung processes) and in performance per dollar, but not in absolute performance.