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How Apple’s rivals plan to catch up with the M1 chip

88 points by vinni2 6y ago

madeofpalk 6y ago
I'm sure they do plan to.
trollski 6y ago
they can plan as much as they want and not much will come out of it. to vertically integrate you need both softwaree and hardware arm as company. efficient cross comapny vertical integration is impossibl. microsoft is probably in best position but they will focus on delivering “secuire platform” or something nonsensical like that since they wont be able to compete on power/efficiency.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  Why is vertical integration necessary for making faster chips? No reason Microsoft wouldn't port to a new ARM variant from e.g. nVidia, or some other RISC.
  - yokem55 6y ago
    The argument is an economic one - if all you are doing is selling a chip, and competing with others selling chips, you only can capture the margin on the chip. A vertically integrated vendor can capture margins across the whole product bundle and do things like charge $200 for 8gb of ram. That extra margin makes it possible to sustain low to no margins on the actual cpu, and you can afford to make much bigger chips at a more advanced process node. It also makes it easy to add specialized accelerators and processor instructions that you can then build support for in the operating system you ship.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      And yet Intel (and at various times AMD) has been extremely profitable, and not hesitant to spend billions on R&D. If you have a performance advantage you've moved out of the commodity space. I've no doubt Apple could sell billions of M1 chips if it wanted, with considerable profit (huge margins even after design costs), but it won't because it can use them to differentiate (and not just to sell overpriced RAM). (And because for decades Apple has suffered from press about its chips being slower than competitors'.) There is no processor feature of a modern CPU that doesn't give advantage to all the operating systems that use it. VT-x virtualisation, AVX, AES-NI, ARM Neon: all are used by MacOS, Linux and Windows. TEEs (SGX+MEE/TrustZone/SEV, Google Titan, Apple T2) serve similar purposes and have similar flaws (like permanent exploits) and trade-offs (same CPU -> side channels, uarch complexity problems, different CPU -> cost; separate chip -> heterogeneity, cost). It seems like the Titan/T2 approach leads to higher security, but I'm not sure that is settled yet. A new arch like RISC-V could do better (though it doesn't look like RISC-V will do that). I would love to see hardware support for micro/nano kernels, but that seems as far away as ever. Obviously it is good to have a guaranteed client for your chips, but I can't see it stopping Intel if shoestring outfits can build something like RISC-V.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    It's difficult to switch IAs without the cooperation of OS vendor, device driver authors, and ideally app developers. It's probably easier to achieve that coordination when there's a vertical integrator who can strong-arm everyone to make that migration.
  - rmah 6y ago
    The M1 chip is a good example of where vertical integration is helpful. My understanding is that apple spent considerable effort on baking into silicon the ability to do some common memory-management related OSX/iOS low-level operations. For a chip vendor that sells to a broader market, this is probably not worth the effort. That said, there are, of course, also downsides to stronger vertical integration.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      > My understanding is that apple spent considerable effort on baking into silicon the ability to do some common memory-management related OSX/iOS low-level operations. I think they profiled these operations easily and made sure that they were cheap to execute on their CPU but I'm not certain there's dedicated silicon for that.
      - angry_octet 6y ago
        Additionally, I can't think of anything that would be useful for MacOS (Mach related or not) that wouldn't also help other operating systems.
  - aledalgrande 6y ago
    Moving faster.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  What made PC big in the first place was compatibility between vendors. I don't think any of those companies will be sacrificing the compatibility anytime soon. Even if Microsoft was to release a vertically integrated product it would be more like Intel's NUC and Ultrabook branding, a guideline for OEMs on how to build good systems. Similarly Microsoft hasn't gone into war with Lenovo, Dell, HP and Asus by selling Surface laptops.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
This article doesn't seem to have a lot to it other than "Apple's CPU efforts will motivate Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD to do better." And, you know, sure. I don't think we expected any of them to say "Welp, guess we better just close up shop now," did we. (I suspect of those three, AMD's the one to watch. Not to discount Qualcomm and Intel completely, but they've definitely had a feeling of coasting for years.)
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  There are rumors that Intel is about to replace its current CEO, Bob Swan. If so, I'll be curious to see if that affects Intel's technical competitiveness.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    "Beatings and CEO replacements will continue until morale improves"
    - burnthrow 6y ago
      Swan is a Jack Welch protege, so...
      - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
        I don't know what that means. Mind explaining?
        burnthrow 6y ago
        Welch school is notorious for overwork and fast firing. It's ironic to see coldtea portray Swan's potential firing as a hit to morale. Swan's a bean counter and a bozo, and Intel needs big changes at the top. Typical: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intels_cfo_i_think_we_have_too.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intels_cfo...
melling 6y ago
A CPU arm’s race is a great thing. Hopefully, RISC-V joins the race.
- nwah1 6y ago
  With all the efforts to isolate China, they are being forced to develop their own fabs and their own architectures. Their obvious choice is to use RISC-V as a base. With the world's largest economy behind it, RISC-V will probably become quite relevant soon.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    America is still the world's largest economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
    - kyriakos 6y ago
      I think that's missing the point of the parent comment. Being the largest doesn't really matter but if they were to put their money somewhere it wouldn't be x86.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Give it time. It's the momentum and room to grow that matters...
    - Zigurd 6y ago
      Nominal GDP is not the best measure for comparing industrial products, especially ones that go into products sold to and used by consumers. In PPP GDP terms, the Chinese economy is larger and PPP GDP is a better measure of how consumers and industrial customers will influence technology development.
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        The question of nominal versus PPP GDP is a bit complicated, but a basic rule of thumb is that nominal GDP is better if you're measuring trade (since the nominal rate is the actual value you'll get during international exchange transactions), whereas PPP works better for individual cost-of-living or quality-of-life metrics. For measuring gross economy size, I would go with nominal GDP.
fmajid 6y ago
TL:DR: vaporware without any concrete details of how they will catch up with the M1, let alone the faster Apple Silicon chips expected in 2021 and 2022.
amelius 6y ago
The big question is: do they continue with their instruction set, or will they choose RISC over CISC.
burnthrow 6y ago
Intel realized they can't sell the same processor for another 10 years by combining more words with "lake." A power-hungry chip that meant most consumers replaced their laptop every few years for no performance benefit, shameful.
no_wizard 6y ago
I personally want to see this end up being something of a consortium effort, one where operating systems won’t need to target specific chips to work, but rather a shared instruction set. I know the M1 decidedly isn’t this but that is the one thing I don’t like from an industry point of view. I like that I can build an Intel or AMD machine and install a wide variety of operating systems as I choose to. That is a key advantage as a consumer of the x86 platform I also think they could catch up faster if they work together on some common industry standard. I don’t remain hopeful that will happen though
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I like that I can build an Intel or AMD machine and install a wide variety of operating systems as I choose to. That is a key advantage as a consumer of the x86 platform A key disadvantage on the other hand is companies coasting for a decade now at the speed/battery/etc front, plus a monoculture with no innovation...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The disadvantage is a consequence of Intel having a de facto monopoly for a decade. But that isn't necessary to have industry standards, as exemplified by what came before it -- there was plenty of competition and advancement in the 90s and early 2000s. For that matter, it's what's happening now. The current Zen line has world-class performance but they're still in systems using ACPI and ATX and PCIe.
  - brnt 6y ago
    AMD has done their best to innovate though, and with Ryzen are succeeding big time. Since Ryzen came out I find CPUs interesting again.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  Design by committee is a very slow process. I doubt the advantages outweigh this huge disadvantage.
MaysonL 6y ago
What might be interesting would be an Ampere Altra Hackintosh…
mdasen 6y ago
Basically, no one has any new plans. Chip makers simply have plans to keep making better chips. There wasn't even discussion of Intel working on better processes or how 5nm helped Apple (and AMD) produce better chips. I think the problem with ARM on the Windows side is that there's no commitment. Qualcomm isn't going to want to create a new category of processor for Windows machines (ie. a 10-15 watt part) without a huge commitment from Microsoft that ARM will end up as a large portion of Windows future (rather than just a single "look, we made an ARM surface that a few people will buy" project). Without that commitment, Qualcomm will certainly supply Microsoft with mobile phone processors, but those will be very slow by comparison. Qualcomm's mobile processors are half of Apple's single-core performance, nevermind the M1. Part of the problem is that no one can (or wants to) force the issue. Apple got up on stage and said, "three years from now, we won't be selling Intel-based laptops. If you don't get on the train, you'll be left behind." Microsoft won't do that. Without that commitment, why should a software firm port its applications to ARM? Every software firm should be thinking, "if we don't do any work, Windows on ARM will be miserable and never get traction." Likewise, any chip maker is going to say, "I don't want to invest in ARM laptop/desktop chips until it's clear that ARM is going to be a major part of the Windows ecosystem." Finally customers are going to think, "I'm not going to buy an ARM laptop until it's clear that Microsoft, the chipmakers, and software firms are all behind this." No one is willing to commit to the future because that future won't exist unless they all move in unison. Apple solves most of that "in-unison" problem. They're the chipmaker, they're the OS maker, and they're the device maker. The only thing Apple doesn't control is third-party devs. However, when you can move three of the four wheels, the other comes along. Apple burned its bridges behind it - or at least is telling the public that. Sure, Apple could abandon its ARM transition and move back to Intel, but realistically they're all-in for Apple Silicon. The Windows world is going to continue to be stuck in a loop where no one wants to commit. Microsoft introduces a solitary ARM-based machine. The processor is worse than Intel's offerings, apps don't support it, they haven't put the effort into a Rosetta 2 that Apple has (you'll have a compatibility layer, but not as good), and third parties aren't rushing to support it (c'mon, it's one niche device). There's no incentive for any party to work hard on this - even Microsoft. If they put lots of effort into a Rosetta 2 system, that's basically wasted effort if ARM isn't going to be a significant part of the future. Might as well wait and see if the ARM laptop catches on before pouring more effort into it. But that becomes a self-fulfilling failure. Without Microsoft committing its full resources to ARM (or substantial enough resources), it will be a second-class experience which will mean that it will fail and not justify continued investment. It requires a leap of faith that Microsoft doesn't have right now. It would require Microsoft to put a lot of effort behind software on ARM. It would require Microsoft to commission an ARM-chip worthy of a top-tier device (and probably lose a lot of money on it for a couple generations while people are skeptical of it). It requires Microsoft to get in front of the world and say, "we're going to make ARM a first-class platform for Windows and we'll show that commitment over the next 3-4 years until you finally believe it." Apple is in an easier position for a few reasons. As I said before, they control more of the stack. There won't be Intel-based laptops a couple years ago for people to compare ARM laptops with. However, the biggest bit might be that they were already making their own chips. Apple was already making chips with double the single-core performance for mobile devices. When Apple launched the M1 Macs, they offered a huge improvement over Intel while lowering power consumption and heat production (and fan noise) by incredible levels. By contrast, when Microsoft puts a Snapdragon into one of their machines, they're usually looking at a slightly slower processor and it gets worse from there without a great Rosetta 2, without app developers on board with porting their apps, etc. Apple's M1 Macs have so many advantages: they're clearly a lot faster, they're clearly a lot cooler temperature-wise, they can run iOS apps (even if that's flawed in some ways), Rosetta 2 offers ahead-of-time translation for a lot of things offering closer-to-native performance even for non-ported things, and app developers are all rushing to get on board. For a customer, an M1 Mac is so exciting - they're amazing devices with huge advantages and a guaranteed commitment from the ecosystem. By contrast, Windows on ARM basically only comes with disadvantages, no compelling reason to try one, and no buy-in from the greater ecosystem.
Zigurd 6y ago
To get an idea how long it will take would-be competitors to get from basically a standing start to rivalling Apple, Apple bought PASemi 12 years ago, in 2008. Google has their own chip designers, as do some other tech companies that are not known for chip design, but nobody except Apple, that anyone knows of, has decided to take on the monumental challenge of general purpose CPU design as part of a vertical integration strategy.
sradman 6y ago
The Apple M1 [1] has set the bar for hybrid 4+4 big.LITTLE laptop-class silicon: > The M1 has four high-performance and four energy-efficient cores, providing a configuration similar to ARM DynamIQ and Intel's hybrid Lakefield and Alder Lake processors. Apple, like other ARM-based smartphone/tablet-class silicon designers, has selected a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architecture. Intel and AMD are incrementally modifying their discreet processor architectures to provide competitive hybrid architectures together with some SoC aspects as AnandTech describes in detail [2]. The Wired article also describes Qualcomm as a competitor coming from the ARM big.LITTLE side of the equation while leaving out other competitors like Samsung and (the defunct?) Huawei/HiSilicon. Nvidia, the current leader in discreet GPU silicon and former competitor in the smartphone/tablet-class silicon market, has announced the acquisition of ARM [3], which adds an interesting plot twist to the competitive landscape. The hybrid core architectures require new schedulers in the OS kernel. Transitioning to new/alternative Instruction Set Architectures, like x64 to ARM64, also requires a translation layer like Apple's Rosetta 2 to help the software transition. Microsoft Windows currently lags being Apple on both of these fronts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Architecture [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefield-all-you-need-to-know https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Changes_of_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Changes_of_ownership
- adrian_b 6y ago
  The 4+4 big.LITTLE configuration is not "laptop-class". It is the right configuration for a CPU with 10 W or 12 W TDP, which is OK only for a fanless ultrabook, like MB Air. For the laptops intended for more serious work you want a CPU with 15 W to 60 W TDP, in which case the right configuration must have at least 8 big cores.
  - sradman 6y ago
    As Apple did not publish official TDP numbers for the M1, AnandTech tried to estimate the TDP of the M1 in the Mac Mini [1]: > In multi-threaded scenarios, power highly depends on the workload. In memory-heavy workloads where the CPU utilisation isn’t as high, we’re seeing 18W active power, going up to around 22W in average workloads, and peaking around 27W in compute heavy workloads. These figures are generally what you’d like to compare to “TDPs” of other platforms, although again to get an apples-to-apples comparison you’d need to further subtract some of the overhead as measured on the Mac mini here – my best guess would be a 20 to 24W range. Lakefield is a 1+4 hybrid architecture with one big Intel Core (the laptop CPU brand name) core and four little Intel Atom cores. I'm not sure what the ideal x+Y combination is for big.LITTLE hybrid silicon for the laptop-class nor the ideal TDP target. From what I've seen, the M1 seems to be the processor to beat along price-per-peformance, performance-per-watt, and all-day-battery dimensions. Independently, the SoC GPU and Universal Memory seem to be in a class of their own. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
jonplackett 6y ago
So in summary... they got nada.
Farfignoggen 6y ago
It's funny that at the same time that Jim Keller was heading up the team that was developing the Zen micro-architecture Keller also had been tasked with managing a second team to develop an ARM ISA Variant and that Project was code named K12. Now K12 is not the ARM Cores that where used in AMD's Seattle Server Processor as Seattle used Arm Holding's reference design A57 cores and that was released as the Opteron A1100 ARM Server processor. But K12 was not that Seattle core as K12 was an in house custom micro-architecture that was similar to Zen but engineered to execute the ARMv8A ISA. And that project K12 along with Project Sky Bridge(Pin Compatible x86/ARM socketed motherboard design) was mothballed in favor of just Zen/x86. So AMD very likely still has the Verilog for its K12 custom ARM core and really AMD's already had the A1100 to market albeit with A57 cores and not any K12 custom ARM cores. So AMD's very well capable of packaging and integrating an ARM core into a usable product. What AMD and Intel are lacking in most is the other non CPU core processing block IP that the M1 has included like the NPU and DSPs and other specialized on SOC IP that are included on the M1. And Apple's in house CPU/SOC teams are really ahead there as is the OS/API and software ecosystems that Apple has developed to make all that happen seamlessly for application developers that are targeting Apple's M1 silicon.
notacoward 6y ago
It seems odd that they never mention Nvidia, which has a bunch of experience with Tegra and now stands to own Arm itself. They'll surely have a part to play in this shake-out.
- immigrantsheep 6y ago
  This is one part that's odd for me as well. The other is how everyone seem to act like CPUs like the Ryzens don't matter anymore because they are not ARM. I mean, I get it, this is nice for some usage. I'm in game development and I don't see things like these making me switch anytime soon. 3D animation, game development, gaming, AI, all of this benefit more from really powerful CPU/GPU and don't care much about power consumption. And this is a big user base. I don't want to sound like I hater (I'm not), and I'm glad something new is happening, but it's not like this going to move suddenly everyone to ARM.
  - lowbloodsugar 6y ago
    OTOH I've spent more money on Switch games this year than any other platform. Meanwhile, two years ago, I returned a Dell because it ran Civ 6 at less than 1 fps, despite its supposedly games focused integrated Vega GPU. My M1 Air manages a solid 60fps, and it's running Civ under Rosetta. I installed Factorio on it and it surprised me with my savegame having been copied over from my PC - it is indistinguishable. I get that neither of these games are Cyberpunk 2077, but most of the games I've enjoyed this year could year could be happily developed on an Air, and once there's a beefier desktop version, I expect even the most demanding level-layout tools will work fine on Apple Silicon. I can see AAA staying intel/nvidia for a long time simply because of tooling, but everyone else, why waste your money? Now, when Apple releases their console...
    - immigrantsheep 6y ago
      I'm really happy for everyone to have the toys they like :) I don't mind/care if people are excited and want to move to the M1 as long as I'm allowed to be happy on my Ryzen/nvidia machine.
jayd16 6y ago
I can't help but feel the elephant in the room is just LPDDR and the extra third of memory bandwidth the M1 has over Intel. ...but no one seems to talk or care about that. All the talk seems to focus on much more arcane things like instruction reorder buffers and not simple fundamentals.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  I mostly agree, but it's not the only thing. Apple made a bunch of incremental improvements in the basics, this being one of the bigger ones. Reducing the movement of data, implementing common operations in hardware (there was mention of an object allocation being an extremely common client software operation that they implemented in hardware), bringing RAM physically closer to processors (reducing the die area and power budget needed for interfaces), higher bandwidth and lower latency paths to backing store--there were a lot of conceptually simple improvements. And perhaps the switch to a more regular instruction set helped somewhat. Apple could see a lot of performance being left on the table in pieces of varying size.
- als0 6y ago
  Don’t 13” Intel MacBooks use LPDDR?
- Macha 6y ago
  Hasn't DDR4 been available to ice lake and mobile ryzen for a while now? Also been a couple of laptops to put desktop class intel cpus in over the years.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Yes, but for whatever reason the M1 is clocked at 60GB/s with Intel's best being around 45GB/s, from what I've read.
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
As a Linux user, it pisses me that the PC industry in general tailors so much to windows. I’d be happy to see more ARM laptops and desktops in the market, but no manufacturer is making them simply because they only aim for Microsoft. Such an obvious loss.
martin_bech 6y ago
There are 2 issues here.. 1 its not going to work, unless they get both the OS, and the apps onboard like apple. 2 they are skating to were the puck is, not were its going to be.. the M1 is apples entry level soc... there will be crazy new socs, im sure of it.
Nomokis 6y ago
I'm terrified of Apple's strategy here. It's a clear message that the strategy of independent manufacturers and vendors is far less effective, at least in a modern context. We're going to see Apple eating up increasing amounts of the market, which is concerning when I particularly care about freedom and Apple is all too eager to lock everything down. We're going to see other companies increasingly look to vertical integration on a scale that we haven't seen in decades. In 50 years, there might not even be any independent manufacturers anymore. Either you buy in to the Apple stack or whoever owns the only other competing stack, if one exists. We'll get to reminisce about the good old days when we could still choose which GPU/CPU/MB/RAM/etc to buy from which manufacturer for the price that we prefer.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Yes, I wonder what it would take for a open platform to be able to match the quality and interconnectivity of Apple. Is there any structure that would make this possible?
  - EricE 6y ago
    "Is there any structure that would make this possible?" Lots of hard work and consensus. Have fun with that. Apple can scratch all the itches - even the boring ones - because they are paying the bills. Open Source's achilles heal. Less than 1% do 99% of the work and if they don't....
  - tatersolid 6y ago
    Based on the history of “Linux on the desktop”: no There’s tons of boring work required to make a polished product (documentation, compatibility work, UX design and testing, global design consistency, etc.) that you simply have to pay people to get done.
hevelvarik 6y ago
Why can’t msft just remove all the asshole from its OS. They would crush this war.
rvz 6y ago
I'm sorry but the 'rivals' are close to almost too late. Apple works around 3 - 4 years ahead of the competition. By the time the 'rivals' catch up with getting M1 performance on an ARM processor, Apple would already have released an M3 or M4 Mac Mini or Mac Pro. Microsoft is probably the closest with the SQ processor in the Surface line-up but is certainly not as performant as the M1. As for everyone else, this plan to 'catch up' might as well call it a day. The M1 chip seems to have dismantled the whole competition for another 3 years, however the development ecosystem is still unoptimised and very early. I'm waiting for an M3 or M4 Mac and when the software is fully optimised for Apple Silicon.

88 points by vinni2 6y ago

I'm sure they do plan to.

they can plan as much as they want and not much will come out of it. to vertically integrate you need both softwaree and hardware arm as company. efficient cross comapny vertical integration is impossibl. microsoft is probably in best position but they will focus on delivering “secuire platform” or something nonsensical like that since they wont be able to compete on power/efficiency.

angry_octet 6y ago
Why is vertical integration necessary for making faster chips? No reason Microsoft wouldn't port to a new ARM variant from e.g. nVidia, or some other RISC.
- yokem55 6y ago
  The argument is an economic one - if all you are doing is selling a chip, and competing with others selling chips, you only can capture the margin on the chip. A vertically integrated vendor can capture margins across the whole product bundle and do things like charge $200 for 8gb of ram. That extra margin makes it possible to sustain low to no margins on the actual cpu, and you can afford to make much bigger chips at a more advanced process node. It also makes it easy to add specialized accelerators and processor instructions that you can then build support for in the operating system you ship.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    And yet Intel (and at various times AMD) has been extremely profitable, and not hesitant to spend billions on R&D. If you have a performance advantage you've moved out of the commodity space. I've no doubt Apple could sell billions of M1 chips if it wanted, with considerable profit (huge margins even after design costs), but it won't because it can use them to differentiate (and not just to sell overpriced RAM). (And because for decades Apple has suffered from press about its chips being slower than competitors'.) There is no processor feature of a modern CPU that doesn't give advantage to all the operating systems that use it. VT-x virtualisation, AVX, AES-NI, ARM Neon: all are used by MacOS, Linux and Windows. TEEs (SGX+MEE/TrustZone/SEV, Google Titan, Apple T2) serve similar purposes and have similar flaws (like permanent exploits) and trade-offs (same CPU -> side channels, uarch complexity problems, different CPU -> cost; separate chip -> heterogeneity, cost). It seems like the Titan/T2 approach leads to higher security, but I'm not sure that is settled yet. A new arch like RISC-V could do better (though it doesn't look like RISC-V will do that). I would love to see hardware support for micro/nano kernels, but that seems as far away as ever. Obviously it is good to have a guaranteed client for your chips, but I can't see it stopping Intel if shoestring outfits can build something like RISC-V.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  It's difficult to switch IAs without the cooperation of OS vendor, device driver authors, and ideally app developers. It's probably easier to achieve that coordination when there's a vertical integrator who can strong-arm everyone to make that migration.
- rmah 6y ago
  The M1 chip is a good example of where vertical integration is helpful. My understanding is that apple spent considerable effort on baking into silicon the ability to do some common memory-management related OSX/iOS low-level operations. For a chip vendor that sells to a broader market, this is probably not worth the effort. That said, there are, of course, also downsides to stronger vertical integration.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > My understanding is that apple spent considerable effort on baking into silicon the ability to do some common memory-management related OSX/iOS low-level operations. I think they profiled these operations easily and made sure that they were cheap to execute on their CPU but I'm not certain there's dedicated silicon for that.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      Additionally, I can't think of anything that would be useful for MacOS (Mach related or not) that wouldn't also help other operating systems.
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  Moving faster.
kyriakos 6y ago
What made PC big in the first place was compatibility between vendors. I don't think any of those companies will be sacrificing the compatibility anytime soon. Even if Microsoft was to release a vertically integrated product it would be more like Intel's NUC and Ultrabook branding, a guideline for OEMs on how to build good systems. Similarly Microsoft hasn't gone into war with Lenovo, Dell, HP and Asus by selling Surface laptops.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

This article doesn't seem to have a lot to it other than "Apple's CPU efforts will motivate Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD to do better." And, you know, sure. I don't think we expected any of them to say "Welp, guess we better just close up shop now," did we. (I suspect of those three, AMD's the one to watch. Not to discount Qualcomm and Intel completely, but they've definitely had a feeling of coasting for years.)

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
There are rumors that Intel is about to replace its current CEO, Bob Swan. If so, I'll be curious to see if that affects Intel's technical competitiveness.
- coldtea 6y ago
  "Beatings and CEO replacements will continue until morale improves"
  - burnthrow 6y ago
    Swan is a Jack Welch protege, so...
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      I don't know what that means. Mind explaining?
      - burnthrow 6y ago
        Welch school is notorious for overwork and fast firing. It's ironic to see coldtea portray Swan's potential firing as a hit to morale. Swan's a bean counter and a bozo, and Intel needs big changes at the top. Typical: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intels_cfo_i_think_we_have_too.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intels_cfo...

melling 6y ago

A CPU arm’s race is a great thing. Hopefully, RISC-V joins the race.

nwah1 6y ago
With all the efforts to isolate China, they are being forced to develop their own fabs and their own architectures. Their obvious choice is to use RISC-V as a base. With the world's largest economy behind it, RISC-V will probably become quite relevant soon.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  America is still the world's largest economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    I think that's missing the point of the parent comment. Being the largest doesn't really matter but if they were to put their money somewhere it wouldn't be x86.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Give it time. It's the momentum and room to grow that matters...
  - Zigurd 6y ago
    Nominal GDP is not the best measure for comparing industrial products, especially ones that go into products sold to and used by consumers. In PPP GDP terms, the Chinese economy is larger and PPP GDP is a better measure of how consumers and industrial customers will influence technology development.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      The question of nominal versus PPP GDP is a bit complicated, but a basic rule of thumb is that nominal GDP is better if you're measuring trade (since the nominal rate is the actual value you'll get during international exchange transactions), whereas PPP works better for individual cost-of-living or quality-of-life metrics. For measuring gross economy size, I would go with nominal GDP.

fmajid 6y ago

TL:DR: vaporware without any concrete details of how they will catch up with the M1, let alone the faster Apple Silicon chips expected in 2021 and 2022.

amelius 6y ago

The big question is: do they continue with their instruction set, or will they choose RISC over CISC.

burnthrow 6y ago

Intel realized they can't sell the same processor for another 10 years by combining more words with "lake." A power-hungry chip that meant most consumers replaced their laptop every few years for no performance benefit, shameful.

no_wizard 6y ago

I personally want to see this end up being something of a consortium effort, one where operating systems won’t need to target specific chips to work, but rather a shared instruction set. I know the M1 decidedly isn’t this but that is the one thing I don’t like from an industry point of view. I like that I can build an Intel or AMD machine and install a wide variety of operating systems as I choose to. That is a key advantage as a consumer of the x86 platform I also think they could catch up faster if they work together on some common industry standard. I don’t remain hopeful that will happen though

coldtea 6y ago
>I like that I can build an Intel or AMD machine and install a wide variety of operating systems as I choose to. That is a key advantage as a consumer of the x86 platform A key disadvantage on the other hand is companies coasting for a decade now at the speed/battery/etc front, plus a monoculture with no innovation...
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The disadvantage is a consequence of Intel having a de facto monopoly for a decade. But that isn't necessary to have industry standards, as exemplified by what came before it -- there was plenty of competition and advancement in the 90s and early 2000s. For that matter, it's what's happening now. The current Zen line has world-class performance but they're still in systems using ACPI and ATX and PCIe.
- brnt 6y ago
  AMD has done their best to innovate though, and with Ryzen are succeeding big time. Since Ryzen came out I find CPUs interesting again.
spiderfarmer 6y ago
Design by committee is a very slow process. I doubt the advantages outweigh this huge disadvantage.

MaysonL 6y ago

What might be interesting would be an Ampere Altra Hackintosh…

mdasen 6y ago

Basically, no one has any new plans. Chip makers simply have plans to keep making better chips. There wasn't even discussion of Intel working on better processes or how 5nm helped Apple (and AMD) produce better chips. I think the problem with ARM on the Windows side is that there's no commitment. Qualcomm isn't going to want to create a new category of processor for Windows machines (ie. a 10-15 watt part) without a huge commitment from Microsoft that ARM will end up as a large portion of Windows future (rather than just a single "look, we made an ARM surface that a few people will buy" project). Without that commitment, Qualcomm will certainly supply Microsoft with mobile phone processors, but those will be very slow by comparison. Qualcomm's mobile processors are half of Apple's single-core performance, nevermind the M1. Part of the problem is that no one can (or wants to) force the issue. Apple got up on stage and said, "three years from now, we won't be selling Intel-based laptops. If you don't get on the train, you'll be left behind." Microsoft won't do that. Without that commitment, why should a software firm port its applications to ARM? Every software firm should be thinking, "if we don't do any work, Windows on ARM will be miserable and never get traction." Likewise, any chip maker is going to say, "I don't want to invest in ARM laptop/desktop chips until it's clear that ARM is going to be a major part of the Windows ecosystem." Finally customers are going to think, "I'm not going to buy an ARM laptop until it's clear that Microsoft, the chipmakers, and software firms are all behind this." No one is willing to commit to the future because that future won't exist unless they all move in unison. Apple solves most of that "in-unison" problem. They're the chipmaker, they're the OS maker, and they're the device maker. The only thing Apple doesn't control is third-party devs. However, when you can move three of the four wheels, the other comes along. Apple burned its bridges behind it - or at least is telling the public that. Sure, Apple could abandon its ARM transition and move back to Intel, but realistically they're all-in for Apple Silicon. The Windows world is going to continue to be stuck in a loop where no one wants to commit. Microsoft introduces a solitary ARM-based machine. The processor is worse than Intel's offerings, apps don't support it, they haven't put the effort into a Rosetta 2 that Apple has (you'll have a compatibility layer, but not as good), and third parties aren't rushing to support it (c'mon, it's one niche device). There's no incentive for any party to work hard on this - even Microsoft. If they put lots of effort into a Rosetta 2 system, that's basically wasted effort if ARM isn't going to be a significant part of the future. Might as well wait and see if the ARM laptop catches on before pouring more effort into it. But that becomes a self-fulfilling failure. Without Microsoft committing its full resources to ARM (or substantial enough resources), it will be a second-class experience which will mean that it will fail and not justify continued investment. It requires a leap of faith that Microsoft doesn't have right now. It would require Microsoft to put a lot of effort behind software on ARM. It would require Microsoft to commission an ARM-chip worthy of a top-tier device (and probably lose a lot of money on it for a couple generations while people are skeptical of it). It requires Microsoft to get in front of the world and say, "we're going to make ARM a first-class platform for Windows and we'll show that commitment over the next 3-4 years until you finally believe it." Apple is in an easier position for a few reasons. As I said before, they control more of the stack. There won't be Intel-based laptops a couple years ago for people to compare ARM laptops with. However, the biggest bit might be that they were already making their own chips. Apple was already making chips with double the single-core performance for mobile devices. When Apple launched the M1 Macs, they offered a huge improvement over Intel while lowering power consumption and heat production (and fan noise) by incredible levels. By contrast, when Microsoft puts a Snapdragon into one of their machines, they're usually looking at a slightly slower processor and it gets worse from there without a great Rosetta 2, without app developers on board with porting their apps, etc. Apple's M1 Macs have so many advantages: they're clearly a lot faster, they're clearly a lot cooler temperature-wise, they can run iOS apps (even if that's flawed in some ways), Rosetta 2 offers ahead-of-time translation for a lot of things offering closer-to-native performance even for non-ported things, and app developers are all rushing to get on board. For a customer, an M1 Mac is so exciting - they're amazing devices with huge advantages and a guaranteed commitment from the ecosystem. By contrast, Windows on ARM basically only comes with disadvantages, no compelling reason to try one, and no buy-in from the greater ecosystem.

Zigurd 6y ago

To get an idea how long it will take would-be competitors to get from basically a standing start to rivalling Apple, Apple bought PASemi 12 years ago, in 2008. Google has their own chip designers, as do some other tech companies that are not known for chip design, but nobody except Apple, that anyone knows of, has decided to take on the monumental challenge of general purpose CPU design as part of a vertical integration strategy.

sradman 6y ago

The Apple M1 [1] has set the bar for hybrid 4+4 big.LITTLE laptop-class silicon: > The M1 has four high-performance and four energy-efficient cores, providing a configuration similar to ARM DynamIQ and Intel's hybrid Lakefield and Alder Lake processors. Apple, like other ARM-based smartphone/tablet-class silicon designers, has selected a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architecture. Intel and AMD are incrementally modifying their discreet processor architectures to provide competitive hybrid architectures together with some SoC aspects as AnandTech describes in detail [2]. The Wired article also describes Qualcomm as a competitor coming from the ARM big.LITTLE side of the equation while leaving out other competitors like Samsung and (the defunct?) Huawei/HiSilicon. Nvidia, the current leader in discreet GPU silicon and former competitor in the smartphone/tablet-class silicon market, has announced the acquisition of ARM [3], which adds an interesting plot twist to the competitive landscape. The hybrid core architectures require new schedulers in the OS kernel. Transitioning to new/alternative Instruction Set Architectures, like x64 to ARM64, also requires a translation layer like Apple's Rosetta 2 to help the software transition. Microsoft Windows currently lags being Apple on both of these fronts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Architecture [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefield-all-you-need-to-know https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Changes_of_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Changes_of_ownership

adrian_b 6y ago
The 4+4 big.LITTLE configuration is not "laptop-class". It is the right configuration for a CPU with 10 W or 12 W TDP, which is OK only for a fanless ultrabook, like MB Air. For the laptops intended for more serious work you want a CPU with 15 W to 60 W TDP, in which case the right configuration must have at least 8 big cores.
- sradman 6y ago
  As Apple did not publish official TDP numbers for the M1, AnandTech tried to estimate the TDP of the M1 in the Mac Mini [1]: > In multi-threaded scenarios, power highly depends on the workload. In memory-heavy workloads where the CPU utilisation isn’t as high, we’re seeing 18W active power, going up to around 22W in average workloads, and peaking around 27W in compute heavy workloads. These figures are generally what you’d like to compare to “TDPs” of other platforms, although again to get an apples-to-apples comparison you’d need to further subtract some of the overhead as measured on the Mac mini here – my best guess would be a 20 to 24W range. Lakefield is a 1+4 hybrid architecture with one big Intel Core (the laptop CPU brand name) core and four little Intel Atom cores. I'm not sure what the ideal x+Y combination is for big.LITTLE hybrid silicon for the laptop-class nor the ideal TDP target. From what I've seen, the M1 seems to be the processor to beat along price-per-peformance, performance-per-watt, and all-day-battery dimensions. Independently, the SoC GPU and Universal Memory seem to be in a class of their own. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

jonplackett 6y ago

So in summary... they got nada.

Farfignoggen 6y ago

It's funny that at the same time that Jim Keller was heading up the team that was developing the Zen micro-architecture Keller also had been tasked with managing a second team to develop an ARM ISA Variant and that Project was code named K12. Now K12 is not the ARM Cores that where used in AMD's Seattle Server Processor as Seattle used Arm Holding's reference design A57 cores and that was released as the Opteron A1100 ARM Server processor. But K12 was not that Seattle core as K12 was an in house custom micro-architecture that was similar to Zen but engineered to execute the ARMv8A ISA. And that project K12 along with Project Sky Bridge(Pin Compatible x86/ARM socketed motherboard design) was mothballed in favor of just Zen/x86. So AMD very likely still has the Verilog for its K12 custom ARM core and really AMD's already had the A1100 to market albeit with A57 cores and not any K12 custom ARM cores. So AMD's very well capable of packaging and integrating an ARM core into a usable product. What AMD and Intel are lacking in most is the other non CPU core processing block IP that the M1 has included like the NPU and DSPs and other specialized on SOC IP that are included on the M1. And Apple's in house CPU/SOC teams are really ahead there as is the OS/API and software ecosystems that Apple has developed to make all that happen seamlessly for application developers that are targeting Apple's M1 silicon.

notacoward 6y ago

It seems odd that they never mention Nvidia, which has a bunch of experience with Tegra and now stands to own Arm itself. They'll surely have a part to play in this shake-out.

immigrantsheep 6y ago
This is one part that's odd for me as well. The other is how everyone seem to act like CPUs like the Ryzens don't matter anymore because they are not ARM. I mean, I get it, this is nice for some usage. I'm in game development and I don't see things like these making me switch anytime soon. 3D animation, game development, gaming, AI, all of this benefit more from really powerful CPU/GPU and don't care much about power consumption. And this is a big user base. I don't want to sound like I hater (I'm not), and I'm glad something new is happening, but it's not like this going to move suddenly everyone to ARM.
- lowbloodsugar 6y ago
  OTOH I've spent more money on Switch games this year than any other platform. Meanwhile, two years ago, I returned a Dell because it ran Civ 6 at less than 1 fps, despite its supposedly games focused integrated Vega GPU. My M1 Air manages a solid 60fps, and it's running Civ under Rosetta. I installed Factorio on it and it surprised me with my savegame having been copied over from my PC - it is indistinguishable. I get that neither of these games are Cyberpunk 2077, but most of the games I've enjoyed this year could year could be happily developed on an Air, and once there's a beefier desktop version, I expect even the most demanding level-layout tools will work fine on Apple Silicon. I can see AAA staying intel/nvidia for a long time simply because of tooling, but everyone else, why waste your money? Now, when Apple releases their console...
  - immigrantsheep 6y ago
    I'm really happy for everyone to have the toys they like :) I don't mind/care if people are excited and want to move to the M1 as long as I'm allowed to be happy on my Ryzen/nvidia machine.

jayd16 6y ago

I can't help but feel the elephant in the room is just LPDDR and the extra third of memory bandwidth the M1 has over Intel. ...but no one seems to talk or care about that. All the talk seems to focus on much more arcane things like instruction reorder buffers and not simple fundamentals.

tuatoru 6y ago
I mostly agree, but it's not the only thing. Apple made a bunch of incremental improvements in the basics, this being one of the bigger ones. Reducing the movement of data, implementing common operations in hardware (there was mention of an object allocation being an extremely common client software operation that they implemented in hardware), bringing RAM physically closer to processors (reducing the die area and power budget needed for interfaces), higher bandwidth and lower latency paths to backing store--there were a lot of conceptually simple improvements. And perhaps the switch to a more regular instruction set helped somewhat. Apple could see a lot of performance being left on the table in pieces of varying size.
als0 6y ago
Don’t 13” Intel MacBooks use LPDDR?
Macha 6y ago
Hasn't DDR4 been available to ice lake and mobile ryzen for a while now? Also been a couple of laptops to put desktop class intel cpus in over the years.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Yes, but for whatever reason the M1 is clocked at 60GB/s with Intel's best being around 45GB/s, from what I've read.

WhyNotHugo 6y ago

As a Linux user, it pisses me that the PC industry in general tailors so much to windows. I’d be happy to see more ARM laptops and desktops in the market, but no manufacturer is making them simply because they only aim for Microsoft. Such an obvious loss.

martin_bech 6y ago

There are 2 issues here.. 1 its not going to work, unless they get both the OS, and the apps onboard like apple. 2 they are skating to were the puck is, not were its going to be.. the M1 is apples entry level soc... there will be crazy new socs, im sure of it.

Nomokis 6y ago

I'm terrified of Apple's strategy here. It's a clear message that the strategy of independent manufacturers and vendors is far less effective, at least in a modern context. We're going to see Apple eating up increasing amounts of the market, which is concerning when I particularly care about freedom and Apple is all too eager to lock everything down. We're going to see other companies increasingly look to vertical integration on a scale that we haven't seen in decades. In 50 years, there might not even be any independent manufacturers anymore. Either you buy in to the Apple stack or whoever owns the only other competing stack, if one exists. We'll get to reminisce about the good old days when we could still choose which GPU/CPU/MB/RAM/etc to buy from which manufacturer for the price that we prefer.

jtsiskin 6y ago
Yes, I wonder what it would take for a open platform to be able to match the quality and interconnectivity of Apple. Is there any structure that would make this possible?
- EricE 6y ago
  "Is there any structure that would make this possible?" Lots of hard work and consensus. Have fun with that. Apple can scratch all the itches - even the boring ones - because they are paying the bills. Open Source's achilles heal. Less than 1% do 99% of the work and if they don't....
- tatersolid 6y ago
  Based on the history of “Linux on the desktop”: no There’s tons of boring work required to make a polished product (documentation, compatibility work, UX design and testing, global design consistency, etc.) that you simply have to pay people to get done.

hevelvarik 6y ago

Why can’t msft just remove all the asshole from its OS. They would crush this war.

rvz 6y ago

I'm sorry but the 'rivals' are close to almost too late. Apple works around 3 - 4 years ahead of the competition. By the time the 'rivals' catch up with getting M1 performance on an ARM processor, Apple would already have released an M3 or M4 Mac Mini or Mac Pro. Microsoft is probably the closest with the SQ processor in the Surface line-up but is certainly not as performant as the M1. As for everyone else, this plan to 'catch up' might as well call it a day. The M1 chip seems to have dismantled the whole competition for another 3 years, however the development ecosystem is still unoptimised and very early. I'm waiting for an M3 or M4 Mac and when the software is fully optimised for Apple Silicon.