Geekbench is pretty useless for actual performance comparisons.
When I see someone mentioning geekbench multicore score, I just roll my eyes. Compare to other multicore benchmarks like Cinebench, Blender and most gaming bench they are way off in terms of real life performance. It looks like they bench for multicore for separate threads. You know one thread/job for one core and not one job for more than one core. This is great for mobile devices because this shared processing/tasks is a huge power draw so when it is possible using single core for processing/tasks is a huge power saver. I looks to me Geekbench always favored mobile devices and going to stay that way.
x86 has been the standard for waaayyyyyy too long
Others have come out but they never grab a foothold because you literally have to recompile everything. Some companies have even included their own compilers and optimizers but then you run into other packages and binaries that don't work on anything but x86. One company literally wanted to give us a new 256-core system they were prototyping for a large scale web farm, but we ran into too many package issues that we couldn't convert over to their architecture. And that was with Linux.
Apple succeeded at switching over to ARM though, they’re thriving.
They have more direct control over their software ecosystem though
Absolutely, an iron fist. But that worked out well in this case.
Yup, smart move for sure
They've already switched architectures twice before, so they've got some experience at it.
Apple definitely has a way of doing what is right sometimes, and forcing the industry's hand to move forward.
.... Sometimes. Sometimes this definitely backfires, but not this time.
Yup. Some like DEC even offered on-the-fly binary recompilation from x86 to Alpha in windows, back when windows NT was available on 4 or 5 different processors (PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, x86, and I think eventually Intel's original x86 64-bit replacement.
x86 has evolved so much in the last 40 years that it's still able to keep a foothold for PCs.
I'm curious what's about to happen moving forward as they continue to increase transistor densities and shrink die sizes.
hell, even intel tried to get away from x86 with itanium but failed miserably... and they screwed themselves again by recently dumping the RISC-V pathfinding a year after initiation. i worry about the future of Arc, but maybe they'll pull their head out of their ass on that one if we're lucky.
Funny thing is the 8086 was only supposed to be a stopgap. Their next big thing ended up being a miserable flop, but the 8086 took off and the rest is history.
Should just throw an x86 coprocessor slot on the motherboard, that way we can all embrace RISC-V (or arm or whatever the fuck)
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