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I think there were a good number of us who recognized that Intel was a bad fit for Apple. The lackadaisical progress of PowerPC simply forced the issue, and Int

I think there were a good number of us who recognized that Intel was a bad fit for Apple. The lackadaisical progress of PowerPC simply forced the issue, and Intel was the only real option at the time. Intel is like Mike Brady with his architectural designs that all look suspiciously like his own house. They refused to compete with themselves and kept x86 as 32 bit so they could promote Itanic, and therefore lost the lead to AMD for years (it wasn't just 64 bit - actively REDUCING instructions per clock with Netburst was... well, legendary - just in a bad way). It just so happened that the kick in the ass Intel got from AMD came a few years before Apple needed Intel, so Intel had finally started trying enough that they had a product line that would work for Apple. But really, is Intel suitable for low power? Could anyone seriously imagine an x86-based phone? Their one-hit wonder is only barely keeping up with AMD and ARM when Intel throws hundreds of watts at their chips and turbo-clocks the heck out of them. Even though Ryzen has been showing up Intel for years, they've floundered so long that there was practically zero chance Apple could stay with them long term. But even in 2005, Intel wasn't necessarily good - they just happened to be the least bad right then.

kube-system 4y ago
> Could anyone seriously imagine an x86-based phone? You forget about Atom?
- DHowett 4y ago
  > Could anyone seriously imagine an x86-based phone? > ... Atom? Indeed! The Motorola RAZR i was Atom-powered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I only remembered it because recently I pulled an old android tablet out of a junk drawer, installed CPU-Z on it, and scratched my head for a moment about why it said “x86” as the architecture… I then remembered why it was in the junk drawer.
    - snazz 4y ago
      I was actually pleasantly surprised with the performance of a $100 x86 HP tablet (running Windows 8.1 of all things) I got back in 2014 or so. It booted and launched apps really fast thanks to the SSD, faster than my regular computer that had an HDD at the time. The Atom processor and single gig of RAM didn’t hamstring it too much for basic web browsing. The strangest part of that setup was that it used a 32 bit UEFI and a 64 bit operating system, so I couldn’t use regular Linux images. But hey, you could configure the UEFI settings using only the touchscreen! Naturally the battery life was terrible and it lasted fewer than 12 hours in sleep mode, so it spent little time outside the junk drawer too.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        I had a similar experience with a Tesco (U.K. Supermarket) Hudl (their short lived tablet brand) bought in 2015. Not a bad experience and attractive price but awful battery life and got quite hot too!
- johnklos 4y ago
  I didn't forget about Atom. They give shit performance per watt, they have all sorts of issues (remember the Atom C2000 debacle?), and they're still quite expensive, relative to ARM. Atom based phones exist, but they're not good at anything in particular.
_vdpp 4y ago
I think the move to Intel was critical for the revival of the Mac because it gave Windows users an off-ramp if they wanted to try out the Mac hardware without going all-in with OSX. Boot Camp made it safe for Windows users to switch, and many did. It got me to buy my first Mac, at least (iMac). I figured if OSX didn’t work out I could just run Windows on it. Maybe ironically, the new ARM Macs make me a little hesitant to buy a new MacBook because I’d be pretty much locked in to OSX (with all due respect to the Asahi folks who are doing great work - I fear Apple is going to pull the rug out from under them though.)
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  > I fear Apple is going to pull the rug out from under them though. I don’t think so. There’s been support for “other OSs” from the start with the M line. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this. I don’t think they will change their minds. It brings value to the platform while offering little threat. I think we’ll be seeing a boot camp version of ARM Windows as soon as Microsoft solves its licensing issues.
  - zacmps 4y ago
    What support does apple provide for other OSs? I thought that work was entirely community driven?
    - sofixa 4y ago
      The people on the Asahi team explained this into great depth, but basically everything before macOS (bootloader and etc.) is capable of handling a different OS. However i would dispute their and OP's interpretation that Apple "supports" other OS. It's more of a "fitted for but not with", where Apple leave the technical possibility but don't do anything actively to help anyone trying to do so. The Asahi team has to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch with pretty much no documentation, which is an amazing feat and hats off to them. However claiming Apple supports what they're doing is a stretch, and there's no reason why Apple wouldn't just pull the rug under them - it's not like they've said it's OK (like with Bootcamp) to run Linux on Macs.
Panzer04 4y ago
The last few percentage points of performance take an insane amount of power. If you gave up 10% perf you'd probably halve power consumption. I don't think there's any reason X86 has to use more power than ARM - it's simply not the focus of most implementations, however. As I understand it, most processors at this point are an interpreter on top of a bespoke core. Intel used to get quite a lot of praise for low power consumption back in 2012-2015 with Ivy Bridge and so on - rather coincidentally, that was also when they had a process advantage (rather like AMD and Apple today enjoy).
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Yes and no. After the CISC vs RISC war was over I also though ISAs where implementation details. But from what I’ve read, having different length instructions makes extracting parallelism way harder. That’s why Apple can make such crazy wide machines.
  - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    Oh yeah, isn't ARM fixed-size instructions and x86_64 is variable-size? So decoding x86_64 requires clever pipelining, whereas ARM is just "Every X bytes is an instruction" and you can parallelize easily. I wonder if we'll see Intel or AMD try to make another somewhat-backwards-compatible ISA jump to keep up with ARM. x86_32 --> x86_64 --> x86_512?
    - kaba0 4y ago
      If I’m not mistaken, based on similar threads on HN decoding is never the bottleneck, so I would be hesitant to write x86 off for mobile devices. It probably does make transition to smaller scale harder, and that is where most efficiency wins happen.
      - tambourine_man 4y ago
        We should never write x86 off when there are billions behind it and variable length instructions have their advantages as well, such as code density, which may come to play an important role again in the future. But it is much easier to simply chop off a stream of instructions at every X bits than to evaluate a portion and decide what to do later and that difference get larger the wider you go.
kcb 4y ago
> But even in 2005, Intel wasn't necessarily good - they just happened to be the least bad right then. I don't think it's a coincidence that Intel Macs coincided with the release of Core/Core 2 Duo cpus. At the time there was nothing close to them by any metric. Remember Intel enjoyed a generational lead in foundry tech for decades.

kube-system 4y ago

> Could anyone seriously imagine an x86-based phone? You forget about Atom?

DHowett 4y ago
> Could anyone seriously imagine an x86-based phone? > ... Atom? Indeed! The Motorola RAZR i was Atom-powered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i
- kube-system 4y ago
  I only remembered it because recently I pulled an old android tablet out of a junk drawer, installed CPU-Z on it, and scratched my head for a moment about why it said “x86” as the architecture… I then remembered why it was in the junk drawer.
  - snazz 4y ago
    I was actually pleasantly surprised with the performance of a $100 x86 HP tablet (running Windows 8.1 of all things) I got back in 2014 or so. It booted and launched apps really fast thanks to the SSD, faster than my regular computer that had an HDD at the time. The Atom processor and single gig of RAM didn’t hamstring it too much for basic web browsing. The strangest part of that setup was that it used a 32 bit UEFI and a 64 bit operating system, so I couldn’t use regular Linux images. But hey, you could configure the UEFI settings using only the touchscreen! Naturally the battery life was terrible and it lasted fewer than 12 hours in sleep mode, so it spent little time outside the junk drawer too.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      I had a similar experience with a Tesco (U.K. Supermarket) Hudl (their short lived tablet brand) bought in 2015. Not a bad experience and attractive price but awful battery life and got quite hot too!
johnklos 4y ago
I didn't forget about Atom. They give shit performance per watt, they have all sorts of issues (remember the Atom C2000 debacle?), and they're still quite expensive, relative to ARM. Atom based phones exist, but they're not good at anything in particular.

_vdpp 4y ago

I think the move to Intel was critical for the revival of the Mac because it gave Windows users an off-ramp if they wanted to try out the Mac hardware without going all-in with OSX. Boot Camp made it safe for Windows users to switch, and many did. It got me to buy my first Mac, at least (iMac). I figured if OSX didn’t work out I could just run Windows on it. Maybe ironically, the new ARM Macs make me a little hesitant to buy a new MacBook because I’d be pretty much locked in to OSX (with all due respect to the Asahi folks who are doing great work - I fear Apple is going to pull the rug out from under them though.)

tambourine_man 4y ago
> I fear Apple is going to pull the rug out from under them though. I don’t think so. There’s been support for “other OSs” from the start with the M line. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this. I don’t think they will change their minds. It brings value to the platform while offering little threat. I think we’ll be seeing a boot camp version of ARM Windows as soon as Microsoft solves its licensing issues.
- zacmps 4y ago
  What support does apple provide for other OSs? I thought that work was entirely community driven?
  - sofixa 4y ago
    The people on the Asahi team explained this into great depth, but basically everything before macOS (bootloader and etc.) is capable of handling a different OS. However i would dispute their and OP's interpretation that Apple "supports" other OS. It's more of a "fitted for but not with", where Apple leave the technical possibility but don't do anything actively to help anyone trying to do so. The Asahi team has to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch with pretty much no documentation, which is an amazing feat and hats off to them. However claiming Apple supports what they're doing is a stretch, and there's no reason why Apple wouldn't just pull the rug under them - it's not like they've said it's OK (like with Bootcamp) to run Linux on Macs.

Panzer04 4y ago

The last few percentage points of performance take an insane amount of power. If you gave up 10% perf you'd probably halve power consumption. I don't think there's any reason X86 has to use more power than ARM - it's simply not the focus of most implementations, however. As I understand it, most processors at this point are an interpreter on top of a bespoke core. Intel used to get quite a lot of praise for low power consumption back in 2012-2015 with Ivy Bridge and so on - rather coincidentally, that was also when they had a process advantage (rather like AMD and Apple today enjoy).

tambourine_man 4y ago
Yes and no. After the CISC vs RISC war was over I also though ISAs where implementation details. But from what I’ve read, having different length instructions makes extracting parallelism way harder. That’s why Apple can make such crazy wide machines.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  Oh yeah, isn't ARM fixed-size instructions and x86_64 is variable-size? So decoding x86_64 requires clever pipelining, whereas ARM is just "Every X bytes is an instruction" and you can parallelize easily. I wonder if we'll see Intel or AMD try to make another somewhat-backwards-compatible ISA jump to keep up with ARM. x86_32 --> x86_64 --> x86_512?
  - kaba0 4y ago
    If I’m not mistaken, based on similar threads on HN decoding is never the bottleneck, so I would be hesitant to write x86 off for mobile devices. It probably does make transition to smaller scale harder, and that is where most efficiency wins happen.
    - tambourine_man 4y ago
      We should never write x86 off when there are billions behind it and variable length instructions have their advantages as well, such as code density, which may come to play an important role again in the future. But it is much easier to simply chop off a stream of instructions at every X bits than to evaluate a portion and decide what to do later and that difference get larger the wider you go.

kcb 4y ago

> But even in 2005, Intel wasn't necessarily good - they just happened to be the least bad right then. I don't think it's a coincidence that Intel Macs coincided with the release of Core/Core 2 Duo cpus. At the time there was nothing close to them by any metric. Remember Intel enjoyed a generational lead in foundry tech for decades.