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The first is that they could justify continuing to do this to their shareholders based solely on the cost savings from not paying margins to Intel, even if the
by alwillis 6y ago
The first is that they could justify continuing to do this to their shareholders based solely on the cost savings from not paying margins to Intel, even if the performance is only the same and not better.
You know Apple’s market capitalization is a little over $2 trillion dollars, right? And Apple's gross margins have been in the 30-35% range for many years. This isn't a shareholder issue. They are by far the most profitable computer/gadget manufacturer around.
So it was reasonable for them to expect to beat Intel's 14nm++++++ with TSMC's 5nm, but what happens now that AMD is no longer dead and is using TSMC too?
No matter what AMD does in the short term, they're not going to beat the performance per watt of the M1, let alone the graphics, the Neural Engine and the rest of components of Apple's SoC. It's not just 14nm vs. 5nm; it's also ARM’s architecture vs. x86-64.
Apple has scaled A series production for more than a decade and nobody has caught them yet in iPhone/iPad performance. There were 64-bit iPhones for at least a year before Qualcomm and other ARM licensees could catch up.
There's no evidence or reason to believe it'll be any different with the M series in laptops and desktops.
- floatboth 6y agoAMD should easily beat Apple in graphics, all they have to do is switch to the latest Navi/RDNA2 microarchitecture. They are collaborating with Samsung on bringing Radeon into mobile devices, surely that will translate into efficiency improvements for laptops too. > ARM’s architecture vs. x86-64 x86 will always need more power spent on instruction decode, sure, but it's not a huge amount.
- alwillis 6y agoAMD should easily beat Apple in graphics… Perhaps you haven't read the Anandtech article? [1] Intel has stagnated itself out of the market, and has lost a major customer today. AMD has shown lots of progress lately, however it’ll be incredibly hard to catch up to Apple’s power efficiency. If Apple’s performance trajectory continues at this pace, the x86 performance crown might never be regained. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> You know Apple’s market capitalization is a little over $2 trillion dollars, right? That's the issue. Shareholders always want to see growth, but when you're that big, how do you do that? There isn't much uncaptured customer base left while they're charging premium prices, but offering lower-priced macOS/iOS devices would cannibalize the margins on existing sales. Solution: Increase the margins on existing sales without changing prices so that profitability increases at the same sales volume. > No matter what AMD does in the short term, they're not going to beat the performance per watt of the M1 Zen 3 mobile APUs aren't out yet, but multiply the performance of the Zen 2-based Ryzen 7 4800U by the 20% gain from Zen 3 and the multi-threaded performance (i.e. the thing power efficiency is relevant to) is already there, and that's with Zen 3 on 7nm while Apple is using 5nm. > it's also ARM’s architecture vs. x86-64. The architecture is basically irrelevant. ARM architecture devices were traditionally designed to prioritize low power consumption over performance whereas x86-64 devices the opposite, but that isn't a characteristic of the ISA, it's just the design considerations of the target market. And that distinction is disappearing now that everything is moving toward high core counts where the name of the game is performance per watt, because that's how you get more performance into the same power envelope. Epyc 7702 has a 200W TDP but that's what allows it to have 64 cores; it's only ~3W/core. > Apple has scaled A series production for more than a decade and nobody has caught them yet in iPhone/iPad performance. Qualcomm never caught Intel/AMD either.
- klelatti 6y agoHmmm, Ryzen 7 4800U has eight large cores vs 4 large plus 4 small in the M1 and even with your (hypothetical) 20% uplift multicore is just about matching M1. Single core is nowhere near as good. 'Architecture is basically irrelevant' not the biggest factor but not irrelevant - x64 still has to support all those legacy modes and has more complex front end. You're working very hard to try to deny that Apple has passed AMD and Intel in this bit of the market. We'll have to see what happens at higher TDPs but they clearly have the architecture and process access to do very well. No idea what Qualcomm has to do with this.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago