I think the ARM Snapdragon is a great machine, and I'm pleased to see Intel finally take a back seat.
The only thing I don’t like is Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer has done some shady things that compromise security. My company doesn’t allow use of Lenovo computers for sensitive work.
My department has had to fight tooth and nail to convince our traveling people to go from 17” laptops to 15”. We will never get them onto 13.3”.
My headline comment isn’t exactly true — the ARM is enhanced with some x86 instructions.
Unfortunately the devices aren’t as open to modifications as their Intel equivalents.
Window on Apple chips. Funny.
ARM is starting to attack the server market as well. Last November, Cloudflare benchmarked a Qualcomm Falkor ARM server against Intel Broadwell and Skylake servers. The Broadwell and Skylake servers had 20 and 24 cores, respectively, with hyperthreading. The Falkor had 46 cores.
The Falkor lagged on single-core tasks, but did passably well on multicore tests. Software played a role in some of the tests, to the Falkor's disadvantage. E.g., a few of the tests were based on the Go language. Apparently, its ARM runtime needs work.
But the most interesting test was a web-serving benchmark using Nginx (btw, FR uses Nginx):
Server farms are notorious for consuming inordinate quantities of electricity. The Falkor came in a close second, but used less than half the power to do it — 214 requests per sec per watt, compared to 99 for Skylake and 77 for Broadwell. That has to make it attractive to large parts of the server market.
Comment: I wish the author of this article would write/speak in plain English for us peasants who don’t speak Computerese.
Haven’t personally looked at it, but Windows 10 IoT will run on the raspberry pi 3b/3b+ (Arm CPU’s). And the RP3B/3B+ are quite efficient, so can see that this might be realistic.