16 ms·

Apple's M1 processor spotlights Intel's chip challenges

35 points by eddieoz 6y ago

jacknews 6y ago
"Apple and Intel are in the middle of a slow-motion breakup." I'd say it's pretty decisive at this point.
- sneak 6y ago
  Apple will continue to buy Intel chips in quantity for at least 18 months into the future.
  - jacknews 6y ago
    Of course, but I'd say this is less a 'slow motion breakup', which has obviously already been going on for the last few years, as Intel has been cruising along oblivious, while Apple has been furiously building it's own capabilities and an escape, and more a case of 'divorce papers have now been filed, but these things take time to conclude'
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Probably longer to meet support contract obligations. But the idea that they might prolong the transition more than the market will bear, and their operations can turn out ARM product, is silly. They invested years of R&D into this transition, they’ve made huge hardware architectural changes smoothly twice with tons of preparation, and if anything they let the decision linger longer than anyone watching for it would’ve expected given the A-series improvements and given Intel’s many disappointments over the last few years. When they switched from PPC to Intel, they had clearly been desperately trying to keep PPC alive and viable. With Intel they’ve been just openly showing the world they can do better and just daring anyone try to keep up.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
eddieoz 6y ago
>> Intel said it's "relentlessly" focused on building leading chips. "We welcome competition because it makes us better," Intel said in a statement. "We believe that there is a lot of innovation that only Intel can do," including supplying chips that span the full price range of PCs and that can run older software still common in businesses. -- IMO, the chip seems to bring some innovations, but nothing too new or disruptive for this market.
klelatti 6y ago
Not sure that talking about 'innovations that only Intel can do" and then mentioning two things that are not innovations at all and which other companies can in fact do is very reassuring. I suspect that Intel's near term prospects are defined by how quickly TSMC can get fabs up and running - not a great place to be.
- acdha 6y ago
  That was very worrisome to me, too: backwards compatibility is a real market but it’s an inherently shrinking one and profits are capped with multiple competitors, even including Apple - if that old software ran on old processors it’ll almost certainly run fast enough in a modern emulation/translation system on new hardware while users migrate to non-legacy software. Similarly, the full-range of PCs comment reads like they’re hoping nobody noticed that the low-end market is increasingly using cheaper ARM chips. Here again x86 compatibility is worth something but for a lot of people it comes down to whether it runs Chrome and Office, so there’s an upper bound on how much money you can squeeze out with such effective competition. Intel has the resources to do better than this but I no longer have confidence that they have management who can effectively run the company.
ziml77 6y ago
Need less talk and more actual innovation. I'd love to see something around the performance and power efficiency of the M1 without it all needing to be built into a single chip. The M1 definitely gets a lot of benefits from being all packaged together, but it unfortunately leads to fewer options since you can't mix-and-match CPU, GPU, and RAM. I'm hopeful that M1 will drive both AMD and Intel to do better in the mobile space. AMD got a lot of praise for the 4000 series, but it's had nearly no availability.
- jacknews 6y ago
  Yes kudos to apple for delivering astonishing performance and performance/watt, but to use these chips you'll have to accept Apple's full embrace - the chip, the device it powers, the OS, the app ecosystem and restrictions.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    That’s the beauty of it. To turn the phrase, there’s a lot of innovation in the M1 that only Apple can do.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      If you look at the way MS works with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel this advantage isn’t that large. AMD SoCs have Unified Memory, there’s DirectStorage to let SSDs load directly into GPU memory without the CPU, etc There’s also a downside to being a walled garden, Apple is building itself a Great Wall, but the barbarians eventually got the better tech. So for example, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have Directx ray tracing. How many generations before Apple GPUs catch up with Ampere or RDNA3? To some extent having the GPU architectures discrete allows them to iterate much faster as they aren’t tied to other dependencies, or left with inferior thermal and power constraints.
      - zaroth 6y ago
        I think you’re absolutely right if you need the highest absolute performance regardless of performance per dollar or performance per watt. But I think a lot of people are more concerned with Perf/$ and Perf/Watt and will find Apple’s fully integrated approach is extremely hard to beat or even compete with. In this case perf/$ is going to provide Apple an unbeatable margin, not necessarily the consumer an unbeatable price.
est 6y ago
> There is a lot of innovation that only Intel can do In other words, innovation which solves x86 problems doesn't exist on other architectures.
- thrtythreeforty 6y ago
  Except oh wait, AMD seems to have x86 innovation on lock anyway
sicnus 6y ago
All of this is useless chatter for most folks that just want a decent gaming platform. Sadly, Intel on Windows is going to be where folks go.
- cinbun8 6y ago
  No one sees Mac as a gaming platform at all. And gamers are a small subset of the user base.
  - coldcode 6y ago
    However people do see iOS as a gaming market, and soon you can run those apps on a Mac (clearly limitations in interface might restrict it a little). Gaming has many segments. I play WOT on my Mac via Codeweavers emulation, and performance is 60FPS+ in my 2017 iMac in most cases, equivalent to a midrange PC. I am not sure how this will work on M1 however.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      WOT was made to run on low end systems, not really that impressive. Can Valorant, Overwatch, or other triple-A content run?
    - timw4mail 6y ago
      I wonder when Apple will finally ship a touchscreen Mac. It seems almost inevitable now that iOS apps will be running on MacOS.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      To be fair, those gaming markets are almost completely non-overlapping on a venn diagram, and it’s not just the interface (as in user input) that drives that. It’s the form factor. Handheld touchscreen games and many platform/PC games are just drastically different in the interaction models they employ/require, and slapping a touch screen on a MacBook isn’t going to change that meaningfully without many other significant form factor considerations.
- 6y ago
tambourine_man 6y ago
This reads a lot like Palm’s CEO back in the day: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” https://web.archive.org/web/20061205211900/http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/columnists/16057579.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20061205211900/http://www.mercur...
- draw_down 6y ago
  Yes, it’s fun to see echoes of the reaction to the iPhone announcement so many years hence. I suppose you could argue, then as now, that the disbelief is performative and not a real reaction. I have my doubts, though.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  I am still of the view that the real issue here one that Apple has never overcome. Software. This was also very obvious during the recent presentation, very few companies highlighted and of those how many did you recognize? For current Mac users we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases if the developer is even planning on supporting it in the future. Catalina did a good job of punting a lot of old software to the side and decimated gaming on the Mac. I know I am in a minority here but for me I want only one desktop/laptop type machine for both productivity and games. As above, Catalina decimated the gaming environment on Mac and frankly the iOS game environment isn't comparable. So, yes in some limited cases Intel sounds a bit like Palm but the difference is in phones it was a wide open environment to exploit and the current desktop/laptop market is heavily entrenched with established 3rd party software that must go along for the ride and that condition did not exist for phones, though now it does. Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    > highlighted and of those how many did you recognize? Are you kidding? All of them. I mean, Adobe, Microsoft? > we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases It will, the cases were Rosetta 2 won’t work are extremely rare, hand tuned vector instructions from high performance software that is probably well supported anyway. As for games, yes, if you care about them at all, don’t buy a Mac. At least not until Apple changes its attitude towards it. > Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market. Yes, one can dream.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
yeah. just like the "revolutionary" innovations done by zen 2 and zen 3 by AMD, which happens to not be intel. the same innovation by intel meant to keep active exploits in the market just because.
the-dude 6y ago
Reminds me of Acorn, where Sophie Wilson describes they travel to the US to visit a chip/CPU design shop. Their expectations are not met when they find only a couple of guys in a plain office building. They decide they can do it themselves and design the ARM1.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Apple collaborated with Acorn on the ARM610, back around 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_RISC_Machines_Ltd._%E2%80%93_ARM6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_RISC...
  - ljosifov 6y ago
    ARM was probably the only realistic CPU Apple could put in the Newton PDA, at about that time. Apply had a large stake in the company. Amusingly, it is possible that selling that stake latter, saved Apple - this https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-from-going-bust-1990s/ https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-...
martin_drapeau 6y ago
The M1 is a revolution and upcoming M2, M3 and so forth will be strong evolutions. Apple has a good track record of improving their chips year over year. Look at initial comments of the iPhone by the competition. They were all laughing. A decade later they are not. With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. They have everything going for them. The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. In fact, this is where Apple shines in terms of long-term strategy and execution. They are able to create a revolution with a new product/architecture (iPod, iPhone, iPad and now PC), then iterate to make it evolve over time. In doing so, they create new markets. I really feel like the M1 is an inflection point in the personal computers market. Can't wait to see how Qualcomm and Nvidia (with the acquisition of ARM), will respond.
- someday_somehow 6y ago
  > The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. ARM is over 30 years old as well.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    64 bit Arm is ten years old - if you dispense with 32 bit as Apple has then there is no legacy to carry forward.
  - martin_drapeau 6y ago
    My point is that PC architecture still remains CPU + GPU + RAM mostly separate communicating over a large bus. The M1 combines this all in a SoC.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  > With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. With Mac desktops and mobile devices getting similar in hardware the question is how much longer it will take, till you can plug your phone to a screen, keyboard and mouse and end up with a decent desktop for most use cases. (There are tricky questions in that for instance whether one can plug it out for a break or something and how well such a thing would recover and a question whether one would be able to separate work and private life in such a world, but all should be solvable)
matthewmacleod 6y ago
The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. This is a bit silly. Neither Intel nor AMD are particularly constrained by the underlying ISA that their chips are using.
- derision 6y ago
  And AMD has released ARM chips as recently as 4 years ago
- sliken 6y ago
  Heh, dunno, notice that Apple is comparing themselves to the Intel chips, and in particular the i9. But NOT the AMD chips. On various metrics the Zen 3 looks pretty good compared to M1. AMD has Higher peak performance/throughput, similar per thread performance, and I've yet to see a GPU comparison.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    This isn’t because they compare to AMD unfavorably, but because they habitually compare against their past offerings and against their goliath du jour (notice how they very seldom compare against other software vendors anymore since the iPhone has been a stable profit leader).
asah 6y ago
hahaha, "pricing innovation" they mean, or perhaps "marketing innovation"
akmarinov 6y ago
Let's see you ship that 5nm in 2023, Intel. At that point TSMC will be doing 3nm.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Intel’s 5nm is supposed to be around TSMC’s 3nm target that said Intel’s process has been stuck in muck for years now.
fabiofzero 6y ago
Reminds me of Ballmer's comments when the original iPhone was release.
doe88 6y ago
I think the real advantage of Apple so far is to have the kind of volumes and margins with iphones to be able to have privilegied access to TSMC fabs and processes, and therefore now it will automatically trickle down on Macs and their new SoCs granting them a head start on everybody else, even irrespective of any other kind of possible architectural advantage or design decision.
gnabgib 6y ago
Title should be "Apple's M1 processor spotlights Intel's chip challenges" and while this picked quote is in there, it goes on to list legitimate value (although hardly innovations)

35 points by eddieoz 6y ago

jacknews 6y ago

"Apple and Intel are in the middle of a slow-motion breakup." I'd say it's pretty decisive at this point.

sneak 6y ago
Apple will continue to buy Intel chips in quantity for at least 18 months into the future.
- jacknews 6y ago
  Of course, but I'd say this is less a 'slow motion breakup', which has obviously already been going on for the last few years, as Intel has been cruising along oblivious, while Apple has been furiously building it's own capabilities and an escape, and more a case of 'divorce papers have now been filed, but these things take time to conclude'
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Probably longer to meet support contract obligations. But the idea that they might prolong the transition more than the market will bear, and their operations can turn out ARM product, is silly. They invested years of R&D into this transition, they’ve made huge hardware architectural changes smoothly twice with tons of preparation, and if anything they let the decision linger longer than anyone watching for it would’ve expected given the A-series improvements and given Intel’s many disappointments over the last few years. When they switched from PPC to Intel, they had clearly been desperately trying to keep PPC alive and viable. With Intel they’ve been just openly showing the world they can do better and just daring anyone try to keep up.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

eddieoz 6y ago

>> Intel said it's "relentlessly" focused on building leading chips. "We welcome competition because it makes us better," Intel said in a statement. "We believe that there is a lot of innovation that only Intel can do," including supplying chips that span the full price range of PCs and that can run older software still common in businesses. -- IMO, the chip seems to bring some innovations, but nothing too new or disruptive for this market.

klelatti 6y ago

Not sure that talking about 'innovations that only Intel can do" and then mentioning two things that are not innovations at all and which other companies can in fact do is very reassuring. I suspect that Intel's near term prospects are defined by how quickly TSMC can get fabs up and running - not a great place to be.

acdha 6y ago
That was very worrisome to me, too: backwards compatibility is a real market but it’s an inherently shrinking one and profits are capped with multiple competitors, even including Apple - if that old software ran on old processors it’ll almost certainly run fast enough in a modern emulation/translation system on new hardware while users migrate to non-legacy software. Similarly, the full-range of PCs comment reads like they’re hoping nobody noticed that the low-end market is increasingly using cheaper ARM chips. Here again x86 compatibility is worth something but for a lot of people it comes down to whether it runs Chrome and Office, so there’s an upper bound on how much money you can squeeze out with such effective competition. Intel has the resources to do better than this but I no longer have confidence that they have management who can effectively run the company.

ziml77 6y ago

Need less talk and more actual innovation. I'd love to see something around the performance and power efficiency of the M1 without it all needing to be built into a single chip. The M1 definitely gets a lot of benefits from being all packaged together, but it unfortunately leads to fewer options since you can't mix-and-match CPU, GPU, and RAM. I'm hopeful that M1 will drive both AMD and Intel to do better in the mobile space. AMD got a lot of praise for the 4000 series, but it's had nearly no availability.

jacknews 6y ago
Yes kudos to apple for delivering astonishing performance and performance/watt, but to use these chips you'll have to accept Apple's full embrace - the chip, the device it powers, the OS, the app ecosystem and restrictions.
- zaroth 6y ago
  That’s the beauty of it. To turn the phrase, there’s a lot of innovation in the M1 that only Apple can do.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    If you look at the way MS works with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel this advantage isn’t that large. AMD SoCs have Unified Memory, there’s DirectStorage to let SSDs load directly into GPU memory without the CPU, etc There’s also a downside to being a walled garden, Apple is building itself a Great Wall, but the barbarians eventually got the better tech. So for example, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have Directx ray tracing. How many generations before Apple GPUs catch up with Ampere or RDNA3? To some extent having the GPU architectures discrete allows them to iterate much faster as they aren’t tied to other dependencies, or left with inferior thermal and power constraints.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      I think you’re absolutely right if you need the highest absolute performance regardless of performance per dollar or performance per watt. But I think a lot of people are more concerned with Perf/$ and Perf/Watt and will find Apple’s fully integrated approach is extremely hard to beat or even compete with. In this case perf/$ is going to provide Apple an unbeatable margin, not necessarily the consumer an unbeatable price.

est 6y ago

> There is a lot of innovation that only Intel can do In other words, innovation which solves x86 problems doesn't exist on other architectures.

thrtythreeforty 6y ago
Except oh wait, AMD seems to have x86 innovation on lock anyway

sicnus 6y ago

All of this is useless chatter for most folks that just want a decent gaming platform. Sadly, Intel on Windows is going to be where folks go.

cinbun8 6y ago
No one sees Mac as a gaming platform at all. And gamers are a small subset of the user base.
- coldcode 6y ago
  However people do see iOS as a gaming market, and soon you can run those apps on a Mac (clearly limitations in interface might restrict it a little). Gaming has many segments. I play WOT on my Mac via Codeweavers emulation, and performance is 60FPS+ in my 2017 iMac in most cases, equivalent to a midrange PC. I am not sure how this will work on M1 however.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    WOT was made to run on low end systems, not really that impressive. Can Valorant, Overwatch, or other triple-A content run?
  - timw4mail 6y ago
    I wonder when Apple will finally ship a touchscreen Mac. It seems almost inevitable now that iOS apps will be running on MacOS.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    To be fair, those gaming markets are almost completely non-overlapping on a venn diagram, and it’s not just the interface (as in user input) that drives that. It’s the form factor. Handheld touchscreen games and many platform/PC games are just drastically different in the interaction models they employ/require, and slapping a touch screen on a MacBook isn’t going to change that meaningfully without many other significant form factor considerations.
6y ago

tambourine_man 6y ago

This reads a lot like Palm’s CEO back in the day: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” https://web.archive.org/web/20061205211900/http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/columnists/16057579.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20061205211900/http://www.mercur...

draw_down 6y ago
Yes, it’s fun to see echoes of the reaction to the iPhone announcement so many years hence. I suppose you could argue, then as now, that the disbelief is performative and not a real reaction. I have my doubts, though.
Shivetya 6y ago
I am still of the view that the real issue here one that Apple has never overcome. Software. This was also very obvious during the recent presentation, very few companies highlighted and of those how many did you recognize? For current Mac users we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases if the developer is even planning on supporting it in the future. Catalina did a good job of punting a lot of old software to the side and decimated gaming on the Mac. I know I am in a minority here but for me I want only one desktop/laptop type machine for both productivity and games. As above, Catalina decimated the gaming environment on Mac and frankly the iOS game environment isn't comparable. So, yes in some limited cases Intel sounds a bit like Palm but the difference is in phones it was a wide open environment to exploit and the current desktop/laptop market is heavily entrenched with established 3rd party software that must go along for the ride and that condition did not exist for phones, though now it does. Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  > highlighted and of those how many did you recognize? Are you kidding? All of them. I mean, Adobe, Microsoft? > we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases It will, the cases were Rosetta 2 won’t work are extremely rare, hand tuned vector instructions from high performance software that is probably well supported anyway. As for games, yes, if you care about them at all, don’t buy a Mac. At least not until Apple changes its attitude towards it. > Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market. Yes, one can dream.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

yeah. just like the "revolutionary" innovations done by zen 2 and zen 3 by AMD, which happens to not be intel. the same innovation by intel meant to keep active exploits in the market just because.

the-dude 6y ago

Reminds me of Acorn, where Sophie Wilson describes they travel to the US to visit a chip/CPU design shop. Their expectations are not met when they find only a couple of guys in a plain office building. They decide they can do it themselves and design the ARM1.

Symbiote 6y ago
Apple collaborated with Acorn on the ARM610, back around 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_RISC_Machines_Ltd._%E2%80%93_ARM6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_RISC...
- ljosifov 6y ago
  ARM was probably the only realistic CPU Apple could put in the Newton PDA, at about that time. Apply had a large stake in the company. Amusingly, it is possible that selling that stake latter, saved Apple - this https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-from-going-bust-1990s/ https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-...

martin_drapeau 6y ago

The M1 is a revolution and upcoming M2, M3 and so forth will be strong evolutions. Apple has a good track record of improving their chips year over year. Look at initial comments of the iPhone by the competition. They were all laughing. A decade later they are not. With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. They have everything going for them. The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. In fact, this is where Apple shines in terms of long-term strategy and execution. They are able to create a revolution with a new product/architecture (iPod, iPhone, iPad and now PC), then iterate to make it evolve over time. In doing so, they create new markets. I really feel like the M1 is an inflection point in the personal computers market. Can't wait to see how Qualcomm and Nvidia (with the acquisition of ARM), will respond.

someday_somehow 6y ago
> The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. ARM is over 30 years old as well.
- klelatti 6y ago
  64 bit Arm is ten years old - if you dispense with 32 bit as Apple has then there is no legacy to carry forward.
- martin_drapeau 6y ago
  My point is that PC architecture still remains CPU + GPU + RAM mostly separate communicating over a large bus. The M1 combines this all in a SoC.
johannes1234321 6y ago
> With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. With Mac desktops and mobile devices getting similar in hardware the question is how much longer it will take, till you can plug your phone to a screen, keyboard and mouse and end up with a decent desktop for most use cases. (There are tricky questions in that for instance whether one can plug it out for a break or something and how well such a thing would recover and a question whether one would be able to separate work and private life in such a world, but all should be solvable)

matthewmacleod 6y ago

The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture. This is a bit silly. Neither Intel nor AMD are particularly constrained by the underlying ISA that their chips are using.

derision 6y ago
And AMD has released ARM chips as recently as 4 years ago
sliken 6y ago
Heh, dunno, notice that Apple is comparing themselves to the Intel chips, and in particular the i9. But NOT the AMD chips. On various metrics the Zen 3 looks pretty good compared to M1. AMD has Higher peak performance/throughput, similar per thread performance, and I've yet to see a GPU comparison.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  This isn’t because they compare to AMD unfavorably, but because they habitually compare against their past offerings and against their goliath du jour (notice how they very seldom compare against other software vendors anymore since the iPhone has been a stable profit leader).

asah 6y ago

hahaha, "pricing innovation" they mean, or perhaps "marketing innovation"

akmarinov 6y ago

Let's see you ship that 5nm in 2023, Intel. At that point TSMC will be doing 3nm.

dogma1138 6y ago
Intel’s 5nm is supposed to be around TSMC’s 3nm target that said Intel’s process has been stuck in muck for years now.

fabiofzero 6y ago

Reminds me of Ballmer's comments when the original iPhone was release.

doe88 6y ago

I think the real advantage of Apple so far is to have the kind of volumes and margins with iphones to be able to have privilegied access to TSMC fabs and processes, and therefore now it will automatically trickle down on Macs and their new SoCs granting them a head start on everybody else, even irrespective of any other kind of possible architectural advantage or design decision.

gnabgib 6y ago

Title should be "Apple's M1 processor spotlights Intel's chip challenges" and while this picked quote is in there, it goes on to list legitimate value (although hardly innovations)