You have missed the point entirely. Intel may have better single thread performance but it comes at the cost of power usage and cost. Most users think single thread performance is important but it's not. Right now legacy software makes Intel CPUs attractive, but the future is multiple cores and parallelism, because that uses much less power.
So keep on taking as much as you like about "performance" because it's irrelevant. Power and price are much more important. The thing you call "performance" will be fixed in software going forward.
The hell you say. Let's do some math for a second...
1 core = 10 watts
1 core completes a process in 10 seconds. 10x10 That's 100 joules of energy, give or take.
Now take two of those same cores working on that same process in a multithreaded environment. Assuming each is able to an equal amount of work, it'd take 5 seconds for them both to do.
2 cores = 20 watts
Process = 5 seconds.
= 100 joules
Or a quad core configuration...
4 cores = 40 watts
Process = 2.5 seconds
= 100 joules.
You're completing the task faster, which will give you power saving over time, but this assumes one thing that rarely, rarely, RARELY ever happens in the real world...
...that each added core gives you an exponential increase in performance. Parallel processes are very difficult to write, and most applications have absolutely no need for it, with each thread added giving you slim gains at the cost of exponentially increased overhead.
So yeah, single thread performance is still, and always will be very important. A 5w core that takes three times as long to perform a process is going to give you a net loss in battery life compared our 10w, despite being lower powered. ARM chips aren't so much better than Intels that they can do considerably more with considerably less. I'd say the absolute best case scenario is that they're roughly average, with a 5w ARM chip doing a process in 20 seconds that a 10w Intel chip can do in 10.
So you're wrong.
