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It's all going to come down to user experience and versatility. Apple is doing some crazy stuff with the M1, but I personally would chock (most of it) it up mor
by pathartl 6y ago
It's all going to come down to user experience and versatility. Apple is doing some crazy stuff with the M1, but I personally would chock (most of it) it up more to being clever than true innovation. I think only Intel needs to be concerned right now because they're being outpaced by both AMD and Apple. Additionally if the acquisition of Arm by Nvidia results in what people expect, Intel will basically be losing out in every market.
Going back to versatility, there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure, so there's still a massive market for AMD or other Arm manufacturers to target. For the consumer side unless Apple releases a chip that results in them making a sub-$800 laptop, they're just simply not going to capture a large market. With the rise of devices like Chromebooks in education and home there's still something to be said for Apple devices just being too expensive.
In general, Apple devices also leave a LOT to be desired for any sort of large scale enterprise organization. Unless they go back to their 90's and early 00's mindset, I just can't see this changing.
It's certainly exciting to see the CPU market being upended by Apple and AMD, as well as the potential future for a large architecture shift, but I don't think there's any real threat to market shares as a whole.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou don’t just go and make ever part of your chip architecture wider by being clever. Well, there was probably some cleverness involved, but it’s not like this has been a one-off trick.
- free2OSS 6y agoThis is Apple we are talking about. The last 20 years have been tricks.
- nix23 6y agoHehe, i see what you did here ;)
- pathartl 6y agoBy clever I mostly mean, from what I've seen from reports, handling stuff like transition from x86 to arm by baking in instruction translation into the die. Their approach with some things is a bit different from what others are doing, but it's not like they wholly invented a new 2nm process that breaks what we thought the laws of physics were, they're using the same fab as everybody else. Thus their design at the moment is clever.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure AWS already have a series of AArch64 instance-types which they will most likely continue to improve.
- pathartl 6y agoI didn't say that they wouldn't go Arm, I said they wouldn't buy chips from Apple. Apple would never sell it like that.
- judge2020 6y agoCurrent Macs on AWS run via real Apple hardware, so I don't see how M1 will be different. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-bu...
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoRight, but they're going to remain a tiny niche. They're priced so highly that there's no risk of them cannibalizing Amazon's own AArch64 instance-types.
- simonh 6y agoI don’t know about under $800, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple didn’t keep the current M1 Air on the lineup at a lower price when the Airs get their next revamp. This is exactly what Apple did with the iPad, nowadays you can get a very decently specced 10.2” iPad with their 2018 CPU for $309. That’s astonishing, but it’s a great way for Apple to get extended value out of their silicon.