5 ms·

I love this for a few reasons. First off, we get to see a deeper look into what Apple did, and I'm enjoying how they went outside the established norms... Somet

I love this for a few reasons. First off, we get to see a deeper look into what Apple did, and I'm enjoying how they went outside the established norms... Sometimes the Apple cart (pun not intended) needs overturning. Secondly, the fact that they are able to dig into this much depth bodes well for competitors to reverse engineer similar performance into other platforms

jbob2000 6y ago
Computers used to be a "commodity of commodities". The motherboard was made by one manufacturer, the memory was made by another one, the CPU by a different one, etc. etc. Unless a competitor controls and owns their supply chain like Apple does, I don't see how they can compete; they need those "established norms" otherwise they won't be able to find commodities that work with their final product.
- spijdar 6y ago
  Computers being "commodities of commodities" is kind of a recent phenomenon. For a while, the norm was to do exactly what Apple is doing. It was much more common to design and market your own custom processor or, at the least, custom chipsets coupled with your own firmware/OS, like most unix workstations, non-IBM-PCs like the Amiga, Atari, Macs... It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Personally I think that could be a good thing if it allows us to once again become experimental with personal computing operating systems, an are that has stagnated significantly in the past 2 decades due in part to the fact that any new contender has to support a ludicrous amount of hardware to be usable on a wide variety of PCs. Then again it could all go horribly wrong and leave us with nothing but highly locked-down terminals suitable only for connection to our glorious cloud masters.
    - spideymans 6y ago
      Also innovation in the PC space has pretty much been limited by whatever Intel is willing to accommodate. I'm happy we're beginning to move away from this.
    - ryukafalz 6y ago
      The flip side to that is that OSes that are built for specific hardware are only useful so long as that hardware continues to be produced. I don't think we'd have Linux as a useful contender today if it had been locked to a specific company's hardware; there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). I'm more excited about things like rump kernels for hardware support across disparate OSes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel
      - spijdar 6y ago
        > there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). You're blaming BeOS's failure on the BeBox? Every release of BeOS that was marked as a "full release" (as opposed to a developer preview or a "preview release") could run on Intel hardware, and the BeBox itself was discontinued long before then. This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. Similar home OSes didn't enforce privilege separation or multiple users, but at least had the framework -- BeOS essentially just runs everything as root. It had some neat tricks, but was a pretty underdeveloped OS in some key areas. The fact it never took off isn't that surprising to me, and it's not just because Be was a small company or that it's hard for an underdog to get market share in a crowded space (both of which are also true). It just wasn't really well suited for "general purpose computing" in the same way that e.g. Linux, WinNT, or Darwin are.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. What need does a personal computer OS have for multi-user support? The median number of users on a personal computer at any given time is 1. Even in the rare case that two or more people want to use the same computer at separate times and desire to protect eachother's files from eachother, they can use encryption rather than fake OS enforced security. Privilege separation, in order to keep malicious applications from compromising the user's files, has become significantly more important but it wasn't that important back then.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    >It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space. It's possible. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it, but it's possible. Qualcomm is just licensing ARM's standard core designs. If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product. There's a problem there, though (that Apple doesn't have): a random PC OEM doesn't control the OS. So that means they have to beg Microsoft to add support for their custom architecture, which MS may not want to do, and instead say "we're standardizing on what Qualcomm does, so do that or get bent".
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Is that not still the case? My machines aren't that old, and I'm fairly certain that is the case in both of them. In fact, I'm thinking about upgrading my working memory on one of them looking at the 50% indicator at my screen right now for what is only having 12 tabs open in a web browser and not doing much other heavy lifting.
mhh__ 6y ago
What norms are there that actually make any difference? The cool stuff in M1 is the design work into the processing hardware, aren't the peripherals a bit of a hodge-podge of old this and non-standard that?
- 95014_refugee 6y ago
  > aren't the peripherals a bit of a hodge-podge of old this and non-standard that? There are certainly "old" peripherals in the SoC (the UART comes to mind). There's probably not a lot of norm-busting in this, There are certainly "non-standard" peripherals in the SoC (if by "non-standard" you mean "nobody else has them"). As the article notes, many if not most other folks "just" check off a couple dozen boxes on the ARM PrimeCell Shopping List (plus a few 3p vendors) and stack the resulting blobs together. Going your own way and building major components yourself (and all of the major components, including the fabric / interconnects) is very definitely not the "norm".

jbob2000 6y ago

Computers used to be a "commodity of commodities". The motherboard was made by one manufacturer, the memory was made by another one, the CPU by a different one, etc. etc. Unless a competitor controls and owns their supply chain like Apple does, I don't see how they can compete; they need those "established norms" otherwise they won't be able to find commodities that work with their final product.

spijdar 6y ago
Computers being "commodities of commodities" is kind of a recent phenomenon. For a while, the norm was to do exactly what Apple is doing. It was much more common to design and market your own custom processor or, at the least, custom chipsets coupled with your own firmware/OS, like most unix workstations, non-IBM-PCs like the Amiga, Atari, Macs... It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Personally I think that could be a good thing if it allows us to once again become experimental with personal computing operating systems, an are that has stagnated significantly in the past 2 decades due in part to the fact that any new contender has to support a ludicrous amount of hardware to be usable on a wide variety of PCs. Then again it could all go horribly wrong and leave us with nothing but highly locked-down terminals suitable only for connection to our glorious cloud masters.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    Also innovation in the PC space has pretty much been limited by whatever Intel is willing to accommodate. I'm happy we're beginning to move away from this.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    The flip side to that is that OSes that are built for specific hardware are only useful so long as that hardware continues to be produced. I don't think we'd have Linux as a useful contender today if it had been locked to a specific company's hardware; there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). I'm more excited about things like rump kernels for hardware support across disparate OSes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel
    - spijdar 6y ago
      > there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). You're blaming BeOS's failure on the BeBox? Every release of BeOS that was marked as a "full release" (as opposed to a developer preview or a "preview release") could run on Intel hardware, and the BeBox itself was discontinued long before then. This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. Similar home OSes didn't enforce privilege separation or multiple users, but at least had the framework -- BeOS essentially just runs everything as root. It had some neat tricks, but was a pretty underdeveloped OS in some key areas. The fact it never took off isn't that surprising to me, and it's not just because Be was a small company or that it's hard for an underdog to get market share in a crowded space (both of which are also true). It just wasn't really well suited for "general purpose computing" in the same way that e.g. Linux, WinNT, or Darwin are.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. What need does a personal computer OS have for multi-user support? The median number of users on a personal computer at any given time is 1. Even in the rare case that two or more people want to use the same computer at separate times and desire to protect eachother's files from eachother, they can use encryption rather than fake OS enforced security. Privilege separation, in order to keep malicious applications from compromising the user's files, has become significantly more important but it wasn't that important back then.
- spideymans 6y ago
  >It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space. It's possible. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it, but it's possible. Qualcomm is just licensing ARM's standard core designs. If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product. There's a problem there, though (that Apple doesn't have): a random PC OEM doesn't control the OS. So that means they have to beg Microsoft to add support for their custom architecture, which MS may not want to do, and instead say "we're standardizing on what Qualcomm does, so do that or get bent".
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Is that not still the case? My machines aren't that old, and I'm fairly certain that is the case in both of them. In fact, I'm thinking about upgrading my working memory on one of them looking at the 50% indicator at my screen right now for what is only having 12 tabs open in a web browser and not doing much other heavy lifting.

mhh__ 6y ago

What norms are there that actually make any difference? The cool stuff in M1 is the design work into the processing hardware, aren't the peripherals a bit of a hodge-podge of old this and non-standard that?

95014_refugee 6y ago
> aren't the peripherals a bit of a hodge-podge of old this and non-standard that? There are certainly "old" peripherals in the SoC (the UART comes to mind). There's probably not a lot of norm-busting in this, There are certainly "non-standard" peripherals in the SoC (if by "non-standard" you mean "nobody else has them"). As the article notes, many if not most other folks "just" check off a couple dozen boxes on the ARM PrimeCell Shopping List (plus a few 3p vendors) and stack the resulting blobs together. Going your own way and building major components yourself (and all of the major components, including the fabric / interconnects) is very definitely not the "norm".