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It's not like 2000, where if you're behind a good run of fab research will rocket you forward with some sweet increases in clock frequency. We're nearing the e
by AtlasBarfed 6y ago
It's not like 2000, where if you're behind a good run of fab research will rocket you forward with some sweet increases in clock frequency.
We're nearing the end of the road on node shrinks, Intel can best hope to be marginally ahead on process.
What Apple's M1 shows is that a fundamental redesign is needed to get gains. Intel's problems appear to be in design, software, and business execution.
But doing a new ISA or muscling into ARM or other radical things precisely require design/software/business execution or it will utterly fail.
M1 is going to open the floodgates for ARM on PCs. That's what will kill Intel.
AMD can probably pivot, I have faith in their designers.
- passive 6y agoThe Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo leap was based on architecture, not fab tech. It was a very significant shift in chip design philosophy. Intel being ahead in fab tech didn't hurt, but it's far from their only strength. There's no reason to believe M1 will open any sort of gates for Arm on PC. It's not like other Arm CPUs will be running Mac OS, or M1s will be running Windows. The whole pre-Intel period for Mac OS didn't do anything to diminish x86 on the desktop. Now, Chromebooks are something of an argument for ARM on the desktop, as they at least seem to provide identical behavior regardless of ISA, but they aren't putting up the necessary numbers quite yet. x86 still owns PC gaming, and has a pretty solid hold on console gaming. I'm not going to be worried at all for Intel until that shifts too.