Performance per watt is increasing due to the lithography.
Also, Devon’s paradox.
Traditionally x86 has been built powerful and power hungry and then designers scaled the chips down whereas it's the opposite for ARM.
For whatever reason, this also makes it possible to get much bigger YoY performance gains in ARM. The Apple M4 is a mature design[0] and yet a year later the M5 is CPU +15% GPU +30% memory bandwidth +28%.
The Snapdragon Elite X series is showing a similar trajectory.
So Jim Keller ended up being wrong that ISA doesn't matter. Its just that it's the people in the ISA that matter, not the silicon.
[0] its design traces all the way back to the A12 from 2018, and in some fundamental ways even to the A10 from 2016.
I would need some strong evidence to make me think it isn't the ISA that makes the difference.
We will see how big improvement is it's successor panther lake in January on 18A node
>I would need some strong evidence to make me think it isn't the ISA that makes the difference.
It is like saying that Java syntax is faster than C# syntax.
Everything is about the implementation: compiler, jit, runtime, stdlib, etc
If you spent decades of effort on peformance and ghz then don't be shocked that someone who spent decades on energy eff is better in that category
Not by a long shot.
Over a decade ago, one of my college professors was an ex-intel engineer who worked on Intel's mobile chips. He was even involved in an Intel ARM chip that ultimately never launched (At least I think it never launched. It's been over a decade :D).
The old conroe processors were based on Intel's mobile chips (Yonah). Netburst didn't focus on power efficiency explicitly so and that drove Intel into a corner.
Power efficiency is core to CPU design and always has been. It's easy create a chip that consumes 300W idle. The question is really how far that efficiency is driven. And that may be your point. Lunar Lake certainly looks like Intel deciding to really put a lot of resource on improving power efficiency. But it's not the first time they did that. The Intel Atom is another decades long series which was specifically created with power in mind (the N150 is the current iteration of it).