The laptop market is huge, a huge pie that everyone wants to take a bite of. Intel unquestionably reigns in this market, trying to steal market share from AMD little by little. But, a new competitor is coming, just like ARM and we will explain to you what you can contribute and how it differs from Intel and AMD solutions.
Maybe the name ARM means nothing to you, but you have one of these processors in your hands. This is normal, since they do not manufacture or produce anything, they actually develop processor architectures which they license to Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple and other manufacturers. That’s why it means nothing to you, because they are sold under another name.
What is ARM?
We are not going to go into big definitions or very technical topics, we are going to try to simplify. It’s just a company responsible for designing processors and these drawings “rent” them so that third parties can use them. Companies like Samsung, Qualcomm or Apple use these designs, which can be slightly modified, to suppress their processors.
Something very interesting is that ARM processors are based on a different architecture than the one used by Intel and AMD (which is CISC). If you speak ARM in the RISC Architecturewhich is a system of simplified instructions which makes them more efficient. It makes it possible to develop more compact and efficient processors compared to CISC.
This point has the counterpart that the power is much lower. Although work is underway to create much more powerful solutions, there is one important condition. I especially know use on smartphones and tabletswhere high temperatures cannot be given.
Differences between AMD and Intel and AMD processors
In order not to complicate things too much, we are going to leave you a small comparative table between the two architectures. There are important differences between the two, which are as follows:
| ARM ARCHITECTURE | ARCHITECTURE x86 | |
|---|---|---|
| type of architecture | They are based on RISC, which is a reduced instruction set for computation. | It is based on CISC, which is a complex instruction set. |
| Main Manufacturers | Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and MediaTek | Intel and AMD |
| Energy consumption | Consumption is very low thanks to its design which, at the same time, means less heat generation | The energy consumption is quite high, they are quite inefficient which, at the same time, supposes a strong heat generation |
| Performance | Due to their type of architecture, these are more limited in tasks where the computational load is high. | The performance is very high because it is designed for heavy workloads, especially in parallel loads |
| Main uses | Smartphone and Tablet, Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded systems | Personal computers (desktops and laptops), servers and workstations |
| Segments they fall into | Laptops and Servers | Artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles |
| software compatibility | The amount of software is limited, as most of them are developed for the x86 architecture | The amount of software is enormous, since the vast majority of software is developed for this architecture. |
| Price | They have a very low price due to their “simplicity” in manufacturing and there are more chips than in the x86 architecture | They are quite expensive, as the manufacturing is more important and the number of chips per wafer is much lower than the ARM architecture. |
It must be said that ARM is working on the development of solutions for desktop computers and servers. If there are solutions for servers, they are still far from Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC. Although Amazon AWS already has servers based on ARM chips, but of course the power is not comparable, although they are much more efficient.
Your Introduction to the Laptop Market
We are sure that if we mention the Apple Silicon Processors for the MacBookI’m sure you know them. are processors base in the ARM architecture. But these are not the first laptops to introduce these chips.
The bone first laptops in the use of these processors were the Chromebook. Thislaptop computers They are based on the Google ChromeOS operating system and use these processors. They are very economical systems designed for students, mainly.
We can say that the path has been “sown”. That by 2027-2030 the number of ARM-based laptops will increase significantly makes sense. They are expected to make big leaps in performance in the coming years. It even seems that Intel and ARM are working together on the development of future processors.
Note that Intel has recently become a founder. This means that Intel will manufacture processors for third parties and this would be the “collaboration” between the two companies. It looks like they will be making ARM processors in the future, something they have some experience in. We have to say that the Core 12th Gen and Core 13th Gen have a very similar design to the ARM big.LITTLE architecture.
