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I can't see any reason why the exact same engineers and managers who designed Apple M1 released in November 2020 would get less than M1 performance when they de

I can't see any reason why the exact same engineers and managers who designed Apple M1 released in November 2020 would get less than M1 performance when they design a RISC-V chip at a new company, and most likely they already had ideas in their heads to make better-than-M1 but had to leave out. So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts. Sure, M1 or M2 class RISC-V hitting the market in 2026 or 2027 is hitting an old performance mark and Apple will have moved on. Even if not the absolutely fastest thing in the world at that point, M1 performance in 2027 is still going to be a totally usable machine for most people for most purposes. I'm typing this on an M1 Mac Mini I bought in November 2020 and I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. You can make whatever comparison you want between M1/M2 and x86.

wwtrv 3y ago
> I can't see any reason why the exact Wouldn't they need to implement a bunch of additional extensions which RISC-V doesen't currently have just to reach feature parity? That alone would've introduced significant delays. Also it took Apple 8 or so years to build a competitive desktop/laptop CPU. They released their first custom ARM core in 2012 and likely relied a lot on what they learned while working with Cortex so it's not like they started completely from scratch. And we're talking about Apple, very few if any other companies are willing to invest as much time and resources into a product targeting a stagnant or even shrinking market (desktops/laptops) with very low margins. I don't think Qualcomm can't design something that would be competitive with M1/2 they probably don't just see a lot of sense in that financially. How would RISC-V change this? Of course there are political reasons for Chinese companies (being increasingly cutoff from western tech to invest into RISC-V) which might be more important than financial ones. So a shift to RISC-V would be almost guaranteed to increase our reliance on China which in no way could be viewed as something positive... > I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. And presumably you would be fine to replace it when as machine which is just as fast in 5 years just because it used a RISC-V CPU despite there being significantly faster ARM/x86 devices on the market?
- brucehoult 3y ago
  > it took Apple 8 or so years to build ... likely relied a lot on what they learned Apple doesn't build or learn anything. The people they employ to work there do. When those people go to another company ... e.g. a RISC-V company ... they take that learning with them.
snvzz 3y ago
>So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts. Near Zen5 (projected) performance shown in Tenstorrent slides. M2 is not anywhere near that. Apple would wish.

wwtrv 3y ago

> I can't see any reason why the exact Wouldn't they need to implement a bunch of additional extensions which RISC-V doesen't currently have just to reach feature parity? That alone would've introduced significant delays. Also it took Apple 8 or so years to build a competitive desktop/laptop CPU. They released their first custom ARM core in 2012 and likely relied a lot on what they learned while working with Cortex so it's not like they started completely from scratch. And we're talking about Apple, very few if any other companies are willing to invest as much time and resources into a product targeting a stagnant or even shrinking market (desktops/laptops) with very low margins. I don't think Qualcomm can't design something that would be competitive with M1/2 they probably don't just see a lot of sense in that financially. How would RISC-V change this? Of course there are political reasons for Chinese companies (being increasingly cutoff from western tech to invest into RISC-V) which might be more important than financial ones. So a shift to RISC-V would be almost guaranteed to increase our reliance on China which in no way could be viewed as something positive... > I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. And presumably you would be fine to replace it when as machine which is just as fast in 5 years just because it used a RISC-V CPU despite there being significantly faster ARM/x86 devices on the market?

brucehoult 3y ago
> it took Apple 8 or so years to build ... likely relied a lot on what they learned Apple doesn't build or learn anything. The people they employ to work there do. When those people go to another company ... e.g. a RISC-V company ... they take that learning with them.

snvzz 3y ago

>So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts. Near Zen5 (projected) performance shown in Tenstorrent slides. M2 is not anywhere near that. Apple would wish.