New Apple M1 based computers are getting reviewed by hardware websites. There is no doubt: it is a big slap in the face of their venerable x86 competitors in terms of performance and efficiency.

A revolution

Is it the beginning of a new era in which our smartphones and personal computers would use the same ARM technology, which has powered smartphones since their beginnings?

Smartphones have taken over our world. They are everywhere, and required by more and more operations : validating banking transactions, payments, private and public transportation, etc.

It is a bigger revolution than the personal computer, which brought Internet and computing to mostly everybody.

History repeats

However there is a major difference in how they get there to what happened with personal computers.

At their beginnings many companies, such as Amiga, Apple or Atari, were competing with different operating systems and processor architectures. Platforms were not compatible with each other, you couldn't run an Amstrad program on an Apple computer. Then the PC platform started to take off.

PC strength was that it is an open platform. An operating system and its software, running on a given PC compatible computer, would run on any other PC computer. Today …

ARM processors are everywhere! There are the heart of the smartphones, TVs, Wifi routers, 5G networks, etc.

However in our personal computers, x86 based processor still largely prevail, even if x86 was invented more than fifty years ago. It is also the case in the datacenter world, nicely called cloud nowadays.

Times are changing. Major actors such as Amazon and Apple are embracing ARM to put their dependency on Intel to an end. As ARM only defines the architecture of the CPU, many companies are competing in building ARM powered chips. That allows breaking Intel's near monopoly on personal and datacenter computers.

Are we at the dawn of a new era, where ARM would fully replace the good old x86?

An another precursor has joined the game, as Ezvan.fr was migrated to ARM recently. Faster and cheaper, is there more to ask for?