9 ms·

5 years from now people will grok more fundamentally that launching 2 process nodes ahead of Intel via TSMC was the big win. For now, we'll deal with marketing

• Shadonototra 4y ago
  How do you provide fanless laptop, and extended battery life if you don't care about maximizing performance while maintaining ultra low power usage? That is why nobody buys windows based laptops anymore and the macbook air is the best selling laptop you don't need apple marketing team to see how people are fed-up with hot windows laptops and their noisy fans (and blind btw, pun intended or maybe not lol)
  • refulgentis 4y ago
    I agree, a fanless cool laptop is preferable over a loud fan and hot laptop
  • Quarrel 4y ago
    > That is why nobody buys windows based laptops anymore and the macbook air is the best selling laptop A huge majority buy windows based laptops. Macbook Air's are the best selling laptop because of the fragmentation of the Windows laptop market amongst manufacturers. MacOS does not in any way make up a majority of laptops. I get that it is 2001 again and we should all be shitting on MS, but let's try and keep some facts in the conversation.
    • Shadonototra 4y ago
      Incapable of attacking my argument about fanless/power efficiency, instead you nitpick on the sales > I get that it is 2001 again and we should all be shitting on MS, but let's try and keep some facts in the conversation. That's a windows 11 with snapdragon for you! fanless! ha
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        It's not a "nitpick" you made a specific claim. Not the person you're replying to but I'll reply: I think the M1 is really nice, although I don't care much for some other MacBook hardware design decisions and I don't care much for macOS either, so I didn't buy one, but I did spend some time considering it and looking at options. In the meanwhile, my current ThinkPad is "effectively fanless, most of the time". What this means is that as I'm typing this it doesn't need any fans. It doesn't most of the time, even when I'm programming and compile my project (incremental compiles) it doesn't need the fans, and it remains fairly cool as well. With full compiles or some (not even all) games it does need the fans, and that's okay with me. And this laptop is actually 4/5 years old; I got it "second-hand new". Newer ones are even better. Oh, and the battery also lasts about 15 hours on a full charge, which is not as good as a M1 machine, but "more than good enough" for me. So "full fanless" would certainly be nice, but in the meanwhile "mostly fanless" is actually just fine. Also remember that Apple only makes top-of-the-line laptops; if you buy a cheap Windows laptop: yeah, you're not getting an especially good laptop. But if you buy something in the same price range you often (not always) get something much more comparable.
  • burmanm 4y ago
    Living in a bubble is always nice though. How many laptops are even used as laptops? Most of the world is not using Apple laptops and is not going to. The Facebook community around you might, but that's not the entire world. The "nobody" in your list still accounts for what, 90% of the laptop buyers? Even more? Most of the powerful laptops are neither Macs, as those go to the gaming laptops where - this is a big surprise - games and their performance counts. Apple has no answer there.
    • Shadonototra 4y ago
      > Most of the powerful laptops are neither Macs, as those go to the gaming laptops where - this is a big surprise - games and their performance counts. Apple has no answer there. Games? the biggest market is the Mobile market, Desktop market is shrinking year after year, it'll become a niche very soon Ever heard of Genshin Impact? https://gamerant.com/genshin-impact-made-more-money-in-its-first-year-than-any-other-game/ https://gamerant.com/genshin-impact-made-more-money-in-its-f... And please learn to project a little when you do some analysis, yesterday is long gone, tomorrow is what's going on And when say nobody, i talk about the people making a deliberate choice, in that group, rarer are the people choosing a windows laptop, other than the people replacing their IT fleets, or your granny picking a cheap laptop because she has no clue what an OS is anyways and everything is pre-installed with Windows, for some reasons ;)
      • burmanm 4y ago
        Games, yes, games. We're talking about laptops here, not mobile phones. PC gaming industry is huge and continues to be (even in the future iterations you talk about). When it comes to projections, the ~1300€ laptops are not going to be the ones taking over the world. Not in any realistic projection, unless the inflation goes to Turkey level. Every people makes deliberate choice, don't discount someone's choice not being deliberate just because it does not align to yours. I don't pick a laptop for my own self, but a desktop - since I don't need the mobility when I need grunt. There M2 brings me nothing so far. Your granny might make a more thoughtful choice than you do. She might buy a tool for herself while you're fancying over something shiny. That's not deliberate.
  • HideousKojima 4y ago
    The highest estimates I've seen for Mac laptop market share are 15%, most places put it at 6-8%.
  • zamalek 4y ago
    > fanless laptop See also: "how do you provide ever thinner laptops?" The reason you're so sensitive to fans is because Apple's attention to cooling goes far, far, beyond a joke. Modern processors will throttle at their maximum temperature (typically 100C for CPUs). Apple's approach has always been to depend on that as a cooling solution. People have improved the cooling on the M1 to something in the ballpark of the M1 Pro, and performance lifts to match. M1 has certainly thrown the whole compute-per-TDP equation into chaos, and you'll definitely see more performance prior to hitting tj-max, but when that comes, performance will come crashing down. They don't have fanless cooling, they essentially have no cooling. If your workloads don't require extended periods of compute, then the fanless Apples can't be beat. Claiming that the M1 beats x86 laptops across the board is, well, "very uninformed " to say it kindly. To say it frankly, fans of high-end devices (whether Windows or Linux) do get very noisy in the face of uninformed bullshit.
    • paulmd 4y ago
      > If your workloads don't require extended periods of compute, then the fanless Apples can't be beat. Claiming that the M1 beats x86 laptops across the board is, well, "very uninformed " to say it kindly. OK, but Apple also makes the MBP line with active cooling too?
      • zamalek 4y ago
        Sure, but the parent comment was going on about fans. Edit: you also get insanely specced x86 laptops that have no business being laptops, so for the few who actually buy those monsters the parent comment is also laughable.
    • ShadonototraCD 4y ago
• memetomancer 4y ago
  Can you maybe explain what you mean here? I can hardly understand your point about Intel, and don't seem to get what you are implying about "marketing-ese". The M1 is a spectacular chip. The M2 seems like a fine iteration.
  • hu3 4y ago
    They mean Apple's advantage is in good part due to their anti-competitive practice of buying TSMC's entire 5nm production. Leaving none for others like AMD which had to compete on 7nm for the longest time. Same will happen for 3nm if nothing changes. Whatever your opinion may be about Apple/AMD/Intel. Unfair competition is not good for consumers in the long run. edit: instantly downvoted. As per tradition in Apple related posts on HN when faced with facts.
    • geraneum 4y ago
      The fact is, Intel is not using TSMC (yet) for their high-end CPUs that compete with Apple. Their stagnation has nothing to do with Apple monopolizing the fab's capacity. Since they [Intel] were on Macs before Apple Silicon, they are being used for direct comparisons.
    • 988747 4y ago
      What's anti-competitive about that? Apple doesn't even make their own chips, they need outside vendor for that. AMD and Intel are free to offer TSMC even more money, if they want.
      • hu3 4y ago
        You think AMD's 200 billion market cap stands a chance against Apple's 2.3 trillion market cap? Consumers only stand to lose in the long run. Including Apple consumers.
        • 988747 4y ago
          As far as I know TSMC is building a new factory in Arizona right now, and one more in Taiwan. That was largely financed by Apple's money, and is a huge win for consumers who will benefit from the most advanced chip manufacturing capabilities for the years to come.
• msbarnett 4y ago
  They're only 1 process node ahead of Intel. Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent transistor density as TSMC 7nm. The M1 was TSMC 5nm. And given that there's no way a single process node jump is going to give Intel a 75% uplift in instruction per clock (2 nodes wouldn't give them that either, for that matter), Intel is going to have to clock higher for comparable performance and that's still going to put them behind on power consumption (which is exponential in clock speed). Which is to say, it's completely untrue that the only reason these chips look good for speed/power-consumption is the process node they're on. Apple came up with a super-wide architecture (way wider than anything we've ever seen in x86-64), and they made it pay off by getting good performance out of a much lower maximum clock, which bought them a ton of power efficiency.
  • teilo 4y ago
    Yeah. The "nm" in a node designation is nothing but marketing now, since 3D FET designs have completely changed what "nm" means.
  • out_of_protocol 4y ago
    Can we switch to MT/mm2? (millions of transistors per square millimeter)
  • refulgentis 4y ago
    They were two ahead at launch (to wit, comparisons were against 10th gen Intel)
  • vitalyx 4y ago
    It seems like people just repeating this over and over but is there anything to back it up? Do we have a 12th gen Intel chip with a known die size and transistor count? Seems like Intel is deliberately coy about this. I gave up looking.
• paulmd 4y ago
  > 5 years from now people will grok more fundamentally that launching 2 process nodes ahead of Intel via TSMC was the big win. AMD will have process node parity with Apple this year - Zen4 will be on N5P, as will M2. I doubt that alone will be sufficient for x86 to catch up, they have a LOT of ground to make up. (this is, of course, the "small" laptop chip for Apple, the M2 Pro/Max will add more CPU cores and a much larger GPU, but you can still extrapolate the performance trends once we see Zen4 and I doubt it's going to be all that flattering. AMD has said "minimum of 15% faster", but even if that works out to 40% on average, Apple just made their own 18% leap, and the current architectural gap is much larger than 22% according to SPEC2017 benchmarks.) It's not all just "apple wants to go bigger" either - Apple's cores are quite svelte in terms of transistor count as well, they're in between Zen3 and Alder Lake transistor count (this is supposition, but I think they would still be slightly smaller than Alder Lake even if you removed the AVX-512 support from Alder Lake). Most of their transistors go towards a truly titanic GPU, the cores themselves are fairly small (the efficiency cores in particular are impressively small for the performance they give). And yes, of course "Apple has chosen to target slightly lower clock rates with really high IPC", but that is enabled by design decisions that ARMv8 allows (really deep reorder buffer, really wide decode) that x86 cannot replicate as easily, you can't just triple x86's IPC by targeting a slightly lower clockrate and going wider. And yes, ARM code is slightly less dense - about 12% larger than x86 when compiling the SPEC2017 test suite, according to the numbers from the RISC-V people. That's not where the difference comes from either, it's not just "high IPC on low density code". I know what Jim Keller said, and he's right, x86 isn't dead, but it's not ahead right now either, even considering Apple is on 5nm. When AMD is on 5nm this year, we can re-assess and see whether that was the driving factor, or whether there are design reasons as well. People seem to have interpreted Keller's comments as being "it is physically impossible for ISA to make any perceptible difference in perf-per-transistor or perf-per-watt" and I'm not sure that's a statement he would agree with. A 10-20% advantage to restructuring your architecture in a way that enables deeper reorder and better decoding vs x86, seems like a reasonable premise to me. Especially considering the baseline is x86, the quintessential legacy behemoth ISA. There has been a lot of work to keep it in play, but that means a lot of the "easy tricks" like instruction cache have already been exploited just to get it this far. Surely there are things that could have been done better from a clean start.