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The key element in the CPU market space is volumen. Volume lowers the cost of manufacturing and allows you to spend much more money on R&D as it is amortised ov
by _ph_ 6y ago
The key element in the CPU market space is volumen. Volume lowers the cost of manufacturing and allows you to spend much more money on R&D as it is amortised over more devices. While all the big RISC manufacturers had in principle better architectures than Intel, in the 90ies Intel would kill them one by one due to the insane volumes of the PC market. Only on the server PowerPC and Sparc would survive. This is what forced the PowerPC to Intel transition, Apple had litte choices. I always keep wondering what the outcome would have been, if one of the large RISC platforms would have been made available in more consumer level products, e.g. offering an ATX motherboard for running Linux. Volumes would have been much larger.
Another big factor for Intel was, that, financed by their huge cash flow, they had the most advanced fabs, so competitors often were 1-2 generations behind in the available processes.
But now a few things have changed. First of all, Intel got stuck with their 10nm process, so they are no longer the manufacturing lead. But most importantly, TSMC would pull ahead of Intel and offer their services to everyone in the market. For the first time, AMD had a manufacturing advantage vs. Intel.
And the iPhone happened. Given Apple an almost endless supply of money and a huge volume. Over many years, Apple built up a leading chip-design team. This already paid off big with the iPhone, having by far the most powerful CPUs in the mobile space. This also gave Apple a clear insight into the advantages of really owning the whole platform. Designing software and the cpus together.
Offering desktop-class CPUs is of course a large additional investment - so it is not a trivial step. But if Apple is willing to do it, it should be very interesting and would give hope that they have ambitious plans with the Mac, as it only makes sense if they really push the platform.
- nextos 6y agoThe big problem with switching CPUs is the instruction set. For most people, it doesn't matter. But if you are in some niche domains, it really has an impact. I don't expect a smooth transition of libraries such as BLAS or VMs such as the JVM. You can't simply recompile these. You typically need a human to rewrite SSE, AVX and other tricky low level code so that performance stays competitive.
- afwaller 6y agoThere’s already BLAS and JVM for ARM.
- dragandj 6y agohow fast are tese blas and jvm implementations? what’s the redistribution licenses?
- pjmlp 6y agoDepends on what you are willing to pay. People keep forgetting that OpenJDK is only the reference implementation, and between open source, research and commercial JVMs there are around 10 of them, with support from tiny microcontrollers all the way up to exascale HPC CPUs.
- dragandj 6y ago...and, if I remember well, ARM JVM were generally slow, and require(d) pay-per-every-user that you'd distribute to. I don't know of any fast BLAS/LAPACK implementation for ARM (but I might be wrong). So, for something that works well on x86, and is available for free (in the beer and speech sense) now requires payment, if available at all if I want to support macOS? I guess I'll skip.
- pjmlp 6y agoOpenJDK has ARM support, including vector instructions support. As for the other JVMs, or ART coffee flavour for that matter, they are also quite good, otherwise they would have been long out of business. And I really don't understand why the focus with BLAS/LAPACK, if you want that kind of work make a Linux OEM happy, Apple platforms never cared for HPC work.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoBut how far has Apple's chip diverged from reference ARM designs? And does ARM preserve backwards compatibility as aggressively as Intel? Because I see compatibility as the biggest reason for the dominance of x86 and x64.
- dehrmann 6y ago> And the iPhone happened. Given Apple an almost endless supply of money and a huge volume. Over many years, Apple built up a leading chip-design team. I'm not sure if this is the case, but my read on it was always that Apple bought PA Semi to bootstrap its chip design efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
- _ph_ 6y agoYes, they certainly started with the team from PA Semi. But by now their chip department is a multiple of that.