4 ms·

AMD and ARM are both eating Intel's lunch lately

• dathinab 6y ago
  It's a bit of nit-picking but I would say AMD and Apple. The M1 is a Apple chip not and ARM chip. Sure it uses ARM IPs including the ARM instruction set. But it doesn't really use the ARM provided IP-cores as far as I know. So the M1 is ARM in the sense that AMD chips are x86 ;=) This seems to be a pointless differentiation but the M1 chips are inherently different from other ARM ISA using chips using ARM IP-cores. Probably the main difference is that they have special hardware support for x86 emulation allowing fast x86 emulation on a ARM ISA CPU which is normally not possible otherwise.
  • BearOso 6y ago
    I believe they still license the ARM designs and just make changes on top of them. The GPUs are also very much PowerVR-based, even though they aren’t branded that way any more. The special hardware for emulation was also mostly debunked. Turns out it’s just a really optimized software emulation layer.
    • the_lucifer 6y ago
      > I believe they still license the ARM designs and just make changes on top of them. Nope. They only license the ISA (Apple has an ARM ISA perpetual license). Apple hasn't used ARM designs since the A6 back in 2012.
  • the_lucifer 6y ago
    > But it doesn't really use the ARM provided IP-cores as far as I know. You are correct. Apple has made fully custom chips since 2012. However the graphics still seems to be PowerVR based (ergo the complaints by Imagination Technologies about IP infringement)