3 ms·

Lets go back to 2006 and ask this question in retrospect: Will Apples move to Intel mean better support for the PC? Answer: No.

atemerev 6y ago
Support for what? Apple software? Definitely not. Open source software builds for ARM? Most certainly.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  > Open source software builds for ARM? Most certainly. What? Plenty of open source software already builds on Arm. Honestly, it feels like people here forgot that Arm is a processor architecture that has been around since 1985. Apple just happened to put one in their computer 35 years later.
  - atemerev 6y ago
    So far, I can’t buy any other ARM laptop (I can build a PiTop, but that’s a toy, not a modern computer suitable for work). So yes, high performance ARM laptop in the general availability _is_ a big deal.
bArray 6y ago
I agree, it's highly unlikely they would give away their competitive edge. A lot of their speed-ups may even come directly from dedicated silicon anyway, and that would likely be under lock-and-key for quite some time (until hackers of the future reverse engineer the M1).
- MisterTea 6y ago
  (until hackers of the future reverse engineer the M1). They wont find anything of interest. The M1 is just a well designed low power mid-performance tier chip. There's no magic when you compare a power efficient arm chip to an x86 chip in the same class. And don't forget that apple has a closed ecosystem so they can build whatever the hell they want without worrying about the technical inertia and legacy baggage the PC platform as a whole is completely built upon.
  - bArray 6y ago
    > They wont find anything of interest. I imagine the hackers of tomorrow will reverse engineer the M1 for the same reason they reverse engineer the chips of yesterday - nostalgia. In any case this will be an interesting note in computing history.
- smaudet 6y ago
  What I feel like a lot of people are ignoring here is that this was a speedup from an underpowered macbook line.... They beefed up core caches a bunch, which likely has a lot more to do with the speedups than any special silicon tricks... People are also ignoring that they have a lot of software infrastructure based around virtualization and auto optimization...its like if the JVM was running at kernel level on a jvm optimized chip with days to perform optimization...of course you would expect that to be blazing fast. Compared to the horror show in Intel land where you have to compile in special support for advanced instructions...

atemerev 6y ago

Support for what? Apple software? Definitely not. Open source software builds for ARM? Most certainly.

MisterTea 6y ago
> Open source software builds for ARM? Most certainly. What? Plenty of open source software already builds on Arm. Honestly, it feels like people here forgot that Arm is a processor architecture that has been around since 1985. Apple just happened to put one in their computer 35 years later.
- atemerev 6y ago
  So far, I can’t buy any other ARM laptop (I can build a PiTop, but that’s a toy, not a modern computer suitable for work). So yes, high performance ARM laptop in the general availability _is_ a big deal.

bArray 6y ago

I agree, it's highly unlikely they would give away their competitive edge. A lot of their speed-ups may even come directly from dedicated silicon anyway, and that would likely be under lock-and-key for quite some time (until hackers of the future reverse engineer the M1).

MisterTea 6y ago
(until hackers of the future reverse engineer the M1). They wont find anything of interest. The M1 is just a well designed low power mid-performance tier chip. There's no magic when you compare a power efficient arm chip to an x86 chip in the same class. And don't forget that apple has a closed ecosystem so they can build whatever the hell they want without worrying about the technical inertia and legacy baggage the PC platform as a whole is completely built upon.
- bArray 6y ago
  > They wont find anything of interest. I imagine the hackers of tomorrow will reverse engineer the M1 for the same reason they reverse engineer the chips of yesterday - nostalgia. In any case this will be an interesting note in computing history.
smaudet 6y ago
What I feel like a lot of people are ignoring here is that this was a speedup from an underpowered macbook line.... They beefed up core caches a bunch, which likely has a lot more to do with the speedups than any special silicon tricks... People are also ignoring that they have a lot of software infrastructure based around virtualization and auto optimization...its like if the JVM was running at kernel level on a jvm optimized chip with days to perform optimization...of course you would expect that to be blazing fast. Compared to the horror show in Intel land where you have to compile in special support for advanced instructions...