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Unless the company stumbles upon some revolutionary novel computation approach (eg 10x more efficient) it seems a long road for a chip designer to become a fina

Unless the company stumbles upon some revolutionary novel computation approach (eg 10x more efficient) it seems a long road for a chip designer to become a financial success. Even if it could buy a RISC chip today that was magically 20% better than Intel, who is going to buy it for serious commercial installations? It has taken years since Zen1 before AMD started to gain real presence in servers and laptops.

sitkack 2y ago
RISCV chips that are way slower than Intel that are already being used in serious (?) commercial installations [that was a lot of words].
- astrange 2y ago
  The ISA doesn't matter that much for performance at the high end. The most important difference between ISAs is security. ARMv9 is the best here (several well designed security extensions) and x86 might be the worst (part because of variable length instructions and part because Intel can't ship SGX.) I don't know about RISCV in particular.
shiroiushi 2y ago
How long did it take Apple to make their ARM-based CPUs that totally outperform Intel CPUs in laptops? This group could very well do the same. The main problem, of course, is x86 compatibility, since most laptop users run Windows and not Linux and Windows only works on x86. They might be targeting a different market where x86 compatibility isn't important but power efficiency (or maybe some other metric that x86 sucks at) is: non-Windows mobile devices of some kind, for instance. I do really wonder what their business strategy is here.
- jorvi 2y ago
  It took Apple ten years. Apple A4 was released in 2010, M1 in 2020.
  - unnah 2y ago
    Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008 and put them to work on ARM cores right away. On the other hand, there were noises about the A-series being faster than x86 already at the time of Apple A13 in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
    - astrange 2y ago
      The goal of the A/M series chips isn't to be faster than x86, it's to have a better power/performance tradeoff. Going as fast as possible gets you "gamer laptops", which weren't good products. Of course they are fast, which is part a nice coincidence, and part Intel falling badly behind TSMC.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        From what I've read, the Apple M chips aren't faster than the very fastest Intel offerings. But it doesn't matter: what matters is how long your laptop will run on battery doing typical laptop work, and the M chips really put the x86 chips to shame here unfortunately. So agreed, what they're great at is power/performance tradeoff.

sitkack 2y ago

RISCV chips that are way slower than Intel that are already being used in serious (?) commercial installations [that was a lot of words].

astrange 2y ago
The ISA doesn't matter that much for performance at the high end. The most important difference between ISAs is security. ARMv9 is the best here (several well designed security extensions) and x86 might be the worst (part because of variable length instructions and part because Intel can't ship SGX.) I don't know about RISCV in particular.

shiroiushi 2y ago

How long did it take Apple to make their ARM-based CPUs that totally outperform Intel CPUs in laptops? This group could very well do the same. The main problem, of course, is x86 compatibility, since most laptop users run Windows and not Linux and Windows only works on x86. They might be targeting a different market where x86 compatibility isn't important but power efficiency (or maybe some other metric that x86 sucks at) is: non-Windows mobile devices of some kind, for instance. I do really wonder what their business strategy is here.

jorvi 2y ago
It took Apple ten years. Apple A4 was released in 2010, M1 in 2020.
- unnah 2y ago
  Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008 and put them to work on ARM cores right away. On the other hand, there were noises about the A-series being faster than x86 already at the time of Apple A13 in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
  - astrange 2y ago
    The goal of the A/M series chips isn't to be faster than x86, it's to have a better power/performance tradeoff. Going as fast as possible gets you "gamer laptops", which weren't good products. Of course they are fast, which is part a nice coincidence, and part Intel falling badly behind TSMC.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      From what I've read, the Apple M chips aren't faster than the very fastest Intel offerings. But it doesn't matter: what matters is how long your laptop will run on battery doing typical laptop work, and the M chips really put the x86 chips to shame here unfortunately. So agreed, what they're great at is power/performance tradeoff.