But then you end up with the downsides of having both and none of the upsides? Wouldn’t that incur an enormous effort on the software side to make it all possible, so you could run a less efficient chip in the end (practically two instead of one)
Having compatibility to legacy software is a pretty upside. Either you use an application that runs power efficient, maybe the entire operating system uses the power efficient ARM at default and then for compatibility or for faster calculation (games?) the x86 cores could be used. Intel already does two different kind of cores, performance and efficiency cores. And smartphones have something similar too. I imagine this would be expensive and it is not for everyone. And who knows what other cutbacks and drawbacks it would require.
Apple has managed the transition between architectures several times now. They build a distributable binary that can have several versions of the compiled code, one for each supported architecture. You have to compile everything twice, but it works.
But then you end up with the downsides of having both and none of the upsides? Wouldn’t that incur an enormous effort on the software side to make it all possible, so you could run a less efficient chip in the end (practically two instead of one)
Having compatibility to legacy software is a pretty upside. Either you use an application that runs power efficient, maybe the entire operating system uses the power efficient ARM at default and then for compatibility or for faster calculation (games?) the x86 cores could be used. Intel already does two different kind of cores, performance and efficiency cores. And smartphones have something similar too. I imagine this would be expensive and it is not for everyone. And who knows what other cutbacks and drawbacks it would require.
Apple has managed the transition between architectures several times now. They build a distributable binary that can have several versions of the compiled code, one for each supported architecture. You have to compile everything twice, but it works.