| TallSilhouette said: There's been a lot of concern about wattage in this thread of late. As gamers, what do y'all think about ARM desktops? |
Personally I don't think it's gonna happen for a long time and the reason being is compatibility. I own a M1 Macbook Pro 16 inch and let me tell you that there's a lot of compatibility issues with various types of software.
See for work, the messaging software that we use is called Cisco Jabber. As I work from home after Covid started, we need to install it on our home computers and it has a Mac version however it's x86. M1 has a translation software called Rosetta that is supposed to translate those apps but anytime I run Cisco Jabber, it crashes after a few minutes and anytime I try to change a setting, it bugs out. And this isn't the only software that does this. You want to run Photoshop that is a few versions old? Crash. Most software works fine but there's plenty of freeze ups with certain types.
And that is with the limited number of software that's on MacOS. Now with Windows, that becomes a whole new can of worms. Unlike Apple, Windows is built upon decades of backwards compatibility. We already see a ton of compatibility issues by using Windows on Arm. The Dream of playing games from 15 years ago? Gone.
So overall, least in the desktop space, I couldn't care less. The main source of power consumption in the desktop space is the GPU and Apple hasn't done anything to fix that. M1 Max Macbook Pro uses up to 135 Watts of power even with it's ultra efficient Arm CPU and the reason it does is because of it's GPU. A laptop with i7 11800H + 3070 uses up to 170 watts and most of the difference is because of the Intel CPU. So efficiency in the GPU space considering M1 GPUs are using TSMC's 5nm while the 3070 is using Samsung's 8nm, it's really not very impressive. The GPU on the M1 Max should be using around 60 watts vs 3070 in the test is using 90 watts.
So going Arm would help overall but it will come at major sacrifices to software compatibility. But the main thing we should compare is Arm on 5nm vs x86 on 5nm. That will really tell us whether or not it's even worth giving any cares about.
Edited for clarification.
Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 30 June 2022 
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