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Apple Silicon is good for everyone. If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. Apple does not need to dominate the PC market to make mo

Apple Silicon is good for everyone. If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. Apple does not need to dominate the PC market to make money. What they deliver pushes other competitors to improve. I, like the commenter I've replied to, can't believe that we're even able to frame a processor power shift like this in a bad light. It shows companies they can build something big without x86 - that's good for hardware in the long run, irrelevant of whether it's Apples variant or not. It's our responsibility, as enthusiasts, to make sure legacy lives on. Plenty of people are building emulators, making home networks with old hardware. It would be much easier if Copyright/Patents expired shorter after the big money has been made. Things should become open source to let everyone in after the inventor has reaped the benefits of their creation.

reader_mode 6y ago
>If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. You say that as if it's about ARM. Plenty of ARM chips on mobile side - none of them come close to Apple mobile performance. Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like Apple has a good chip design department and I don't see how this translates to other ARM devices - Microsoft had their surface with Snapdragon and AFAIK the performance/usability was nowhere close.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  It's not that I meant to be even ARM specific, but it shows that you can build a modern, performant system with your own chips without x86. That sucks for Intel but is fantastic for everyone else. Other vendors using ARM chips means virtualization becomes easier between platforms. Linux servers are going to be running ARM soon with Amazon etc designing their own chips so web devs will want to be ARM native. AMD can essentially take the high end x86 market and dominate gaming alongside Nvidia GPU's and others can experiment elsewhere!
  - schoen 6y ago
    Maybe that will help RISC-V for the same reasons, too!
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      But can one compare them? Isn’t it true that RISC-V is merely an instruction set, whereas ARM is much, much more than that - it’s a whole universe of high-quality hardware designs sold (licensed) by a private company right now. And if some other company starts selling/licensing similarly high-quality designs that use the RISC-V instructions, why would that be exciting?
      - schoen 6y ago
        I'm not particularly expert on this, but it seems like RISC-V is ramping up pretty quickly. Presumably an advantage to customers would be that they ideally wouldn't have any vendor lock-in (they could easily switch to a different RISC-V vendor, or even start manufacturing RISC-V chips themselves). They could also customize the ISA with extensions if they had an application for that (although it seems quite conceivable that that's a possibility with ARM too in some way; I don't really know). I realize that just having a lot of RISC-V hardware options available isn't a guarantee that they're particularly good in terms of their price-power consumption-performance tradeoffs, especially in comparison to ARM (the "whole universe of high-quality hardware designs" that you mention). That may well have more of a delay.
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      The more the merrier!
  - devwastaken 6y ago
    No that sucks for everyone. It sucks for Intel too, but apples chips are now a proprietary design that apple themselves own, where software has to conform to. Nothing good comes from one company owning the entire pie. You create conformance with apple's chips you're subjugating software to apples monopaly whims.
    - bzzzt 6y ago
      Apple is nowhere near 'owning the entire pie'. If anything, by adding the ARM option to the pie it increases the amount of competition. A few years ago (before AMD rebounded with Ryzen) Intel was also a de-facto monopoly, but the only possibility of avoiding them was to settle for significantly less performance. Now we have 3 players in the high-performance desktop market, seems like an improvement to me.

reader_mode 6y ago

>If it succeeds, it shows other businesses how powerful ARM can be. You say that as if it's about ARM. Plenty of ARM chips on mobile side - none of them come close to Apple mobile performance. Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like Apple has a good chip design department and I don't see how this translates to other ARM devices - Microsoft had their surface with Snapdragon and AFAIK the performance/usability was nowhere close.

breakfastduck 6y ago
It's not that I meant to be even ARM specific, but it shows that you can build a modern, performant system with your own chips without x86. That sucks for Intel but is fantastic for everyone else. Other vendors using ARM chips means virtualization becomes easier between platforms. Linux servers are going to be running ARM soon with Amazon etc designing their own chips so web devs will want to be ARM native. AMD can essentially take the high end x86 market and dominate gaming alongside Nvidia GPU's and others can experiment elsewhere!
- schoen 6y ago
  Maybe that will help RISC-V for the same reasons, too!
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    But can one compare them? Isn’t it true that RISC-V is merely an instruction set, whereas ARM is much, much more than that - it’s a whole universe of high-quality hardware designs sold (licensed) by a private company right now. And if some other company starts selling/licensing similarly high-quality designs that use the RISC-V instructions, why would that be exciting?
    - schoen 6y ago
      I'm not particularly expert on this, but it seems like RISC-V is ramping up pretty quickly. Presumably an advantage to customers would be that they ideally wouldn't have any vendor lock-in (they could easily switch to a different RISC-V vendor, or even start manufacturing RISC-V chips themselves). They could also customize the ISA with extensions if they had an application for that (although it seems quite conceivable that that's a possibility with ARM too in some way; I don't really know). I realize that just having a lot of RISC-V hardware options available isn't a guarantee that they're particularly good in terms of their price-power consumption-performance tradeoffs, especially in comparison to ARM (the "whole universe of high-quality hardware designs" that you mention). That may well have more of a delay.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    The more the merrier!
- devwastaken 6y ago
  No that sucks for everyone. It sucks for Intel too, but apples chips are now a proprietary design that apple themselves own, where software has to conform to. Nothing good comes from one company owning the entire pie. You create conformance with apple's chips you're subjugating software to apples monopaly whims.
  - bzzzt 6y ago
    Apple is nowhere near 'owning the entire pie'. If anything, by adding the ARM option to the pie it increases the amount of competition. A few years ago (before AMD rebounded with Ryzen) Intel was also a de-facto monopoly, but the only possibility of avoiding them was to settle for significantly less performance. Now we have 3 players in the high-performance desktop market, seems like an improvement to me.