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I can buy AMD or Intel CPUs, AMD/Intel/NVidia GPUs, a vast array of motherboards and cards, storage and networking pretty much off the shelf, throw Windows or L

I can buy AMD or Intel CPUs, AMD/Intel/NVidia GPUs, a vast array of motherboards and cards, storage and networking pretty much off the shelf, throw Windows or Linux standard builds on it and expect it to work great and perform great. Try doing that with ARM and tell me under what limited circumstances would you buy ARM laptop/desktop/workstation. CPUs are at a stage where AMD and Intel are doing great in non battery constrained setups and with battery constraints you will only get better battery life if you don't make the CPUs sweat. In server/workstation design I would expect AMD and Intel to beat the crap out of ARM anything just because how much optimized they are in that space owing to massive use. So except for frothing at mouth idiots that keep droning about this there isn't much value for the normal customer in buying ARM anything and lose on all fronts - software availability, build flexibility, compatible hardware availability and even performance for many cases. (Spare me teh Geekbench please.) It does make sense for Apple to market their own CPUs to people who are into that type of thing - it's more control, more money and least dependence for Apple - all round win for them if they can pull it off. But it's not going to be easy unless they have something that is hugely better and overcomes at least some of the disadvantages.

weare138 6y ago
>I can buy AMD or Intel CPUs, AMD/Intel/NVidia GPUs, a vast array of motherboards and cards, storage and networking pretty much off the shelf, throw Windows or Linux standard builds on it and expect it to work great and perform great. I think this might be one of the motivations for Apple to switch to it's own CPUs instead of just switching to a different x86-64 CPU like AMD's Ryzen. Apple would be able to lock MacOS to the hardware like iOS and the iPhone.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Absolutely it is but it's not just to shut down the few hackintosh users although that'd be an welcome consequence. It's only because they still have not figured out how the locked down macOS will work that they have not announced anything so far. Download apps only from Mac App Store, make it easy for people 100% in Apple ecosystem to do what they need to do (XCode, browsing, store apps, multi tasking) and they're good to go. They already charge premium for the hardware - not having to pay Intel will fatten the margins, with app store revenue and maybe banning 3rd party browsing engines they can get exactly what they have always wanted and so long as they provide people with some macOS features - terminal access (even if controlled) and multitasking etc. - people in the Apple ecosystem aren't going to care. Of course it maybe gradual and it maybe not so restrictive - they may allow 3rd party app installations and make it harder like they have already done in a way.
mpweiher 6y ago
> I would expect AMD and Intel to beat the crap out of ARM anything Anandtech: "This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer " https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... All at, as far as I can tell, a small fraction of the power consumption / thermal load. So imagine a featherweight 12" MacBook with roughly the CPU performance of a much larger/heavier Intel laptop and the same or better battery life.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Ugh. Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate, an Intel and AMD CPU with 45+w at their disposal and thermal headroom will look very different with server and workstation workloads if it was possible to run meaningful server/workstation benchmarks against Apple's CPUs that is - and the full AT comment is - "This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least." So yeah your comment is business as usual for Apple fan - taking comments and benchmarks out of context, comparing apples to oranges and just being generally dense to support some narrative. I.E. Nothing closer to the reality of having ARM CPUs beat AMD or Intel if I wanted to build a server or workstation or even a big powerful laptop with not optimized for email and browsing battery life.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    > Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate SPEC doesn’t agree with your characterization of their benchmark. “The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is SPEC's industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler.” https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ Neither does Wikipedia: “SPECint is a computer benchmark specification for CPU integer processing power. It is maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECint is the integer performance testing component of the SPEC test suite” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint Nothing about energy efficiency, and notice the definite article “the” in front of “integer performance testing component”. So SPECint tests general compute tasks, such as compiling, XML processing and running Perl programs. Of course you can combine the perf measurements of SPECint with power consumption measurements to arrive at an efficiency measure, if you so choose. The other benchmark was SPECfp, which focuses on scientific computing tasks such fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry etc. So tasks you are unlikely to perform on...your iPhone. The A13 still does well, but not as well as on integer, presumably because Apple just didn’t focus on putting idle resources on their iPhone chip. Increasing FP performance when you have great integer performance is straightforward, afaik: just add more FPU resources.

weare138 6y ago

>I can buy AMD or Intel CPUs, AMD/Intel/NVidia GPUs, a vast array of motherboards and cards, storage and networking pretty much off the shelf, throw Windows or Linux standard builds on it and expect it to work great and perform great. I think this might be one of the motivations for Apple to switch to it's own CPUs instead of just switching to a different x86-64 CPU like AMD's Ryzen. Apple would be able to lock MacOS to the hardware like iOS and the iPhone.

blinkingled 6y ago
Absolutely it is but it's not just to shut down the few hackintosh users although that'd be an welcome consequence. It's only because they still have not figured out how the locked down macOS will work that they have not announced anything so far. Download apps only from Mac App Store, make it easy for people 100% in Apple ecosystem to do what they need to do (XCode, browsing, store apps, multi tasking) and they're good to go. They already charge premium for the hardware - not having to pay Intel will fatten the margins, with app store revenue and maybe banning 3rd party browsing engines they can get exactly what they have always wanted and so long as they provide people with some macOS features - terminal access (even if controlled) and multitasking etc. - people in the Apple ecosystem aren't going to care. Of course it maybe gradual and it maybe not so restrictive - they may allow 3rd party app installations and make it harder like they have already done in a way.

mpweiher 6y ago

> I would expect AMD and Intel to beat the crap out of ARM anything Anandtech: "This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer " https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... All at, as far as I can tell, a small fraction of the power consumption / thermal load. So imagine a featherweight 12" MacBook with roughly the CPU performance of a much larger/heavier Intel laptop and the same or better battery life.

blinkingled 6y ago
Ugh. Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate, an Intel and AMD CPU with 45+w at their disposal and thermal headroom will look very different with server and workstation workloads if it was possible to run meaningful server/workstation benchmarks against Apple's CPUs that is - and the full AT comment is - "This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least." So yeah your comment is business as usual for Apple fan - taking comments and benchmarks out of context, comparing apples to oranges and just being generally dense to support some narrative. I.E. Nothing closer to the reality of having ARM CPUs beat AMD or Intel if I wanted to build a server or workstation or even a big powerful laptop with not optimized for email and browsing battery life.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  > Spec2006 is energy efficiency estimate SPEC doesn’t agree with your characterization of their benchmark. “The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is SPEC's industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler.” https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ Neither does Wikipedia: “SPECint is a computer benchmark specification for CPU integer processing power. It is maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECint is the integer performance testing component of the SPEC test suite” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint Nothing about energy efficiency, and notice the definite article “the” in front of “integer performance testing component”. So SPECint tests general compute tasks, such as compiling, XML processing and running Perl programs. Of course you can combine the perf measurements of SPECint with power consumption measurements to arrive at an efficiency measure, if you so choose. The other benchmark was SPECfp, which focuses on scientific computing tasks such fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry etc. So tasks you are unlikely to perform on...your iPhone. The A13 still does well, but not as well as on integer, presumably because Apple just didn’t focus on putting idle resources on their iPhone chip. Increasing FP performance when you have great integer performance is straightforward, afaik: just add more FPU resources.