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Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wr

Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said. People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-) Though I still want my AMD Arm GPU SoC...

mschuster91 1y ago
For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed. The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.
- joshuaissac 1y ago
  > and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.

mschuster91 1y ago

For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.

MisterTea 1y ago
Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed. The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.
joshuaissac 1y ago
> and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.