Why Apple’s M1 chip will make your PC games run faster

While I’d say the title sucks, this was a surprisingly nice article.

For me the attraction of ARM has generally been the power efficiency rather than the raw performance. Intel has had to squeeze it’s ass down the don’t chainsaw the battery life to death until you’re actually under load path. Something they’ve done pretty well; modern x86 processors tend to last a long ass time until you start demanding the heavy duty performance. A fair trade if you want a laptop with both practical battery life and serious performance. Meanwhile ARM processors I’ve used have put x86 to shame in terms of endurance, and they’ve had to squeeze their ass down the track of delivering heavy duty performance.

Personally, I’m not highly attached to x86. My focus on Unix systems means my cart is hitched to the source compatibility wagon. Where PCs have long tended to favor the ease of running someone else’s compiled binaries ad nauseum. I’ve been hoping that Microsoft’s greater push at Windows on ARM will eventually shove the PC world away from a single ISA family.

From the prospect of Linux, my experience has best been summarized as user space is just honky dory, and damn you graphic drivers. That is to say, things like hardware accelerated rendering and decoding have been more problematic, but for most things it still amounts to apt-get and move on.