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Can we please have ONE. SINGLE. SILICON DISCUSSION ON HN. stay on the topic at hand without fanboys spamming "hurr durr, my M2 is da best, Intel suxxx, X86 is d
by ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Can we please have ONE. SINGLE. SILICON DISCUSSION ON HN. stay on the topic at hand without fanboys spamming "hurr durr, my M2 is da best, Intel suxxx, X86 is dead!!!111one", while not bringing anything useful or relevant to the discussion?
Seeing your comment at the top makes me not want to ever open any silicon topic here again as I'm sure it will be full of these kind of low effort comments vomiting marketing garble on how AS is the best and everything else is doomed to failure, while not bringing any useful info or arguments on-topic.
- echelon 4y agoI think a suitable counter argument is that Apple has grown too large and needs to be split into multiple smaller companies to better aid competition. Between what they're doing to silicon, the outrageous App Store behavior, and how they flaunt that they're a quazi-government entity, I think this could find broad support in Congress and the DOJ. Nobody can compete with Apple, and that's a bad thing for everyone.
- jeromegv 4y agoSo Apple brought competitiveness to an industry that was badly needing it and stalling in the most recent years.. and your “solution” is that we should prevent them from doing so?
- smoldesu 4y agoIt's a strawman. Apple has the capacity to do immense good, but only because they're the single largest company in the world! We should scrutinize concentration of power heavily, and so far Apple has done nothing to suggest their benevolence to the rest of the market. They're blowing off Dutch regulators like it's a middle school homework assignment, and refusing to loose their asinine monopoly over software distribution on iPhone. They're behaving childishly, and everyone knows they're not a child. They're a company with hundreds of billions of dollars, and they're demonstrating organizational failure to address the demand of the market. On top of that, they're largest revenue sources are rent-collection and unibody aluminum computers made by political prisoners in Chinese concentration camps. They need a slap, hard.
- danaris 4y agoWhat, exactly, are they "doing to silicon"? They made a chip that's vastly better than anything out there at a given power consumption level. They are not attempting to use this advantage to corner the silicon market; indeed, they are neither licensing the design, nor selling the chips outside their own end-user hardware. How does any of that say "antitrust" to you?
- echelon 4y agoUsing their enormous lead on cellphones and their incredible negotiation power and playing that into mobile business computing and supply chain / process monopoly.
- franga2000 4y agoThe same goes for Google. They have higher market share in many categories and cover many more of them. Near-monopoly on search, ads, online video, email, and at least half of the smartphone OS market...
- echelon 4y agoEach of the trillion dollar tech companies could be split in half and still be trillion dollar tech companies. It would be a healthier ecosystem for startups and competitors and make for faster total sector growth.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoThe App store fees are pretty atrocious but I fail to see how Apple Silicon is anything but a net positive for the industry.
- School-Cotton 4y agoNo comment on the other stuff, but the “silicon” part of this argument boils down to “anyone who makes something way better than the competition must be shut down because that’s unfair”. We’d still be in the Stone Age if everybody had that mentality
- heavyset_go 4y agoApple successfully monopolized the 5nm node by buying out all of TSMC's manufacturing capability at that node size. Characterizing it as "anyone who makes something way better than the competition" is a strawman portrayal of the underlying issue at hand.
- School-Cotton 4y agoApple contributes billions of dollars to TSMC’s R&D. The node would not exist yet without Apple.
- tambourine_man 4y agoThen don’t. There’s a big internet out there. Apple Silicon is the most exiting thing to happen in the field in decades. Apple handles platform transitions really well so it may seem less of a tectonic shift than it actually is. It’s normal for people to be enthusiastic amongst such facts.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoThen why not be enthusiastic about it on AS threads. This thread is about Intel chiplet design, it ahs nothing to do with AS so why pollute every silicone thread with this offtopic.
- tambourine_man 4y agoIs it OK to mention AMD on Intel threads? AS is not the same ISA, but to me, it’s all the same topic: consumer level chips.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoAnd where can I go buy these Apple consumer chips to put in my PC? Do you see how this works?
- tambourine_man 4y agoI don’t see how it only makes it on topic if the vendor sells individual parts but to each their own.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoBecause Apple only sells Apple devices, not chips. AS parts can only be found in the Apple ecosystem and can only be bought exclusively within devices Apple sells, while the other part (X86 from Intel and AMD) can be bough by anyone, run almost any OS and SW to date, and be used in any design/application you can dream of from laptops, PCs, servers, consoles, mainframes, cloud datacenters, robots, planes, even inside Tesla's head unit, while AS is just in a few Apple devices that don't overlap with most for the segments I mentioned before. One silicone part has an impact over the entire computing sphere, while the other is relevant only within the Apple ecosystem. So bringing up AS in all threads about generic computing chips that anyone can buy directly is pointless as Apple does not cater to that market. That's like me bringing up how fast my Ferrari is in threads about utilitarian vans and pickup trucks. Sure, they're both cars, but they don't compete in the same segments, so Ferrari making an even faster car has no impact or threat on the market of vans and pickups.
- yywwbbn 4y agoI keep wondering, did people always use the word ‘silicon’ when talking about CPUs & SoCs? Somehow I never noticed it before Apple released their ‘Apple Silicon’.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt's Apple marketing speak
- kyriakos 4y agoApple has very strong marketing, for example retina screens is marketing term for high DPI screens.
- mycocola 4y agoJust echoing what others are saying, no, we called them Intel chips/CPUs. What I don't get is why people go along with it. I personally prefer not being a miniature speakerphone for the marketing department at Apple.
- freeflight 4y agoIn hardware circles I've seen CPUs/GPUs colloquially being referred to as "silicon" for at least a decade. Which has very little to do with Apple PR, but everything with how CPUs/GPUs are overwhelmingly made from silicon.
- heavyset_go 4y agoThis trends chart[1] suggests that "Apple silicon" is very much a marketing term versus a colloquial term for chips in general. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=Apple%20silicon,Intel%20silicon,AMD%20silicon,Nvidia%20silicon https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
- programmer_dude 4y agoThis line of reasoning is just dumb. Every single chip on the mother board is made from Silicon. (There maybe some gallium or germanium parts but those are insignificant and irrelevant).
- dheera 4y agoExactly. I hate Apple with a passion. EDIT: F this downvoting, people seem to not get the obvious fruit pun.
- refulgentis 4y agoCosign, and thank you: any CPU discussion past "Apple ARM great" has been impossible to have since launch. List of places I tried taking conversation over that time, but it was ignored or read as complaints about Apple. (see Disclaimers in footer if you read these and think 'Wow, he just wanted to talk about why Apple was bad') - M1 was the first processor on a particular node; so there was a short term opportunity to do an apples to apples comparison by taking down M1 numbers and waiting for upcoming launches - it wasn't as trivial as "manufacturing on the improved node" for AMD, but it was for Qualcomm - performance of ARM vs. X86 could be teased out by tracking tuple of node x manufactor of chips and being patient; projections and tracking of Qualcomm & AMD chips performance - the initial M1 was beaten by Tiger Lake in desktop & sustained performance cases, which was two(!) nodes behind - performance and noise issues from Apple optimizing for absolute fan silence always, leading to them only kicking on at extremely high speeds far into the performance workload, that had already been throttled == DISCLAIMERS == 1. I am a happy M2 MBP owner and think its the best chip. 2. My more nuanced view, summarized is that it is almost restrained in that the hardware got bigger, somehow, and in software there are growing pains as drivers adopt from iPhone use case to mostly-plugged-in use case. To wit, throttling seems optimized for ad copy around fan noise at low workloads than the user. 3. If you feel these discussions were focused on denigrating Apple, please recommend curious thoughts to have about chips that aren't denigrating Apple
- CoastalCoder 4y agoOne benefit of threaded conversations is that you can ignore one thread and still participate in the rest of the discussion.
- saiya-jin 4y agoThis is US site. Apple is US company. The biggest company in the world, source of so much pride. So tons and tons and tons of fanboyism here is inevitable. I'd say most of it is damn well earned. That said, fanboyism makes people blind and uncritical, and (at least to me) its apparent company like Apple needs some good old criticism, rather than blind worship. Otherwise they will fall (if not fallen) into "we know whats best for you and you have no say in it" like with cough cough "child porn" filters or battery-gate. I truly honestly don't trust their "we are more secure" marketing pitch, especially as non-US person. At the end, its just another corporation driven by huge army of managers with main focus on salaries and bonuses. The idea that they are somehow morally better than everybody else when they keep hiring from companies like Facebook is pretty dangerous and goes back to beginning of my post.
- freeflight 4y ago> I'd say most of it is damn well earned. Respect is earned, while fanboyism is rarely a good thing as by definition it's something rather biased.
- Flankk 4y agoWhy are you so triggered that M2 is the best chip on the market? I'm pretty sure that is relevant in a discussion about the CPU market. AMD did a similar thing to Intel with the Ryzen launch. Intel is currently stagnating. They need a miracle at this point.
- jrockway 4y agoWhy are you so excited? Did you design the M2? Do you manufacture the M2? Did you fund the M2? If so, feel free to be proud of it. You made a technological advance happen. But if you just walked into a store and bought one, I dunno, I think you're arriving pretty late in the evolution to take a personal interest in its success.
- derNeingeist 4y agoNot sure about others but I personally am not a big fan of generalising that much: I'd prefer it if people would ideally say that it was for example the "most power efficient general purpose CPU/SoC" or at least something in that regard, not just "the best". For example, have a look at https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/AMD%20Ryzen%20Threadripper%202990WX%2032-Core,Apple%20M2 https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/AMD%20Ryzen%20Thre... (user benchmarks of M1 and Threadripper). Compiling Linux on the 2990WX appears to be about 4 times faster than on the M2. (There are lots of other examples of one of the two CPUs being faster than the other but compiling Linux is the most time-expensive task I regularly do on my 2990WX. The energy usage in this task on the 2990WX is almost certainly a lot higher of course; this will be true for most tasks. However, the 2990WX is also 4 years older of course, manufactured in a different node, not very optimized for power saving and not operated in a very power saving mode.)
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago> M2 is the best chip on the market There is no such thing as a "best chip on the market". Best chip for what? You're confusing the word SoC/CPU with "chip" which is a very generic word. The best "chip" is the one that best suits your individual application or business needs, but there is no such thing as a best chip on the market. That's why Apple is only a tiny fraction of the computing market share and so many other chip vendors are still in business, because every application requires different chips. M2 doesn't solve every needs neither as a CPU (since you can't buy it outside the Apple ecosystem), neither a a generic "chip". Why can't you accept that?
- vachina 4y agoDont feed the troll. Dude's comment history is filled with inconsistencies and an Apple shill.
- cwizou 4y agoWhile I could agree with the general sentiment, I think it's hard to understate how much of a role Apple played in the background of all of this. But in any case, there's plenty of things to be said about this article. About one year ago (random link with relevant quotes : https://www.pcgamer.com/intels-3d-chip-tech-is-perfect-so-it-doesnt-have-to-follow-amds-chiplet-design/ https://www.pcgamer.com/intels-3d-chip-tech-is-perfect-so-it... ), Intel was mocking AMD for using a chiplet approach, before announcing today that it was - clickbaity title aside - going to change everything. The sad truth is, both Intel and AMD are in the exact situation. AMD went chiplet in order to make their performance cores at TSMC, and their less critical cores ("IO") at GloFo. And Intel will be doing the same thing tomorrow (again, random link on the topic: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-visits-tsmc-again-to-secure-extra-production-capacity https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-visits-tsmc-agai... ) by producing their performance cores at TSMC and their less critical ones on their own processes. In both cases, this is just a question of using a very limited resource (TSMC's best in class process) the more effectively that you can (by throwing extra engineering at making a chiplet design that works). And it's supremely relevant to the discussion to talk about how Apple, by throwing capital at a company (TSMC) that was, for the couple of decades I used to cover this, at best 2 years behind the best in class, today where they are (far far in front). We could definitely have a long discussion about the hubris that led 2015 Intel where they are today (completely stuck with a 7 year old "+ paint coatings" aging 14nm "performance" process), or how Gelsinger is trying to make the best out of the situation (I personally think he's immensely qualified and Intel's best hope, though that may not be enough to bring Intel back to where it was), but at the end of the day, Apple threw a wrench in what seemed like an unshakable performance lead from Intel by spewing a bit of money left and right (they didn't only bet on TSMC early on, they threw money at GF for example, and it wasn't that massive early on from my understanding), and the silicon world hasn't been the same since.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>a role Apple played in the background of all of this All of what? This topic is about Intel chilpets, which many of those will end up in datacenters where most Intel chips go, and that's not where Apple sells chips for. Not every chip made and sold in the world revolves around laptops, tablets, smartphones or the apple ecosystem. So can we please talk about Intel's chiplets impact on the industry and less about Apple silicone which has nothing to do with this?