Once upon a time, computer processors differed only in whether they were 32-bit or 64-bit, from Intel or AMD. With the development and evolution of smartphones another family of processors has made its way, these are the ARM chips, particularly suitable for devices with batteries because of their low energy consumption.
As ARMs are also becoming powerful today, so much so that Apple could shortly insert an ARM processor on the next Macbooks, it is interesting to understand now what difference there is between Intel and ARM processors, which are the best for PC and smartphone and what features ARMs respect the more classic Intel x86 processors.
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Intel x86 chips have always been the ones that offered the best performance, but also those with the highest power consumption and price.
ARM chips, thanks to their low cost and lower power consumption, have been preferred on tablets and smartphones, although they have always remained far from Intel performance.
Until a few years ago, a cell phone probably had an ARM chip, while a desktop PC certainly had an Intel or AMD chip (which use the same x86 or x64 technology).
Over time, iPhones, iPads and most Android smartphones and tablets have kept ARM chips inside them in order to keep energy consumption low while Intel, which has however worked to lower the energy consumption of its processors, has been forced to abandon the field of cell phones.
Technically, the main difference between Intel ex86 ARM processors is in the instruction set programmed with the Assembly language.
Very briefly and without going into details that even I cannot fully understand, these are the instructions with which the processor is told to perform a series of operations, for example mathematical calculations or data movement.
The x86 chips use CISC instructions, which stands for " Complex Instruction Set Computing ", to perform a certain task with as few Assembly passes as possible, which requires multiple clock cycles.
ARM chips are RISC, which stands for " Reduced Instruction Set Computing ", using a set of instructions that divides each process into extremely small and simple steps, each of which can be performed in a single clock cycle.
Even if nothing has been understood, what is evident is that the RISC chip, with a single clock cycle, needs less memory and, consequently, a smaller number of transients which translates into lower energy consumption.
Conversely, CISC chips can do much more work and perform better.
In more practical terms, in addition to energy consumption, the most important difference between Intel and ARM processors is the incompatibility of applications developed for one or the other platform.
Therefore, if you try to run a program developed for Intel processor on an ARM processor device, this will not work.
For this reason, when you try to manually download an Android app with the APK file, you must be careful that it is the version for ARM processor and not the Intel Atom version (used on a few smartphone models, which Intel abandoned in 2016).
This compatibility issue was also the cause of the failure of computers with Windows 8 RT, which did not support traditional desktop programs.
Now, however, things could also change because ARM processors are much more powerful today and the compatibility problem could be solved.
For example, Chromebook computers exist both ARM and Intel models, with the only difference that if there is an ARM chip you cannot install Linux on Chromebook.
The rumors about a next move to ARM processors for Macbooks are becoming more insistent, also because Apple already uses ARM on iPhone and iPad so adjusting the compatibility of the programs could be simple.
Unfortunately, however, for Windows PCs, at the moment, there is little to be done and ARM processors will not be able to work without a radical change in software design.
It is not at all excluded, however, the release of other Windows 10 ARM tablet models, although many of the limitations that had plagued Windows 8 RT will remain.
