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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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ARM isn't better than x86 though. If you're talking about Apple's M-series chips, the most important difference is the manufacturing process (Apple buys up all of the next gen production capacity), not the instruction set architecture.
A better example is EVs vs gas engines for around town usage, EVs require less maintenance, are cheaper to fuel, and have more torque (more fun to drive). Likewise, Rust has more safety guarantees, nicer idioms, and nifty modern features, and if C++ and Rust were both released today, there'd be almost no reason to prefer C++.
ARM is very very obviously superior to x86. You won't be able to find anyone informed that will say otherwise.
Probably the biggest way it is better is that instructions are always 2 or 4 bytes which makes wide decoders a lot easier.
The decoder isn't your bottleneck, it's a pretty insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things. We could all be using x86 in our wearables and whatnot if Intel didn't sit on their hands while ARM got big under their noses.
I personally prefer ARM to x86, but it's not for any technical merit of the ISA, I just happen to like simple things. I don't interface with the CPU directly anyway, so it's moot, and I'd probably like RISC-V better as well if I had one laying around despite it being worse as an actual product right now (fewer optimizations, nobody is building it on the latest nodes, etc).
What matters the most to me is actual products. The M-series of chips are fantastic, as are modern AMD CPUs. I'd prefer the former for general use because of the node it's produced on, and I'd prefer the latter for computation and gaming because they're well designed for it. From a product standpoint, I only care about ARM vs x86 for software compatibility, and then the specific iteration of the ISA becomes important.