RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast?
ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.
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My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.
I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.
The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.
The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”
I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.
Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!
To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.
Cheers, Stephen
ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.
This hasn't been true for decades. Mainframes are fast because they have proprietary architectures that are purpose-built for high throughput and redundancy, not because they're RISC. The pre-eminent mainframe architecture these days (z/Architecture) is categorized as CISC.
Processors are insanely complicated these days. Branch prediction, instruction decoding, micro-ops, reordering, speculative execution, cache tiering strategies... I could go on and on but you get the idea. It's no longer as obvious as "RISC -> orthogonal addressing and short instructions -> speed".
Very much so. It's largely a register-memory (and indeed memory-memory) rather than load-store architecture, and a direct descendant of the System/360 from 1964.