yep. right now nvidia rules the pc industry. its profits dwarf intel and amd. if anyone can make a proper arm soc its nvidia. but its too focused on gpus
Er, Nvidia's profits are largely not from PC (you know the P stands for Personal, right?) but enterprise.
Double er, uh, you know they'd been trying that for over a decade and failing spectacularly, right? Their own custom ARM CPUs were wonky and inconsistent in performance, they wanted a lot of money for them, and they were pulling a lot of other shenanigans (pulled a Qualcomm and sued a bunch of the companies trying to force their GPU IP into stuff in exchange for modem IP because Nvidia couldn't do a modem right either - granted it turns out that's pretty tough as Intel and Apple have found out as well, although I think the challenge there is doing so in a way that doesn't infringe on Qualcomm's patents). They managed to sell Nintendo a years old ARM chip that had flopped because of their shenanigans, but Nintendo isn't exactly savvy (which is why it was a huge improvement for them still). Now their ARM designs are focused on commercial and enterprise because that's where their profits are. And there's less scrutiny of their behavior there.
Read Charlie's story at Semiaccurate, he explains the whole stupid mess in plenty of detail.
No thanks. Can you provide an alternative that isn't prone to writing like a trash celebrity gossip blog that actively seeks to stir up rumors with specious (if not likely outright fabricated) information as its alleged source?
If you want something that offers performant ST at reasonable power levels (and while you can clock Zen 4 down, I don't think would do especially well at 5-8W on whole board power with the SoC + DRAM, which is what you want to measure, for ST) and relatively low or very low idle power consumption then right now your option is Apple and its Mx chips of really any variety - even the Pro and Max still have low idle which is impressive.
But at any rate, if you want that in a laptop, and many do - this is a real alternative for Windows, or it would have been, assuming the recent rumor is correct RE: PMICs and ruining efficiency.
That's the appeal. Something that hits 1700-2000 GB5 @ the (incl. RAM, as in like Geekerkawn or an Andrei test) general power range a mobile chip would draw and with great idle but for a real, desktop-class OS.
That seems fundamentally at odds, you want the desktop class but running on mobile class hardware just because. And this isn't really desktop class, its a layer of that attempting to run transcribed ARM software, again just because you want low idle power? Which goes back to the question, what's the point if you can already run that software on other platforms? Even Microsoft has done a good job on their stuff on Android and iOS. There's not a lot of Windows specific software outside of games (which these chips are still lacking at running well) that isn't available or has alternatives on other platforms.
And its not like people even like Windows that much these days. Especially now that Microsoft wants to cram AI Bing into everything. And people have been complaining about privacy/tracking/etc on Windows as well. Plus quality control of updates has been an issue for awhile after they basically deprecated most of the internal bug testing team for that. Oh and let's not forget the revelations of the Microsoft ideas in gaming even, which is basically own everyone.
Now sure, its a chicken-egg situation where in order to get properly designed for ARM software then you've got to have the platform, but they've been supposedly building this platform for what a decade now with nothing really to show for it. I think initially they did because of bridging mobile and desktop back with Windows Phone and Win8 design. They kinda gave up on that but then tried again because of the Apple, and now there seems to be some insistence in order to try and match Apple, but it seems pointless since they'll constantly be at odds due to Microsoft not controlling the hardware and software (which is supposedly the appeal). Further, even Apple is running into limitations and that's going to become more and more of an issue as the ability to keep shrinking chips makes the easy gains harder to come by.
It seems like people want some ARM cores to keep the OS responsive and do simple background tasks, so why not just simply add those to the x86 designs? Or design some x86 cores for that? I've thought this for awhile now, that they should have an ARM SoC or similar running the OS overlay/GUI and the like, while running sandboxed instances of everything else (for security but also for performance where they can put instances into hibernation when not in use so the others can maximize performance and when not needed can be powered down) on hardware that is best for it, or with dedicated co-processing blocks. Arguably Microsoft has been kinda working towards that in a sense, but I don't think people want where that actually leads (which is basically Microsoft blackboxing the base Windows on a dedicated SoC, forcing updates, etc).
Really, seems people want Apple's ARM designs but with more freedom and/or games programmed to use their potential, but also for cheap. You're not going to get all of that no matter what. I think people think Windows on ARM could be that, but I don't think that's realistic based on how Microsoft, or really anyone can operate. There's always going to be a give and take where a company either has to operate like Apple (control), or open but then it'll lack the ability to compete with Apple's tight integration.