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Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another archite
by rob74 5y ago
Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes (FreeBSD, ReactOS anyone?). For mobile devices, we had a bit of a "Cambrian explosion", unfortunately followed by a very quick extinction, which left us with another duopoly. Here also there are free alternatives which however have very marginal market share.
As for actual CPU architectures, there are only two that really matter at the moment: x86/AMD64 and ARM. It's of course very cool that ARM has proved itself flexible enough to be used from (almost) the smallest embedded devices to supercomputers (not to mention Apple M1), but there's not that much diversity as there was in the 80s either...
- slver 5y agoApple’s arm has a partially different instruction set than other arm devices. So it’s not just arm, something to consider.
- wayoutthere 5y agoEvery ARM licensee does this though; they license the core designs from ARM and add features (including additional instructions) around it to package into an SOC. It’s just that Apple has the scale to design their own SOCs instead of buying one from Qualcomm or Samsung.
- saagarjha 5y agoMost licensees do not, in fact, add their own instructions.
- bluGill 5y agoWhich most - there is most as in number of cores shipped, and most as in number of organizations who have a license. The second I have no doubt you are correct - I know of several organizations that have licensed ARM just to ensure they have a long term plan to get more without the CPU going obsolete again (one company has spent billions porting software that was perfectly working on a 16 bit CPUs that went obsolete - there was plenty of CPU for any foreseeable feature, but no ability to get more). These want something standard - they are kind of hoping that they can combine a production run with someone else in 10 years when they need more supply and thus save money on setup fees. The first is a lot harder. The big players ship a lot of CPUs, and they the volumes to make some customization for their use case worth it. However I don't know how to get real numbers.
- saurik 5y agoThis is the first I have heard of Apple doing this, and I feel like, in my position, I would have heard of this... I have just spent some time searching around myself trying to find any such reference and the closest I could find was the opposite: an article from Electrical Engineering Journal that said that Apple could have, but stated they didn't need to and pretty strongly implied they didn't, even going so far as to claim that they couldn't in any drastic way due redirections "even Apple" has on ARM licensees. https://www.eejournal.com/article/whats-inside-apple-silicon-processors/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/whats-inside-apple-silicon... Can you provide some more information on this? I would love to be able to hit them on this, as this would actually be really upsetting to a lot of people I know who work on toolchains.
- mumblemumble 5y agohttps://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/15/the-secret-apple-m1-amx-apple-matrix-coprocessor-reverseengineering-m1-apple-apple-erikengheim/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/15/the-secret-apple-m1-amx... The rumor I've heard is that Apple is keeping their custom extensions to the ISA undocumented in deference to ARM's desire not to have the instruction set just completely fragment into a bunch of mutually incompatible company-specific dialects. It's worth noting that the article you link predates the public release of the M1 by a good 10 months. Given how secretive Apple tends to be about these sorts of things, one can only assume that it was based almost entirely on rumor and conjecture.
- therealcamino 5y agoUndocumented or not, they would be hard to hide: I would think you could scan through MacOS binaries and find them, if they exist. (I guess it's still possible they exist even if you don't find them, maybe unused or only produced by JITs, but that doesn't sound very useful.)
- mumblemumble 5y agoYup. If you follow the links from that article, you'll get to the site of the person who found and documented them. It doesn't look like it took too much effort. But it's not really about trying to prevent anyone from discovering that these opcodes exist. It's about trying to discourage their widespread use. If it's undocumented, then they don't have to support it, and anyone who's expecting support knows to steer clear. That gives them more freedom to change the behavior of this coprocessor in future iterations of the chip. And people can still get at them, because Apple uses them in system libraries such as the OS X implementation of BLAS.
- mumblemumble 5y agoNot only is it an incumbent switching to another architecture; it's an incumbent switching to another incumbent architecture. ARM is older than PowerPC and almost as old as the Macintosh itself; it came out in 1985.
- stsquad 5y agoThe 64bit Aarch64 ISA has very little in common with the original ISA from '85.
- vanderZwan 5y agoIt makes about as much sense as calling humans "lactating fish"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mumblemumble 5y agoWhere the category "fish" isn't a clade - it's possible to evolve to no longer be a fish - it's more comparable to a specific generation of ARM chips, like perhaps ARM32, than it is to the ARM line in general. It would be weird to say "64-bit ARMv5" in the same way that it would be weird to say "lactating fish". But it is not weird to say "64-bit ARM" for the same reason it isn't weird to say "lactating euteleostome."
- tekproxy 5y agoWhile this is a better analogy and worth reading, "fish" is funnier.
- vanderZwan 5y agoI appreciate that you used my bad joke as a fact-checking opportunity to spread some scientific knowledge :)
- leecarraher 5y agopowerpc/IBM is still a big player in the server/HP computing market. They do many cool things with their architectures since cost is less of a factor(dynamic smp, switcheable endieness, OMI) but they suck to build code for from an out-of-box experience standpoint.
- saati 5y agoThat's POWER, a different ISA, there are still some PowerPC embedded cpus but it's just slowly dying.
- leecarraher 5y agotrue, was just going off the debian package architecture naming PPC/ppc64el
- astrange 5y agoPower and PowerPC are essentially the same ISA, I don’t know what that post has a problem with.
- halikular 5y agoWe're getting open source RISC-V wich seems more promising long term than ARM.
- greyhair 5y agoWe'll see. ARM architecture is now about 36 years old. I believe RISC V originated about 10 years ago. I think MIPS started about 40 years ago, but I believe it has finally ground to a stop.
- als0 5y agoThe way I see it is that x86 is still around despite ARM, so ARM will still be around despite RISC-V. No reason why all three can't exist.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- klelatti 5y agoNot sure why you'd say that - especially if you look at Arm v9 and the fact that the architecture is starting to make inroads into there server market. RISC-V is open source which is great in some respects but also not helpful in others.
- zokula 5y agoYou assume Risc V will be open source when it reaches consumers hands.
- halikular 5y agoJust the design. Firmware and software probably not except for FOSS purist products.
- lizknope 5y agoThe original Apple I / II before the Macintosh used the MOS 6502 processor.
- colanderman 5y ago6502 is arguably a "proto-ARM", so one could say Apple has come full circle.
- colejohnson66 5y agoWhat do you mean “proto ARM”? I thought the 6502 was based on the MC6800 (the predecessor to the 68k)?
- Angostura 5y agoNo the 6502 was Chuck Peddle's baby - not related. It had a quite a nice simple instructions set.
- colanderman 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Design_concepts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Design_concep... Parts of ARM were modeled after 6502, it having been the processor used in the company's first successful microcomputer.
- a1369209993 5y agoIt's arguably a proto-RISC architechture (eg ADD has to be coded explicitly from CLC and one or more ADC, register file is memory locations 00-FF, etc), but it has little to do with ARM.
- colanderman 5y agoMy understanding was that much of the design of ARM was literally based on 6502: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Design_concepts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Design_concep... Edit: Granted, Sophie Wilson, one of the designers of ARM, is on record stating that 6502 didn't inspire anything in particular, beside being one of the few inputs to her pool of ideas (16032 and Berkeley RISC being the others): https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wilson https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wil... So... arguably :)