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Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel

• riffic 6y ago
  Cool, I really hope this means people will stop saying "Wintel" now, especially in places like job descriptions (where it just looks stupid.)
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    But now “Wintel” becomes a descriptive term that isn't synonymous with “Windows”, and therefore more, rather than less, useful.
  • amelius 6y ago
    Yes, and maybe we can start calling Apple computers PCs (Personal Computers), which is what they are. At least they seem more personal than my multiuser Linux desktop system.
    • macintux 6y ago
      A few commentators have noted that it’s unfortunate we renamed microcomputers “personal computers” because clearly smartphones are much more personal.
      • Gibbon1 6y ago
        Personal except for that fact that you really own your smart phone in name only. Where you owned a 1980's personal computer lock stock and barrel.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Zenst 6y ago
  Interesting read and the aspect that we may see ARM desktops become more common, based upon Microsoft making more an effort for their ARM support is also credible - only recently saw Windows 10 running natively upon a Raspberry Pi4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTT8GlsqXs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTT8GlsqXs8 Equally the Linux desktop offering have advanced and by that, more palatable for the average user for a desktop. Certainly when it comes to most desktops in business, something that can open word and email and odd spreadsheet and powerpoint, that's the bulk of usage right there. Small lower power usage alternative like Rpi4 would do those jobs fine as for most users. So Apple may actually shift that cultural hurdle that prevails in business, maybe.
  • ThatPlayer 6y ago
    There's already the Microsoft Surface Pro X that uses ARM. It also has a translation layer of some sort like Rosetta that allows you to run x86 (but not x86_64) Windows programs on it.
• nkingsy 6y ago
  Earlier discussions assumed some amount of cloud processing to cover for less powerful chips. Is that not the case?
  • m0xte 6y ago
    Not needed now. My A12 equipped iPad has considerably more grunt than my i7 intel laptop.
    • gruez 6y ago
      >My A12 equipped iPad has considerably more grunt than my i7 intel laptop. I know this meme gets brought up a lot, but has this claim been backed up by benchmarks that's not geekbench?
      • my123 6y ago
        Yes, the arm Mac developer transition kit which runs a much wider variety of software with the same chip (including x86 SW) answered that. At IDA Pro, the DTK is actually faster than a 16 inch MBP in practice... (and that's with an x86_64 copy of IDA... as an arm64 one doesn't exist yet, workload being tested was loading an iOS kernelcache)
      • rayiner 6y ago
        Yes, SPEC, which is a real world suite of applications, like GCC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...
        • gruez 6y ago
          I was too lazy to collate the numbers together, so I found this comparison chart https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/9lup3m/iphone_xs_spec_2006_integer_performance_compared/e79kikr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/9lup3m/iphone_xs_sp.... The A12 looks faster in some cases, but not by much overall. It definitely doesn't support the claim that it has "considerably more grunt" than an i7.
• nathantotten 6y ago
  Longer term this will also likely accelerate servers running on ARM. Writing software on ARM laptops that are deployed to production servers running on x86 servers will start to cause a host of new challenges. The switch to running ARM in production will have many advantages for developers and will likely be very attractive to cloud providers (AWS, Azure) as the costs of electricity for these servers may be significantly less.
  • krrrh 6y ago
    The transition to ARM at AWS appears to be well underway. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    If there was an actual energy efficiency advantage -- i.e. less power consumed for the same amount of work -- Google would already be 100% on ARM. Why do you think they would leave that on the table? I realize the situation changes every time a new CPU comes out, but I have never personally seen a real workload where ARM won on energy efficiency and had reasonable performance. Tests like [1] and [2] showing x86 having an orders-of-magnitude lead on database performance vs. AWS Gravitron2 should give you serious pause. 1: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI-GRAVITON200&sha=c954e23&p=2 https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI-GRAVITON... 2: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI-GRAVITON200&sha=0c9b11b&p=2 https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI-GRAVITON... If you're wondering why ARM needs to have both competitive performance and energy efficiency, see Urs Holzle's comments on wimpy vs. brawny[3]. 3: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36448.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
    • nojito 6y ago
      >Google would already be 100% on ARM Google is laggard when it comes to server tech. Amazon and others have leapfrogged them.
      • 6y ago
• jeffbee 6y ago
  From the guy who thought the AT&T Hobbit was going to take over the industry.
  • epx 6y ago
    Keep prophetizing, one day you nail it.
• whalesalad 6y ago
  In the meantime, can anyone recommend a desktop workstation-like device to start seriously playing around with daily driving ARM? Something more powerful than an rpi4 but with good open source support.
  • pedrocr 6y ago
    Pine64 is working on a great set of devices: https://www.pine64.org/ https://www.pine64.org/ For the workstation they don't have anything much above a RPi4 but they have an interesting MiniITX form factor for a 7-way cluster and are even working on an IP camera. Really cool set of devices.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Probably something like this: https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIwOeM8PHJ6gIVGeN3Ch1JUwsvEAAYASAAEgJBafD_BwE https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works... Multicore benchmarks say it is around the performance of 3 year old desktop chips. Not bad but the single core performance is probably awful. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HoneyComb-LX2K-Sep-Perf https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HoneyCom...
• m12k 6y ago
  Does anyone know if Microsoft has (or is working on) something similar to Apple's Rosetta emulation system? It seems to me this is the critical component that allows a transition to ARM to actually go forward without having to wait for every last developer to port their applications over.
  • LeoPanthera 6y ago
    This already exists in an early stage, ARM Windows can run 32-bit Intel binaries. Extending that to 64-bit binaries is the obvious next step.
    • my123 6y ago
      It's coming: https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/pull/556/commits/6b957fffd07feb1019f6257b0d36f537611ab176 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/pull/556/commits/6b957...
      • monocasa 6y ago
        I'm not sure what I'm looking at there; can you add a bit of context?
        • my123 6y ago
          It's adding the linker flags for the ARM64EC architecture in Windows... which represents the x86_64 on arm64 execution mode to the WinRT C++ stub generator.
  • lunixbochs 6y ago
    The ARM Surface Pro X took a sort of opposite approach to Apple in several ways. Rosetta: usually recompiles once ahead of time, only supports 64-bit Microsoft: seems to recompile on the fly, only supports 32-bit Also notable is the fact that the leaked benchmarks show the A12Z is generally faster when emulating an Intel CPU with Rosetta 2, than the Surface Pro X is when running natively, and the A12Z isn’t even Apple’s real desktop cpu, it’s just what they had on hand from the iPad (!)
• sradman 6y ago
  > This leaves Intel with one path: if you can’t beat them, join them. Intel will re-take an ARM license (it sold its ARM-based XScale business to Marvell in 2006) and come up with a competitive ARM SoC offering for PC OEMs. I find this path unlikely and it depends on Intel's foundries not falling further behind TSMC. The most likely path is to compete on price-per-peformance (i.e. slash prices and internal costs) rather than performance-per-watt.
  • baybal2 6y ago
    What this discussion lacks is the acknowledgement of just how titanic Intel is. It is pretty much the biggest semiconductor company out there, focusing solely on 3-4 main product lines. The most surprising is them under-performing so much while them having resources comparable to the next few competitors combined. It is not only their fabs that got an arrow to the knee with 10nm. Their newest microarchitectures deliver tiny IPC gains in comparison to AMDs products even on comparable nodes, while having significantly more transistors per core. Tiger Lake throws 40-45% more transistors, and only gets 10% IPC gain at max, and the rest of performance gains come from better thermals.
    • starfallg 6y ago
      I think you have some salient points there. A few years down the line, Intel will look back and thank AMD for their decision to spin off GF and go with TSMC with Zen 2. EYPC and Ryzen are keeping the x86 arch relevant until Intel is able to catch up on their next-gen process nodes. AMD may be eating Intel's market share for lunch in a few markets, but in the long term keep ARM far enough away for it to be a niche player, both in the server space and the laptop space.
    • scarface74 6y ago
      There were a grand total of 250 Million PC sold last year and that includes around 20 million Macs. That also includes PCs with AMD processors. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-01-13-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-grew-2-point-3-percent-in-4q19-and-point-6-percent-for-the-year https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-01-1... Apple alone sold more ARM based iPhones and iPads than that last year at higher profit margins. Not to mention all of the ARM based chips used for the Watch, Airpods, Apple TV’s, and HomePods.
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  The last time I played around with Visual Studio, I vaguely remember some options for compiling for ARM. No surprises if Windows eventually moves to ARM. (And if servers do too.)
  • dweekly 6y ago
    Microsoft's Surface device runs Windows on ARM, and has for a while.
    • my123 6y ago
      Note that devices with Windows on Arm (64-bit) shipped from third-party OEMs first, with the Asus NovaGo being available in late 2017 for example.
  • cannam 6y ago
    Microsoft have released at least two separate generations of ARM devices running desktop Windows (Surface with Windows RT back in 2012, and Surface Pro X more recently), so they're definitely up for it, even if the market hasn't been yet.
  • kyriakos 6y ago
    Windows is already running on ARM and in an actual production model that's been on the market for a while. Its just that Apple does a lot better with marketing and makes a much bigger deal of these things. Microsoft on the other hand has always been really bad at marketing.
    • gwbas1c 6y ago
      > Its just that Apple does a lot better with marketing and makes a much bigger deal of these things. Microsoft on the other hand has always been really bad at marketing. It's more complicated than that: It's all about understanding disruptive technology. Arm is disrupting x86 / x64. The thing with disruptive technology is that being ahead of the curve is just as bad as being behind the curve. Microsoft has no benefit from "pushing" Arm, all they need to do is make sure that Windows is ready to run on Arm when someone's ready to sell an Arm desktop computer. But, Apple, as a hardware company, needs to be much more proactive about where the market is going and actively switch its hardware. If this means that Microsoft's first major Arm market for Windows are VMs on Apple, so be it. The rest of the PC makers will switch or be disrupted.
• bilal4hmed 6y ago
  is there a possibility that Apple starts gaining such a lead that none of the others are able to catch up. Could we all be running Apple hardware in say 7 years because the rest never could match the performance of Apple silicon, due to the late start? like what are the odds of qualcomm today matching the A12 in 5 years even?
  • kyriakos 6y ago
    Highly doubt it - even though apple is a giant you can't underestimate everyone else who are also massive giants. Qualcomm until now may had no real reason to step out of its incremental performance increases with every generation since almost everyone on Android camp uses its SoC's for their flagships anyway. Similar to how Intel has been slowly pushing small gradual upgrades to their to CPU's until AMD managed to do something better and now we see Intel pushing more cores than before to catch up.
    • bilal4hmed 6y ago
      Im truly ignorant on this. Who is Qualcomms competition ? given that all android phones are running just their chips, whats their incentive to catch up to Apple when they can just waddle along their current path.
      • kyriakos 6y ago
        Apple taking over the arm laptop market is now their competition. Qualcomm was to gain big if Windows on ARM took off and chewed off a part of the x86 marketshare, but as the author of the parent comment suggested there's a chance apple could leapfrog everyone and they won't be able to catch up meaning less windows devices. qualcomm would be at loss.
        • bilal4hmed 6y ago
          thank you for explaining. Im also the original commentator lol. I still worry about us entering in to a monoculture.
• jonplackett 6y ago
  How much of the improved efficiency is really ARM vs Intel and how much is that the new Apple silicon will now be TWO cycles ahead of Intel in miniaturisation. That must count for something too.
  • tux1968 6y ago
    The point is not that Intel can't do it, it's that Intel hasn't done it.
    • jonplackett 6y ago
      It kinda seems like they also can’t.
  • jcheng 6y ago
    You can look at AMD CPUs if you want an apples-to-apples comparison, as theirs are on the same TSMC nodes as Apple.
    • GeekyBear 6y ago
      AMD is going to go with an enhanced version of TSMC's 7nm process for their next round of CPUs. Apple will be using TSMC's new 5nm process for the first version of it's laptop class chips, so they will have a process node advantage in the upcoming generation.
      • jonplackett 6y ago
        I guess we could compare AMD's new chips with Apple's old ones and see how that looks.
        • GeekyBear 6y ago
          The A13 in Apple's iPhone is on the same TSMC process node as AMD's current chiplets and compares quite favorably despite a greatly reduced power budget and a lack of active cooling. >Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind. 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...
• LaSombra 6y ago
  So, because Apple is moving their general computing devices to ARM-based CPU/GPU, the whole world is going to do the same, Intel will die and world peace will be achieved? Hold your horses. No one even knows how it will perform, how Rosetta 2 will perform and if Intel is not going to hit back as it did with Qualcomm and Microsoft. Seeing is believing, after all.
  • valuearb 6y ago
    It’s already clear they will be significantly faster, mobile battery life will be significantly longer, and Apple Silicon will be significantly cheaper than I86 processors. The A12 and A13 already demonstrate this in much tighter thermal packaging than MacBooks or iMacs, and they use last generation process size. And Rosetta 2 has already been benchmarked, and the results were amazing even on a two year old iPad processor. Intel has nothing to hit back with.
  • UnbugMe 6y ago
    A few people have already published results of Geekbench 4 of the DTK and the performance is impressive already, specially considering that the DTK is using a 2-year old chip, in an emulated environment. The chances that Intel will hit back is fairly small. In the last several years we have seen a gigantic brain-leak from the company, and is unlikely that they'll keep being reference for performance for much longer.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• valuearb 6y ago
  To add to JLGs points, a top of the line 2020 MacBook Air that sells for $1,450 https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-early-2020-intel-core-i7-1060ng7-1-2-ghz-4-cores https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-early-2020-in... Is significantly slower than a $400 iPhone SE in single core, and only slightly faster in Multi-core. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-se-2nd-generation https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-se-2nd-gene... The entry level $900 MacBook Air is 30% slower in single and multi-core than an SE: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-early-2020-intel-core-i3-1000ng4-1-1-ghz-2-cores https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-early-2020-in... Now imagine next years MacBook Airs running the next generation A14 processors on a 5 nm process instead of 7 nm, with much more thermal head room than a phone, with far faster integrated GPUs than Intels, and with functionality like T2 integrated in the SOC. And using processors that are at least $100 cheaper. It’s mind boggling to think of how much faster they will be, how much longer their battery life will be, and that they likely will be even cheaper.
  • my123 6y ago
    With the R&D costs involved, there's no way that Apple does this to save costs. It makes even less sense financially considering that unless Apple is planning to make Macs with much higher volumes than before... (which would be a bold bet)
    • Zenst 6y ago
      Those R&D costs are a bit shared with their whole ecosystem, so whilst some features for a desktop based version of the CPU would not be viable on a phone today or an iPad, down the line they may will filter in. So they kinda already have the volume to cover R&D costs thanks to how well their phones and tablets have sold.
    • baybal2 6y ago
      No, I don't think so. Intel squeezes Apple dry on CPU pricing. Intel squeezes everybody dry. There is no client big enough for them to loose.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  I have been using an iPad for over 10 years, am a huge fan. But it’s disingenuous to compare benchmarks for single threaded performance between the ipad and macbook. I can’t do any ‘very’ serious productivity work on the ipad that requires multiple apps, period. (try moving a photo between multiple photo-editing apps, ha.) I hope that is just a ‘feature’ of iOS, or else macOS will suffer greatly as people leave it for more productivity based OS’s.
  • matthewmacleod 6y ago
    This is not at all disingenuous. The fact that the environment in an iPad is restrictive versus a general-purpose computer is not particularly related to the performance of the processor powering each. There is no reason to think that (when the environment allows it) the performance of more “serious” apps will not be equivalent.
• ksec 6y ago
  > Furthermore, Apple doesn’t buy the expensive Xeon chips, used in millions of Cloud servers, that represent a growing proportion of Intel’s revenue. While Apple is not traditionally considered a HyperScaler ( Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Alibaba etc ), their own Datacenter is still pretty big. You would be using it when you are using Siri and iCloud. And they use Xeon. >Margins will inevitably suffer as the ARM-based SoC field is filled with sharp competitors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, sure to be joined by arch-enemy AMD and others, all ushering in a new era of PCs. That is the problem. It isn't ARM vs x86. Nor Intel's Fab vs TSMC ( Although they are part of the equation ). It is their Margin. Intel is not willing to risk their current healthy margin. And there is nothing inherently cheaper with ARM design. Intel could have lower their x86 Chip with less Margin to compete. In that case the compatibility of x86 with slightly higher premium will be able to fence off any ARM attack into PC market. In the short term everything will still be fine for Intel. The market moves very slowly unless you are Apple which control everything in their stack. But in the long term the unit economics of x86 chip with current Intel's margin stand zero chance to compete. Unless Intel's Fab does some miracle and suddenly leap ahead of TSMC by a generation. Which as far as I can see there is zero chance happening in the next 5 years. Further out we will have to wait and see. That is of course assuming the cost of running those Fab and their Tech being equal. Which we know that isn't the case. And I haven't even mention AWS Graviton 2. I would not be surprised if Graviton 3 is already sampling.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    PC market is minuscule compared to mobile, stagnating , slowly declining and has a long refresh cycle. Not exactly a market you want to be in and be excluded from the larger market. Even worse for Intel, most computers over $1000 are Macs leaving Intel with the low end.
    • Reelin 6y ago
      > PC market is minuscule compared to mobile, stagnating , slowly declining and has a long refresh cycle. Modern phones have 2+ GB RAM and an SoC that could easily be used in a tablet or laptop (think low end Chromebook). The PinePhone literally runs mainline Linux. Mobile is PC, it's only the physical form factor (and associated power usage constraints) that differ.
• Animats 6y ago
  This is very bad for the US semiconductor industry. Intel is the only US company with state of the art fabs in the US.[1] (Global Foundries 14nm fab in East Fishkill, NY, formerly an IBM fab, maybe. It's owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and is being sold to ON Semiconductor.) Intel is profitable because they have high margins on x86 family parts. That margin will now start to drop as Intel faces competition from commodity ARM processors. The US already lost the DRAM industry, the disk industry, the display panel industry, most of the small component industry, and the consumer electronics industry. In ten years, the US won't be able to make electronics in volume. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
  • Traster 6y ago
    FYI, TSMC has announced plans to build a 5nm fab in Arizona: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factor...
    • modeless 6y ago
      It's a small fab compared to the ones in Taiwan and by the time it's completed 5nm won't be their latest process.
      • baybal2 6y ago
        And there is no guarantee that it will ever be, if the promised subsidies will not materialise.
        • monocasa 6y ago
          It probably will materialize. Reading between the lines, the DoD wants close to leading edge fabs on US soil where they can better (in their minds) verify the physical security of what's being manufactured, and is willing to pay absurd amounts of money to make that happen.
• deleted 6y ago
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• sys_64738 6y ago
  This is wishful thinking. ARM was invented during the 1980s so is 'old' too. Intel tried to move from x86 with Titanium but that failed and AMD released the x64 extensions eventually causing Intel to put the full effort into those extensions too. Intel is moving to hybrid CPUs with Lakefield so the mixture of energy efficient and high powered isn't restricted to ARM anymore. Most people in business simply won't mix x86 and ARM binaries on Windows so they're going to be one field or the other. Those same people want to run those Windows tools at home too. ARM Macs will be a niche product for those looking to spend excessively.
  • valuearb 6y ago
    Except Intel is a half decade behind in process. Rosetta2 will run all the i86 binaries as fast as on Intel at same price points. Microsoft will have to double down on ARM for Surface to avoid Windows laptops becoming entirely uncompetitive.
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • nordsieck 6y ago
    > This is wishful thinking. ... Most people in business simply won't mix x86 and ARM binaries on Windows so they're going to be one field or the other. Those same people want to run those Windows tools at home too. ARM Macs will be a niche product for those looking to spend excessively. I think this ignores the historical reasons for x86 success. Intel made their bones by crushing Unix boxes and mainframes with high volume x86 parts. PC CPUs were the highest volume microprocessor for decades, and they leveraged that into making high performance, yet low cost server and workstations parts to buff up their margins. Well, the tables have turned - ARM is far, far higher volume than x86 due to its ubiquitous use in smart phones. And ARM is going to do to Intel what Intel did to IBM, Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, etc. The problem is the same as it always has been: NRE (fixed costs) for new chips climbs ever higher and needs to be offset by even more volume to be acceptable to consumers. ARM won that game in 2007. It's just taken this long before market forces and product maturity have forced Intel's hand. To be fair, Intel may have staved off the inevitable for a few years without their well publicized 10nm production stall.
• vsskanth 6y ago
  On a related note, why aren't Qualcomm arm chips performing as well on benchmarks ?
  • skavi 6y ago
    They just aren't as good[0]. [0]: 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...
  • saati 6y ago
    Why isn't my 386 performing as well on benchmarks?
• dmitshur 6y ago
  Hmm, this was posted 1 hour ago, 49 points, 84 comments, and it already moved down to 31st slot, off of front page (from somewhere in the top 15 just 5-10 minutes ago). That seems surprisingly fast. I noticed because I wanted to come back to read more comments and had a hard time finding it.
  • oarsinsync 6y ago
    Comments outnumbering votes is one of the heuristics used to determine if a thread is likely to be toxic rather than promoting good discourse, so that may be what dampened this off the front page.
    • dmitshur 6y ago
      I see, thanks for an explanation.
• shantara 6y ago
  One thing people prophetizing about Apple ARM transition changing the industry tend to forget about: Apple is not a leader, but actually a latecomer in the ARM space. macOS is the last major OS getting ARM support. iOS and Android have been built with ARM support from the very beginning. The first commits working on ARM support for Linux have been made more than a decade ago. The first publicly released Windows on ARM hardware came out in 2012, and MS has undoubtedly have been working on it for years before the commercial release. If anything would trigger an ARM transition on a massive scale, it would likely be the work invested in the high performance ARM hardware by the companies such as Amazon and Fujitsu.
  • formerly_proven 6y ago
    Linux has supported ARM since the late 90s, actually. edit, source: https://github.com/mpe/linux-fullhistory/commit/3c2a0eb7ba89feae72613951f98baf5a48b156c3 https://github.com/mpe/linux-fullhistory/commit/3c2a0eb7ba89... ("initial ARM support", Linux 2.1.80, 20.1.1998)
  • mjw1007 6y ago
    As far as I know, the first commits working on ARM support for Linux were in 1994, which is quite a lot more than a decade ago. Debian has had an ARM port since 2000.
  • empath75 6y ago
    iOS is Apple, too, you know.
  • cwp 6y ago
    Uh, you know that Apple makes iOS too, right?
  • tpxl 6y ago
    Windows has and will run on x86/ARM Linux has and will run on x86/ARM MacOS has run on x86, and will run on ARM. People have a choice with the first two, not the third. This is why Apple going forward with this is a big deal.
  • scarface74 6y ago
• partiallypro 6y ago
  Intel has been behind before, and eventually the surges ahead. I honestly think that is going to happen yet again. For the next 5 years Apple's silicon might be the top, but in 10 years? I'm not so sure.
  • formerly_proven 6y ago
    Apple has yet to show any silicon that scales significantly above laptop CPUs, which is not trivial. Their achievement as a from-scratch, independent vendor is surely impressive, but let's keep in mind that all performance comparisons between the architectures so far are based on a single benchmark.
    • perardi 6y ago
      As someone who needs some decent Mac firepower, it does concern me a bit that we don’t really know if Apple can make a good high TDP processor, and everything you need to support that, like a good GPU. But…does that matter all that much to Apple? They seemingly have made a recommitment as of late to the pro and prosumer market (see: Mac Pro), but for a long time there, they sold laptop Macs, and begrudgingly sold desktop Macs because, I don’t know, education sales. If they nail MacBook Air-class power envelopes, which I have absolutely zero doubt they can, and they don’t knock a new iMac Pro out of the park…is that really going to hit their bottom line all that much? (Yes, in some way, there’s a halo effect, and developers won’t be happy, nor will creative pros, but if they get great MacBook Airs with higher profit margins, then they probably consider that a win.)
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      I may be mistaken, I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about hardware to say this with full confidence, but wouldn't the very low power and heat requirements of their laptop-CPU-competitive chips suggest that they have a lot of room to increase performance simply by increasing clock speed?
      • formerly_proven 6y ago
        No, because voltage-frequency scaling is very non-linear (and process and design dependent) and designs often just have a "brick wall" they can't progress over. For example, it was practically impossible to get Zen 1 CPUs over 4 GHz on air, not because they got too hot, but because they'd just crash almost immediately, regardless of voltage. Similiarly you can't push the current-est Intel generation beyond ~5.3 GHz, regardless of voltage. Current Zen 2 CPUs are highly binned, some bins cannot go beyond ~4.2 GHz, regardless of voltage and cooling, some can do 4.7 GHz.
• temac 6y ago
  Apple is competitive with Intel. Not ARM in a more general way. So I don't really see how Intel could magically produce a vastly better microarchitecture by retaking an ARM license... Especially since the microarchitecture is not completely independent from the ISA, and Intel is a specialist of x86, not ARM. So it would take a huge time to reach the same level. And that would not fix their process either... Plus to be competitive on perfs Apple is using some tricks (larger page size => huge impact on L1) that are maybe difficult to apply to Windows, given the Windows ARM ecosystem already exists (even if no very striving for now). Also MS is attempting a somehow closed ARM hw ecosystem, so that's not a full replacement for x86. To finish what to compare to is currently likely to be AMD, not Intel. So I think x86 is here to stay, or at least that's not the Apple switch that is going to initiate a revolution.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    How many other companies are competitive with Intel using ARM based designs specialized for their own needs? I know Amazon is doing some amazing things around ARM for their own data centers - both selling access to ARM based servers and using custom chips for networking hardware. Isn’t Google also designing custom ARM chips for machine learning and their data centers?
    • gsnedders 6y ago
      AFAIK, Amazon's ARM stuff is all based on ARM-designed cores (the Neoverse N1, presumably Cortex-X1 in future). Yes, all the integration is done by Amazon but the underlying ISA implementation is the same.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Didn’t they acquire Annapurna recently and are making their own thing?
        • gsnedders 6y ago
          Still based on ARM cores, far as I can tell? Plenty more on chip than just the cores, though.
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  i feel like i saw this movie before. ah yes, PowerPc. Steve Jobs reveal transition to Intel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg i don't know if the history will repeat itself but it will be interesting to watch.
  • rvanlaar 6y ago
    Indeed, it will be interesting to watch. Last time they had Steve to run the show. If the last few years are to be a guide, it will crash and burn. Apple hasn't been developer and power user friendly for some time now. Focusing on thinner laptops while sacrificing the keyboard and the touchbar to name two. I've been hearing from developers being skeptic who are planning to buy before they switch to Arm. Which is a different vibe when they switched to intel. It could be a massive marketing stunt from MS when they announce a more like MacOS version of Windows which actually runs on Intel.
    • X-Istence 6y ago
      Hey, developer here. I'm looking forward to the ARM MacBook's for the longer battery life...
    • scarface74 6y ago
      Steve wasn’t there for the 68K to PPC transition.
• tuatoru 6y ago
  Gassée is focusing on the wrong things. "Thermal envelope"? Bah. In the block diagram of the SoC for the new Macs, Apple very clearly signaled what they are doing. They are working towards Steve Jobs's long-term vision. Onboard "advanced audio processing", "enhanced camera", "neural engine", "AI processing": this is about making Macs that support development of the next generation of software for iPhones. Mobile phones right now are stuck. Apple wants to make them more useful to their users, and the way to to that is to make them context aware, continuously listening and occasionally looking around. so the phone knows what's going on. Context-aware phones is what this is about. "Siri, write minutes of the meeting we just had, and email them to everyone." Users will never accept a phone that's continuously uploading everything in their lives to Apple's servers (or anyone else's), so all of this capability has to be on board the device. Intel is incapable of making a SoC that will support this, and no-one else has the capacity, so Apple has to do it themselves. (Also, Apple wants to keep the IP to themselves.)
  • detaro 6y ago
    If they wanted those extra things available on x86 macs, they could just stuff them in an accelerator chip.
    • kevingadd 6y ago
      Yeah, and they're already shipping custom chips (like the T2) in their intel laptops.
    • simonh 6y ago
      That’s an incredibly costly and inefficient approach. You used to be able to get x86 add on boards for Macs back in the late 80s and early 90s, but they cost a fortune and were incredibly clunky.
      • detaro 6y ago
        That's not a comparable thing. Putting specialized functions in their own chips is completely normal, and only a problem if they need really deep integration with the host CPU, or efficiency or size are extremely important (iPhone: sure. laptop, not so much), so I don't think those are a primary concern for the move to ARM laptops.
• skavi 6y ago
  Gassée actually significantly understates the power consumption difference between the Intel chip in his MBP and an iPad Pro. MBP 13s sustain around 35 watts of power indefinitely. An 12X sustains only around 10 watts.
  • dr_zoidberg 6y ago
    Yes, but I read this: > think faster, svelter laptops actually lasting 10 hours on a battery charge. ...and I instantly think of HP's Envy x360 w/Ryzen 4500U pulling almost 14 hours of battery life in productivity tests. I Apple wants to stand out, it will have to push closer to 20hs on a charge. Not saying they can't, saying it'll be a stretch. And great if they pull it.
    • icedchai 6y ago
      I'm mainly a Mac user, but recently bought one of these Ryzen laptops. The performance is amazing, especially for a low end / "budget" laptop.
      • dr_zoidberg 6y ago
        I'm not sure Apple will be able to exceed Ryzens[0] performance (as perceived by the user). They could get to match it, and of course having tighter integration between hardware and OS will give them opportunities to optimize and tune beyond what Windows and Linux can do having to support a wider range of hardware. [0] I'm considering Zen 2 "the best performing x86" (with a small grain of salt). If Intel wants to take that crown with Tiger Lake I'm all for it.
• om2 6y ago
  A big problem with the thesis of this story: no one else has ARM SoCs as fast as Apple's. The highest end Android phones available get smoked on performance by the 3-year-old iPhone 8: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15603/the-samsung-galaxy-s20-s20-ultra-exynos-snapdragon-review-megalomania-devices/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15603/the-samsung-galaxy-s20-... The tablet situation doesn't look much different. Who's going to design equally capable SoCs for Windows portables? Doesn't look like it's going to be Qualcom or Samsung.
  • ztjio 6y ago
    Although it's not clearly on their radar, this is something nVidia could pull off. They've got Tegra and experience targeting 5nm, or at least, they appear to be growing it. It could be reasonable to see nVidia willing to jump to 5nm for Orin or whatever is after it. Yeah I don't know how realistic that is, but, I struggle to guess at any other company that could stand up and go toe-to-toe with Apple at least in some target markets on ARM... if they wanted.
    • om2 6y ago
      Not clear why they'd be interested, since their business model seems aimed at commodifying CPUs and putting the value proposition in the GPU.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    The tablet situation is if anything worse because demand is terrible :/
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      Interestingly it's strong enough to support a fairly broad range of products from Apple.
  • cromwellian 6y ago
    Does single thread CPU matter? It's been facing marginal returns for years. Most of the growth in computing power expansion is in chiplets, GPUs, and TPUs. The real question is mobile GPUs, and whether NVidia or AMD want to step into that market. On the desktop, Ampere and RDNA2 absolutely crush Apple's offerings, Apple is multiple generations behind. However this is at the expense of not really carrying too much about TDP. The real question is can NV or AMD squeeze a cut down version of their architectures into a SoC thats power competitive. That is, I might be willing to buy an AMD "Fusion" that has a Ryzen and RDNA2 architecture in it, even if it is a severely cut down version, over a MacBook if the battery life is reasonable.
• shmerl 6y ago
  I'd stick with AMD and Linux.
• dcow 6y ago
  Is it really the x86 architecture that's driving costs up and not core micro architecture and process? From where I sit, what we're actually seeing is a 7nm (and impending 5mn) TSMC process destroy the old 14nm process Intel has been hung up on for too long. I mean that's a square increase in density right there. If Intel could fab a 7nm chip right now, I'm pretty sure it would compete in the power department with any arm chip on the market. Just look at the latest Ryzen 4800U. It's a 10w 7nm x86_64 chip that outperforms the a12z. I don't want to downplay the proliferation of ARM we've seen lately due to the smartphone market, and having another architecture is good thing. But I'm not convinced the author isn't scapegoating x86. https://gizmodo.com/so-just-how-powerful-are-apples-new-laptop-chips-gonna-1844134011 https://gizmodo.com/so-just-how-powerful-are-apples-new-lapt...
  • justAnotherNET 6y ago
    > I mean that's a square increase in density right there. It’s hard to say this without being snarky, but anyone who still uses marketing “nanometer” labels for process comparison can have their opinions safely discarded. Every thread for the past 10 years on this topic has explained this, yet every thread there’s some new person who stumbles in not knowing anything at all comparing the same tired numbers. Every thread someone corrects them, yet every next-thread will have another.
  • Xixi 6y ago
    I think that Gizmodo article is getting it very wrong. They keep talking about "the A12Z intended for the Mac", but AFAIK there is no "A12Z intended for the Mac". When Apple switched to Intel their TDK used a Pentium 4, yet no Mac ever shipped with a Pentium 4 (besides the TDK itself, if you consider it a Mac). The ARM TDK is basically an iPad Pro running macOS, without a screen and with extra ram. A12Z themselves are just re-binned A12X (with just one extra GPU core activated), processors that are nearly two years old. No way Apple is shipping that in their first MacBook ARM...
    • dcow 6y ago
      >No way Apple is shipping that in their first MacBook ARM... No doubt. However, I don't think the article is so much "getting it very wrong" as it is working with what they've got. We've seen what a 10-18 watt soc from apple can do in the iPad. And it's pretty cool. But the point is it's not truth defining jaw dropping revolutionary. We can look at what AMD is selling right now. It's also pretty cool and starting to turn some eyeballs. It's very unlikely Apple is going to release something that outright spanks the status quo. So my expectations are that whatever Apple releases will be competitive with what we currently see from AMD and, maybe, with what we'll see later this year. That's all. I'm skeptical that the shift to ARM is the crux of the matter, is all.
• leonroy 6y ago
  Why Intel did not buy ARM is something that puzzles me... In 2016 ARM sold to SoftBank for $31B. In 2016 Intel had a market cap of ~$170B and about $17B cash on hand. I'm no M&A analyst but surely given their fundamentals at the time Intel could have bought ARM without financial difficulty, no? If even Facebook can look two steps ahead and pay an eye watering $19B for WhatsApp couldn't someone in the C-level at Intel could have seen that owning ARM would have been a jolly good strategic purchase - or am I missing something?
  • wslh 6y ago
    Just guessing: 1/ Intel could be considered a monopoly 2/ Intel think they can beat ARM in the long term
  • jhurliman 6y ago
    The conversation was a non-starter due to antitrust laws. Intel has wanted to purchase both ARM and NVIDIA for at least a decade. This is according to the internal rumor mill at Intel Labs circa 2010, so take it with a grain of salt.
    • ebalit 6y ago
      I can see why buying ARM would be a problem for antitrust laws but I don't see why it would be the case for NVIDIA. It seems that ATI/AMD were a stronger competitor to NVIDIA on the GPU side that they were to Intel on the CPU one.
      • tpetry 6y ago
        Intel had (or still has?) the biggest share on the graphics market as every intel cpu had (has?) an integrated gpu. So by definition of market share the largest supplier wanting to buy the second one is an antitrust problem. It does not matter that intels graphics cores are much worse.
  • bsder 6y ago
    Why should Intel enter the business of selling chips as fast as they can with a margin of 30 cents per chip when they are already in the business of selling chips as fast as they can with a margin of 30 dollars per chip? At no point does Intel selling ARM make financial sense until Intel is on the verge of death.
• m0zg 6y ago
  I don't see how Windows would be able to compete on ARM TBH. Nobody is even close to the performance of Apple chips, and that gap is likely to grow over time as Apple piles on more and more specialized compute and takes full advantage of its vertical integration - something Microsoft cannot do. It's really nice to have a fairly restricted set of hardware to develop for. It's really nice to be able to just know that e.g. all your devices have a TPU, and a certain amount of GPU compute bandwidth, and certain hardware codecs, etc. On the Windows side this will never be the case unless Microsoft magically commits itself to chip design the same way Apple did, but even under the best of circumstances this will take a decade or so. Android is similarly handicapped. Intel will be fine for at least the next decade. Businesses will still run on Intel, as will cloud. They'll figure out their process trouble and retake the performance crown again from AMD, although by a narrower margin. All of this has happened in the past. This is due to one simple truth: businesses couldn't give less of a shit what hardware their software runs on, and moving everything to ARM is so expensive, it's not going to happen for existing apps. Most of us here would have a bout of OCD knowing we're not using the latest and greatest thing, but businesses don't have such a problem.
• BooneJS 6y ago
  It's true that Intel (note, I'm a former employee) has had a mixed track record in creating new businesses outside of desktop and server chips. However, I'd like to point out a few things. 1. When Intel released HT as a way to recover 15% idleness in CPUs, the Linux scheduler took a while before it realized it should schedule work on all full cores before assigning something to a hyperthread. 2. Intel has been adding specialized SIMD vector operations, and wide vector operations, yet popular compilers like GCC were really slow to take advantage of them. One or two blog posts a month will hit the HN front page about inlining assembly or using specialized math APIs like the Intel MKL to extract performance from the cores you're running on. Apple can add neat blocks like audio, low power video playback, always-on processor, and neural engine because they also release the software APIs for it. Maybe that's Intel's sin. They never realized how hands-off the white box industry needed to be to stay alive and relied too much on OSS developers to fuel general-purpose Linux performance outside of large HPC computers. Intel made add-on things, people didn't use them, and now Intel is perceived as the company that can't innovate.
  • fatbird 6y ago
    This is very interesting. I know Intel has their own compilers, but wouldn't seconding a couple engineers to the GCC/LLVM teams yield exactly the benefit you're describing here? It's a trivial cost to boost their own add-ons.
    • m000 6y ago
      Intel's handling of ICC has always puzzled me. I'd bet Intel could live without any of the money it made them. Yet, they never open-sourced it so that GCC/LLVM could catch up faster with any tricks that gave ICC a performance edge. Knowing that Intel chips were fully supported by all major compilers would probably translate to more chip sale profits than the profits of selling ICC as a tool. The least they could have done was to release a stripped down version (e.g. without advanced profiling tools) as a no-nonsense free download.
      • acdha 6y ago
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Some serious mental leaps taking place here, well done. I take issue with the assumption that Apple's behavior in the (increasingly incredibly niche) MacOS ecosystem will somehow change Microsoft's strategy in any way. This may be the passing of Mactel, but I doubt Wintel is going anywhere anytime soon.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    Microsoft changed strategy with Windows 8 trying to make it tablet friendly because of the iPad (even though it shouldn’t have) and the entire reason behind the Surface line was because other OEMs could only make cheap commodity computers that didn’t compete with Apple on the high end.
  • nardi 6y ago
    I tried to find some evidence to back up your assertion that macOS is losing market share, but failed. Everything I can see shows that macOS is either holding steady or slightly gaining market share.
• enos_feedler 6y ago
  What I can't reconcile is NVDA's stock price given the vast majority of their revenue and dominance comes from supplying GPUs to the Wintel industry. What is their position in a world where Wintel starts to wind down?
• JohnBooty 6y ago
  Apple Silicon-powered Macs will be better than Intel-based laptops, at least after a few product cycles. I say "better" in terms of performance/watt. But will their margin of superiority be large enough to cause the seismic shifts in Windows/x86 land that this article suggests? I'm not sure. If Apple's laptops are 25% or perhaps 50% better, I'm really not sure that's enough to cause a major upheaval. I think we will wind up in a middle ground different from the upheaval JLG suggests. We are already at a place in which your average laptop is "good enough for most people"; being 25%-50% better than "good enough" is a nice competitive advantage but that's not going to necessarily turn the world upside down. - "Power users" will appreciate the CPU improvement. At this point, that essentially means video editors. It would mean gamers, but Macs still won't be the first choice for gaming. - "Extremely mobile users" will appreciate battery improvements. However, I suspect most laptop users use them chained to a desk most of the time anyway. I would love 50% more battery life, but it's not really actually that much of a factor for me personally. - "Cheap laptop buyers" won't be buying Macs anyway as Apple (wisely) doesn't seem like it wants to play in the sub-$1000 space. Though... maybe it will now.
  • dangus 6y ago
    Your last paragraph and your fourth paragraph are the big upheaval. If you ask me, Apple is going to make a ~$700 passively cooled (sealed like an iPad) MacBook Air with similar/better performance to the current model. Most importantly, it will have the same build quality and “expensive” feeling. Sure, there are plenty of laptops now with similar build quality to Macs, but none of them are actually cheaper than a Mac. Load up a ThinkPad X1 Carbon or XPS 13 with a high DPI display and comparable specs and you’ll see what I mean. But now you’re going to have Apple saving $200 compared to every other computer by not giving Intel a dime. The A13 chip is a $10 line item in the component cost of an iPhone. This barely even costs Apple R&D money since it was already a part of the much larger iPhone and iPad business. Literally nobody will be able to touch Apple on the value end of the spectrum unless they go into bargain basement territory. Are customers going to buy a $600 plastic 1080p laptop with big fans, keyboard deck flex, and 5 hour battery life or will they buy a $700, thin, fanless, retina aluminum Mac with the same performance, 10 hour battery, and a much better fit and finish? If this all sounds a little unrealistic, I’ve got an iPad Air to sell you!
• no_wizard 6y ago
  It’s not apple that matters here. At all. Ever since they took ARM in house for their devices it’s clear they don’t want to be dependent on another corporations chip design. What this misses, gravely I think, is that from the armchair CEO angle, I would want to go after _Qualcomm_ They’re the biggest vendor in this space for mobile as far as I can tell. All the major Android vendors use them, including in high end devices, and they’re apparently incredibly hard to work with from what I understand. This would be the way in for them to muscle into the ARM market but supplanting Qualcomms dominance. That would make more sense to me if I was running Intel. Then again, they ditched their cellular unit so it seems this might be questionable all together
  • adamnemecek 6y ago
    Apple doesn't want other vendors using their CPUs.
    • no_wizard 6y ago
      > Apple doesn't want other vendors using their CPUs. Exactly my point, in so far as what I said: Apple’s never going to be Intels customer for CPUs once they the last Mac requiring Intel CPUs is no longer supported. That’s a dead market. Qualcomm on the other hand, is ripe for some real competition. If Intel wants to swing big into the ARM CPU game, they should look to dethrone Qualcomm. Apple is pretty much irrelevant here. That’s been clear since they brought all their CPU designs in house
• lokedhs 6y ago
  I'm a bit surprised at the use of the term "Apple silicon". Everybody seems to have started to use it. As best as I can tell, this is a term invented by Apple's marketing department. I believe it's meant to imply that Apple is producing some magic that goes beyond the CPU. Readers of this site will of course understand exactly what is being discussed, but I'm concerned that the overuse of this marketing term confuses things for non-technical readers. There are already more common, and more accurate terms that can be used instead.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    You're not going to run android or regular linux on your iPhone so why bother advertising it as ARM?
  • tim-- 6y ago
    For CPUID, it makes sense. GenuineIntel AuthenticAMD AppleSilicon
    • lokedhs 6y ago
      The downvotes sure came quickly on my original post. My point was that we don't refer to AMD CPU's as "Authentic AMD" in general speech. However, in Apple's case they have succeeded in promoting their own narrative. I understand that this happens, but I was just intrigued by the fact that they managed to do it. The difference in terms does have a subtle effect in conversation however.
• m0ther 6y ago
  x86 and it's ancestors eating the markets of [iAPX 432, Itanium, i860, i960] has taught a lesson in the value of an install-base in the server and desktop market. Let's see if history repeats itself? Apple has never seemed to really be into the concept of backward compatibility; but historically the rest of the industry has been. Whatever happens, I'll bet it won't be boring.
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  I’ve always found it amazing Intel didn’t make their own OS eventually software companies will try to to eat you.
• rawoke083600 6y ago
  Interesting... Java was the promise of program once run every where, and i guess that is somewhat true, but what got their faster and better is the browser as a platform. For most things the browser doesn't need Intel or Microsoft, not running or hosting it.
• yyyk 6y ago
  Not so long ago, we had this at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5587283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5587283 ("The rise and fall of AMD...") With comments like these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5588069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5588069 ("I could go on and on about all the reasons I believe AMD went down the tubes... but I think a lot of it reduces to the disfunctional corporate culture alluded to in this piece.") Guess what happened with AMD? So I suggest waiting with the obituaries, at least until Apple actually has a working system a normal person can buy, and until Intel/AMD shows us their response. The entire idea behind the obituaries is that Apple's whatever will be so performant that ordinary PCs will switch on mass. This misses a few things: A) Where will the PCs get their ARM chips from? Not Apple, and non-Apple ARM is still obviously inferior to x86. Intel/AMD will rather keep their x86 monopoly, so it's in their interests to keep producing x86 as long as it's competitive even just against non-Apple ARMs. B) The typical Desktop/Laptop user doesn't care that much about performance anymore - not as much as they care about running their favourite apps. x86 has a huge lead here. All it takes is for Intel/AMD to stay/become slightly competitive with whatever Apple put out, and Apple will stay in their silo - which actually wouldn't bother Apple Inc. at all; They always ran their own ecosystem. C) Really, CISC/RISC doesn't matter that much. Apple's advantage (if there's one) would be a result of other architectural decisions, we should ask ourselves if there's anything preventing Intel/AMD from copying those decisions.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The entire idea behind the obituaries is that Apple's whatever will be so performant that ordinary PCs will switch on mass It doesn't need to and is unlikely to happen en masse. Apple creaming off the most valuable consumers is a problem for everyone else. You can see that in the smartphone market where Apple dominates the profits.
    • yyyk 6y ago
      PC makers switching to ARM was the thesis of the linked post. Regarding your thesis: 'Creaming off most valuable consumers' somehow didn't stop Huawei, Samsung, etc. from being huge profitable enterprises. Partly because it's not quite true (Apple has a position in some countries, in others it might as well not exist), partly because there's more to things than a benchmark comparison (Apple survived for a long time when Mac processors were inferior), and partly because we'll see a response from Intel and AMD. It's going to be an interesting few years in this sector.
• pjmlp 6y ago
  As much as I like Apple products this is wishful thinking, outside North America and a couple of tier one countries, Apple is nowhere to be found unless one belongs to a rich family that happens to bring an Apple device from the outside during a business travel.
• varbhat 6y ago
  One Question: Why are they using the word "Apple Silicon" instead of "ARM" ? Is this marketing move?
  • dry_soup 6y ago
    Yes. They want to take as much credit as they can. This isn't a dig at Apple, it's a rational decision.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Because you can't buy a Chromebook with the "superior" Apple Silicon. You can only buy a Chromebooks with an "inferior" ARM chip. I personally like that naming. It gets the idea across. Apple is not part of the ARM ecosystem. Apple is it's own isolated island.
  • fnordsensei 6y ago
    Marketing, probably, but also accuracy. Apple integrates a bunch of specialized co-processors as well. They want you to think of this, and the Arm bit, as one unit.
• tinus_hn 6y ago
  Strange how Microsoft apparently has no way of providing a Rosetta like solution for Windows on ARM.
• nottorp 6y ago
  Just take a look at this 2013 HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5589410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5589410 Kinda prophetic right?
• BunsanSpace 6y ago
  Until ARM can give processing power comparable to x86-64 power limits be dammed. x86-64 will continue to rule the desktop and large parts of the server market.
• frank2 6y ago
  (1) Many comment writers on this site have been predicting the replacement of AMD64 with ARM in personal computers for about 12 years. (2) Apple's announcement had no discernible effect on Intel's market cap, which, even after adjusting for inflation, is higher today than it has ever been except for an interval of about 2 or 3 years at the end of the dot-com boom. (I used a CPI calculator, a market-cap chart and one of my eyeballs to estimate the duration of this interval.)
• victor106 6y ago
  > Intel execs know they missed the Smartphone 2.0 revolution because of culture blindness. They couldn’t bear to part with the high margins generated by the x86 cash cow; they couldn’t see that lower margins could be supported by unimaginable volume Clayton Christensen‘S Innovators Dilemma at work. It’s amazing how Apple with just 7% of market share can/could change the entire industry. They did the same with Flash(for the better) and this time with the PC. Interesting times ahead
• halo37253 6y ago
  I love how people like to talk about Apple vs Intel. But Intel already had been beaten by AMD, and for the foreseeable future as well. Even on the mobile side, AMD has more performances with less power. How will Apple stack up with AMD is the real question. This move is great for their low powered devices. But when it comes to The Pro devices, I'm sure they would have more performance for the next half decade if they just moved to AMD.
• deleted 6y ago
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