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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

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.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      The slowest operation on the entire CPU has to finish within a single clock cycle. This is basically a design issue. If you design your CPU for 6GHz then the slowest operation isn't allowed to take more than 0.17 nanoseconds. This gets harder the tighter the tolerances are but we can go way beyond what current CPUs run at. The reality is that power consumption/heat prevents us from running CPUs at 6GHz so we don't build CPUs that can run at these frequencies. The manufacturing process can also play a big role (some processes are more efficient at ~2.x GHz than 4.xGHz) but it's biggest impact by far is reducing power consumption to allow higher frequencies.
- samgranieri 6y ago
  This. I can't wait to see what Johnny Srouji's team can do when they're not targeting a mobile device.
scarface74 6y ago
Intel surged before because it had the volume of sells thanks to the PC market to throw at the problem. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the entire personal computer market and probably the server market. Apple also has more money to throw at it. Intel couldn’t make 4G/5G work and sold that division to Apple. On the server side, AWS is designing its own chips (disclaimer I work for AWS but nowhere near that division).
remir 6y ago
10 years is an eternity in tech. Even today, AMD is very competitive against Intel and I think JLG's point was that Apple's move to ARM will boost the entire ARM ecosystem significantly. Qualcomm and Nvidia won't miss a chance to try to dethrone Intel. AMD, too. Intel could be in danger.
- partiallypro 6y ago
  AMD was ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era, ATI (now AMD) was ahead of Nvidia during that period as well. Then there have been back and forth for the past 15 years.

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.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The slowest operation on the entire CPU has to finish within a single clock cycle. This is basically a design issue. If you design your CPU for 6GHz then the slowest operation isn't allowed to take more than 0.17 nanoseconds. This gets harder the tighter the tolerances are but we can go way beyond what current CPUs run at. The reality is that power consumption/heat prevents us from running CPUs at 6GHz so we don't build CPUs that can run at these frequencies. The manufacturing process can also play a big role (some processes are more efficient at ~2.x GHz than 4.xGHz) but it's biggest impact by far is reducing power consumption to allow higher frequencies.
samgranieri 6y ago
This. I can't wait to see what Johnny Srouji's team can do when they're not targeting a mobile device.

scarface74 6y ago

Intel surged before because it had the volume of sells thanks to the PC market to throw at the problem. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the entire personal computer market and probably the server market. Apple also has more money to throw at it. Intel couldn’t make 4G/5G work and sold that division to Apple. On the server side, AWS is designing its own chips (disclaimer I work for AWS but nowhere near that division).

remir 6y ago

10 years is an eternity in tech. Even today, AMD is very competitive against Intel and I think JLG's point was that Apple's move to ARM will boost the entire ARM ecosystem significantly. Qualcomm and Nvidia won't miss a chance to try to dethrone Intel. AMD, too. Intel could be in danger.

partiallypro 6y ago
AMD was ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era, ATI (now AMD) was ahead of Nvidia during that period as well. Then there have been back and forth for the past 15 years.