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Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the
by nexuist 6y ago
Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.
If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86.
That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over the ARM space; in fact I think we will see the emergence of new players as ARM isn't as finicky about licensing their tech as Intel is. The only reason Intel even had a competitor (AMD) in the past 20 years is because they licensed x86 to them before it started becoming the de facto choice.
- spockz 6y agoYou would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.
- zepto 6y agoThere are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.
- bombcar 6y agoEach individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.
- zepto 6y agoThe individual risks are small now, but they weren’t when Apple was recovering from near death.
- cma 6y agoApple started working with ARM in the 80s, eventually used in the Newton. I don't know that they did design directly, but they influenced the changes that became ARM6.
- berkeleyjunk 6y agoI would speculate that the Palo Alto (P.A. Semi) acquisition is what kicked off this round of the Apple semiconductor (r)evolution.
- jimbokun 6y agoThe risk of Apple deciding to design their own chips was massive.
- spfzero 6y agoVertical integration is certainly contrary to mainstream management philosophy these days. Today, the more dependencies you can work into your business plan, the smarter you seem. You’re an expert juggler, woo! That free API you were using got retired? Not your fault, who could have predicted? To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.
- reddog 6y agoLike IBM circa 1968?
- cromulent 6y agoWell, the world was changing and new opportunities arose. I think it's different now compared to then. In 1968 there weren't that many computing devices around. When video games and home computing came around, there were massive opportunities and the entrenched players missed some of them. Same with mobile phones, same with the internet, same with smartphones.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoVertical integration for our Mgt guru generation could not last. In fact the problem of intel not farming out its fab business (and recognise its asset is x86 etc) is the problem. What apple smart at is cut the line to fab. Still ibm then have no consumer whilst apple now has no business and cloud business domination ... still lots of space to play. But if windows moved to arm with the same result I cannot say intel can survive though.
- firebaze 6y agoI guess it's not black magic apple is doing right here. From my experience with big companies, Intel just got buried in its processes, approvals, middle-management etc.pp.; they still got the talent, and in the past years there wasn't any serious competitor to them. The dual wake-up call from AMD and from Apple (ARM), combined with the money Intel has in its pocket will have a serious influence on the cpu market. Unsure if they'll come out ahead, but it will get interesting and probably cheaper, not only for consumers.
- google234123 6y agoARM also has some decades of cruft attached to it.
- r00fus 6y agoARMv8, ie, AArch64 is a redesign/new, and entirely 64 bit with legacy (32bit) support mode tacked on. The design was done to be able to remove legacy without another redesign. To my understanding, this is quite unlike AMD64 (ie, Intel's current 64 bit ISA licensed from AMD) - which extended x86.
- danlugo92 6y agoNo, the aechitecture used in m1 is from 2012
- edrxty 6y agoI'm really hoping one of the other chipmakers jumps on the RISC-V bandwagon. There's substantial potential to do to ARM what ARM did to x86 here. If Intel/AMD/Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever started talking about a significant RISC-V offering I'd be buying as much of their stock as I could.
- acegopher 6y agoRISC-V doesn't offer the same advantage over ARM that ARM has over x86, so that's unlikely to happen.
- edrxty 6y agoI work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoThat sounds really interesting — what makes RISC-V better than ARM for this?
- edrxty 6y agoPartly the design of the core, partly the open source nature. Speaking from experience, it's really hard to push the envelope with ARM chips as they refuse to license them for FPGA deployments so there's not a lot of work being done there.
- varispeed 6y agoWhat stops anyone from implementing ARM ISA on FPGA? If you think of an ISA like an API - that's something that is not copyrightable, so in theory anyone could do ARM on FPGA. So I am guessing that nobody wants to bear the cost of such development and also risking potential lawsuit?
- amelius 6y ago> The opportunity for competition exists Perhaps, but I guess it would take on the order of a decade for a competitor to build their technology including an ecosystem with customers. And who says they won't copy Apple's business practices? > but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. That's because the complexity of the semiconductor industry is daunting. You need far more than a team of IC designers, especially if you want your product to become successful in a world where there is one main player.
- mistersys 6y agoSure if someone is starting from scratch. We have Microsoft, Android and Linux which are alternative computing platforms, and android + linux are already fully ARM. Apple's chips are still much faster than most Android ARM chips, but Android ARM manufacturers are not starting from zero.
- Bud 6y agoYou mean the business practices wherein Apple is 10x better on privacy than everyone else to the point that Facebook and Google are now being forced to be honest with users, disclose all the user data they are stealing and selling, and disclose all the privacy and security risks inherent in their business models? Sign me up for more of those kinds of "business practices", thank you very much.
- skinnymuch 6y agoApple is reportedly beefing up their mobile ads business. Hard to say privacy is the reason when Apple immediately attempts to benefit directly financially and likely with some privacy hits.
- Bud 6y agoWould be helpful if you could support this with some links and evidence. I monitor this issue a lot, and haven't seen anything that presents added privacy risks, at least not yet.
- enos_feedler 6y ago"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, invested aggressively in it, from silicon to security and everyone got caught with their pants down.
- dmix 6y agoThere's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here. Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.
- enos_feedler 6y agoIn the consumer space there are only 2 paths for a viable competitor to emerge. 1) a coordinated ecosystem attack or 2) an individual company doubles down. There are things that lead me to believe 1) can't happen. Google ultimately acquiring Fitbit instead of ecosystem compatibility and integration. It seems like the giants are needing to acquire the pieces to build their own Apple, rather than partner with them. Also Google and Microsoft have complementary businesses but they barely coordinate on this. The closest thing I have seen is Android helping Microsoft with Dual screen Android devices. In most other areas they are setup to compete (chromeos vs. windows, azure vs. gcp, stadia vs. xbox cloud, gsuite vs office, bing vs google search etc). 2) Samsung is the most equipped to lead this.
- josephg 6y agoHow far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?
- Elora 6y ago> The opportunity for competition exists This is so deep and powerful if you really think about it. This is what we were promised. While not perfect, I applaud Apple for at least trying.
- deaddodo 6y ago> Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. > If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. They didn't even do anything special. People have been telling multiple ARM IP holders to build a wide, powerful chip for ages. Especially for the server space. Apple is just the first one to actually do it. AMD and Intel have been doing it all along, which is why it's so impressive that Apple's chip is finally in spitting distance of them despite being a fairly normal design with some specific optimizations for use cases.
- ghettoimp 6y agoMaybe the magic is just the discipline to somehow keep tuning and optimizing everything across the chip. Year after year they release another power-sipping design with another 10-20% performance. It's not a sudden tsunami, but an ever rising tide.
- varispeed 6y agoI wonder how much they paid to engineers to pull this off. If none of them has become a multi millionaire by now, the competition would have an easy way to poach them.
- thesz 6y agoIn 2009, the price to have a chip prototype was about $1M/year in software licenses and $50K-$100K per fab evaluation with half an year delay. That was 12 years ago. I guess software licenses go up and I am certain that current processes have chip prototypes to cost $500K-$1.5M per evaluation. Yes, you can say everyone sit on their hands and/or asses. I say that having money in bank for several dozens of thousands of chip prototypes certainly helps Apple in the design.
- nightowl_games 6y agoThis is a really cute pep talk. "Think outside the box. Just like apple did." But it is completely devoid of meaning. On what grounds do you suggest you know anything about how apple accomplished M1? Or are you just intuiting that it was some sort of "outside the box" thinking? Maybe it was raw engineering and management mastery combined with elite head hunting and millions of dollars poured into research and design over the course of a decade? Nah. Apple's too cool for that. Probably some eureka moment during meditation class, right?