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They are licensing ARM cores; which as of now cannot compete with Apple silicon. While there are using some future ARM core, and I've read rumors that future d
by dhruvdh 6y ago
They are licensing ARM cores; which as of now cannot compete with Apple silicon.
While there are using some future ARM core, and I've read rumors that future designs might try to emulate what has made Apple cores successful; we cannot say whether Apple designs will stagnate or continue to improve at current rate.
There is potential for competition from Qualcomm after their Nuvia acquisition though.
- adgjlsfhk1 6y agoIt seems weird to me to say that arm cores can't compete with apple silicon given that apple doesn't own fabs. They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this).
- seabrookmx 6y ago> They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this) No the Apple Silicon chips use the arm _instruction set_ but they do not use their core design. Apple designs their core in house, much like Qualcomm does with snapdragon. Both of these companies have an architectural license which allows them to do this.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoQualcomm no longer makes their own cores - they just use ARM reference IP designs since the Kryo. That will probably change with their Nuvia acquisition.
- devmor 6y agoWhat do you mean ARM cores can't compete with Apple silicon? "Apple silicon" are ARM cores.
- ac29 6y agoMaybe not in single threaded performance, but Apple has no server grade parts. Ampere, for example, is shipping an 80 core ARM N1 processor that puts out some truely impressive multithreaded performance. An M1 Mac is an entirely different market - making a fast 4+4 core laptop processor doesn't neccesarily translate into making a fast 64+ core server processor.
- martinald 6y agoTo be honest it does though. You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server and even at full load you would be at 150W, which is about half of the high core count Xeons. Obviously not as simple as that, but the thermal fundamentals are right. The 40 core Xeon also costs around 10k. There's rumors that the new iMac will have a 20 core M1 (16+4). I imagine that will be faster than even the top line $10k Xeon. I have absolutely no doubt apple could put together a server based on the M1 which would wipe the floor with Intel if they wanted to. But I very much doubt they will since it is so far out of their core competencies these days. I have absolutely no doubt apple could produce a ridiculously good server CPU from the M1. I doubt they will actually do it though.
- seniorivn 6y agoif they could easily do that(competitor for xeon) they would do it, it's a huge and very stable market, there is no reason to ignore it, if you have such a big advantage.
- saagarjha 6y agoOther than the fact that Apple ignores markets all the time that it is just not interested in.
- physicsguy 6y ago> You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server Not really, part of why the ARM chips are so good is that the memory bandwidth is so fast. With 40+40 cores you're going to have at least NUMA to contend with, which always hampers multithreaded performance.