M1’s efficiency/thermals performance comes from having hardware-accelerated core system libraries.

Imagine that you made an FPGA do x86 work, and then you wanted to optimize libopenssl, or libgl, or libc. Would you restrict yourself to only modifying the source code of the libraries but not the FPGA, or would you modify the processor to take advantage of new capabilities?

For made-up example, when the iPhone 27 comes out, it won’t support booting on iOS 26 or earlier, because the drivers necessary to light it up aren’t yet published; and, similarly, it can have 3% less battery weight because they optimized the display controller to DMA more efficiently through changes to its M6 processor and the XNU/Darwin 26 DisplayController dylib.

Neither Linux, Windows, nor Intel have shown any capability to plan and execute such a strategy outside of video codecs and network I/O cards. GPU hardware acceleration is tightly controlled and defended by AMD and Nvidia who want nothing to do with any shared strategy, and neither Microsoft nor Linux generally have shown any interest whatsoever in hardware-accelerating the core system to date — though one could theorize that the Xbox is exempt from that, especially given the Proton chip.

I imagine Valve will eventually do this, most likely working with AMD to get custom silicon that implements custom hardware accelerations inside the Linux kernel that are both open source for anyone to use, and utterly useless since their correct operation hinges on custom silicon. I suspect Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony already do this with their gaming consoles, but I can’t offer any certainty on this paragraph of speculation.

x86 isn’t able to keep up because x86 isn’t updated annually across software and hardware alike. M1 is what x86 could have been if it was versioned and updated without backwards compatibility as often as Arm was. it would be like saying “Intel’s 2026 processors all ship with AVX-1024 and hardware-accelerated DMA, and the OS kernel (and apps that want the full performance gains) must be compiled for its new ABI to boot on it”. The wreckage across the x86 ecosystem would be immense, and Microsoft would boycott them outright to try and protect itself from having to work harder to keep up — just like Adobe did with Apple M1, at least until their userbase starting canceling subscriptions en masse.

That’s why there are so many Arm Linux architectures: for Arm, this is just a fact of everyday life, and that’s what gave the M1 such a leg up in x86: not having to support anything older than your release date means you can focus on the sort of boring incremental optimizations that wouldn’t be permissible in a “must run assembly code written twenty years ago” environment assumed by Lin/Win today.