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> Now that most of Apple's top talents from its CPU division have left for greener pastures, [...] ?? > [...] somehow delay their competitors from launching n

by tpush 5y ago

> Now that most of Apple's top talents from its CPU division have left for greener pastures, [...] ?? > [...] somehow delay their competitors from launching new and better chips while Apple scrambles to find new talents in the limited pool available. Nonsense, Apple buying capacity because they actually need to manufacture that much stuff. Anything else would be completely idiotic. > Apple has bet their future on Apple Silicon, and it badly needs to retain a lead on other competing CPU for a year or two, to capture sufficient market share (the perception of Apple Silicon leading over other CPUs is very important for this). Share of what market are they supposedly wanting to capture? Share of PCs in general? They care about share of premium devices, where they are very well represented. Share of Macs themselves? That'll solve itself, since Apple won't be offering non-Apple Silicon Macs at some close point in the future. > TSMC also seems to be taking a big gamble, pissing of existing good clients. They take the offer with the most money attached, no one's (neither AMD nor Qualcom) surprised by that.

sudosysgen 5y ago
Apple doesn't need to manufacture their stuff at TSMCs latest protest, neither do AMD or Qualcomm or NVidia. Taking the offer with the most money attached is not a good idea in the long term. They're currently providing unprecedented leverage to Apple. Apple Silicon needs the performance crown as the comment you're replying to mentioned. Having a good market share in the premium sphere is not good enough - if instead of trading blows but still ending up ahead of AMD, AMD processors also were on 5nm with DDR5 memory they'd be plainly slower. Then Apple would be in the position where their laptops are slower and have worse battery life than the competition and also Docker doesn't work right for developers and some of your VSTs don't work at all, and few people would take the pain of changing architecture for worse performance.
- kergonath 5y ago
  I find quite interesting how you frame Apple designing good SoCs as a nefarious plot to take over the world and somehow kill companies they’re not competing with. That’s some impressive mental gymnastics.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The architecture itself is worse than it's competitor. Even with a node advantage and 3x faster RAM at the same power consumption, it cannot beat a 5980HS in single thread by a large margin (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...) and it can only beat it in multicore by using almost twice as much power. In the phone space, their chips are also only ahead by 10-20% despite a huge process advantage (35% higher density). Their SoCs are pretty good. But they're only good because Apple has almost exclusive access to TSMC 5nm. I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing against AMD and NVidia.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      How do you go from “we found one CPU that has similar performance” to “their core is worse”? The source you quoted says that the M1 has a 20% performance lead on average, so you’ll have to define “significant margin”. The M1 package also almost never reaches 35W without stressing the GPU. In any case, if someone said that the M1 was unquestionably faster than anything else on Earth it was not me. It does not change the point that asserting that better is somehow worse is still stupid. > I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing against AMD and NVidia. To whom are they selling their GPUs?
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        The M1 Max exceeds 35W for all but one test and even averages 62W for one test that does not use the GPU. The point is not that it is not faster. A 20% performance advantage on average given 3x faster memory and an up to 50% more efficient process means that the architecture is slower on average but that it makes it up in (third-party) memory and process. >To whom are they selling their GPUs? A lot of professionals that would otherwise buy high-end AMD or NVidia GPUs for now, and eventually they will probably be used for virtualization.
        wtallis 5y ago
        Please stop throwing around that 62W wall power measurement when discussing package power software estimates. You aren't taking enough caution to interpret or present disparate measurements in a valid context. Some of the conclusions you're presenting in this thread are correct. But you're doing a terrible job of justifying them despite the available data, and making unnecessary exaggerations. This discussion deserves a bit more rigor.

by tpush 5y ago

sudosysgen 5y ago

Apple doesn't need to manufacture their stuff at TSMCs latest protest, neither do AMD or Qualcomm or NVidia. Taking the offer with the most money attached is not a good idea in the long term. They're currently providing unprecedented leverage to Apple. Apple Silicon needs the performance crown as the comment you're replying to mentioned. Having a good market share in the premium sphere is not good enough - if instead of trading blows but still ending up ahead of AMD, AMD processors also were on 5nm with DDR5 memory they'd be plainly slower. Then Apple would be in the position where their laptops are slower and have worse battery life than the competition and also Docker doesn't work right for developers and some of your VSTs don't work at all, and few people would take the pain of changing architecture for worse performance.

kergonath 5y ago
I find quite interesting how you frame Apple designing good SoCs as a nefarious plot to take over the world and somehow kill companies they’re not competing with. That’s some impressive mental gymnastics.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The architecture itself is worse than it's competitor. Even with a node advantage and 3x faster RAM at the same power consumption, it cannot beat a 5980HS in single thread by a large margin (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...) and it can only beat it in multicore by using almost twice as much power. In the phone space, their chips are also only ahead by 10-20% despite a huge process advantage (35% higher density). Their SoCs are pretty good. But they're only good because Apple has almost exclusive access to TSMC 5nm. I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing against AMD and NVidia.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    How do you go from “we found one CPU that has similar performance” to “their core is worse”? The source you quoted says that the M1 has a 20% performance lead on average, so you’ll have to define “significant margin”. The M1 package also almost never reaches 35W without stressing the GPU. In any case, if someone said that the M1 was unquestionably faster than anything else on Earth it was not me. It does not change the point that asserting that better is somehow worse is still stupid. > I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing against AMD and NVidia. To whom are they selling their GPUs?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      The M1 Max exceeds 35W for all but one test and even averages 62W for one test that does not use the GPU. The point is not that it is not faster. A 20% performance advantage on average given 3x faster memory and an up to 50% more efficient process means that the architecture is slower on average but that it makes it up in (third-party) memory and process. >To whom are they selling their GPUs? A lot of professionals that would otherwise buy high-end AMD or NVidia GPUs for now, and eventually they will probably be used for virtualization.
      - wtallis 5y ago
        Please stop throwing around that 62W wall power measurement when discussing package power software estimates. You aren't taking enough caution to interpret or present disparate measurements in a valid context. Some of the conclusions you're presenting in this thread are correct. But you're doing a terrible job of justifying them despite the available data, and making unnecessary exaggerations. This discussion deserves a bit more rigor.