klelatti

170 ms·

2281.
by klelatti 6y ago
The new Macs will be somewhat cheaper to make and Apple will want to build market share to support Mac SoC development costs but question I think is whether they can do so without damaging their ability to charge prices similar to current l
2282.
by klelatti 6y ago
Wait until the first ARM Macs in the form factor that you want (which might be less than a year). At that point you can see if the features of the new models convince you that they are worth it. If not you should still be able to buy a near
2283.
by klelatti 6y ago
Interesting take from Ben that custom chips means that Apple expects the Mac business to grow - in order to support the fixed costs - and that probably means new designs. Maybe finally a touchscreen to go with the iPad and iPhone apps?
2284.
Apple's New Reality(stratechery.com)
2 points by klelatti 6y ago|1 comments
2285.
by klelatti 6y ago
Agreed - CPUs (at the end at least) were fine. Also they were probably looking for bigger margins than were available. General point is that I think that Arm has a small architectural advantage due to lack of cruft but that other factors ar
2286.
by klelatti 6y ago
Some is turned off but some still has to be dealt with (variable instruction lengths for example). Intel tried to compete in mobile for a long time and failed even with a better manufacturing process.
2287.
by klelatti 6y ago
That was interesting! Surely not an accident. Possibly to: - Emphasise the breadth of their silicon expertise across CPU / GPU / Neural Engines etc. - Because Arm has little or no brand recognition (Apple > Intel > Arm in br
2288.
by klelatti 6y ago
Sorry meant A64 rather than aarch64 as pretty sure that Apple hasn't supported 32 bit for a while now (so no T32 or Thumb) so the instruction set was announced in 2010 and definitely cleaner than x86. Agreed that CISC vs RISC is very
2289.
by klelatti 6y ago
I actually agree that x86 will dominate the desktop for quite a while yet. I also agree that EPYC has materially better performance than the Graviton - Rome is very impressive. Just can't agree though that only Apple has the ability to
2290.
by klelatti 6y ago
Seems to me to be very likely that Apple's graphic's silicon is much more performant and power efficient than Intel's integrated GPUs. CPUs idle most of the time seems to point to the advantage of a big.LITTLE style design wh
2291.
by klelatti 6y ago
> What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Sorry but there is no justification for this. With the same thermal constraints there is every ex
2292.
by klelatti 6y ago
I can't agree with the characterisation here that only Apple can make decent Arm cores. Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn
2293.
by klelatti 6y ago
I too don't see x86 disappearing soon but it feels like the world has changed and that change is not positive for Intel. We've been used to x86 dominance on the desktop and servers for so long that I think a future where there are
2294.
by klelatti 6y ago
Don't think Apple will be putting mobile processors into desktops - expect they will be processors designed for desktops with comparable or better performance than the Intel processors they replace. Not sure what is weird about 64 bit
2295.
by klelatti 6y ago
Fair point but there are examples where customers could be using AWS / Google API's that could hide the new hardware (voice recognition would be a good example). I guess too that for Apple there is a huge advantage to having the c
2296.
by klelatti 6y ago
Using ARM processors combined with their own custom silicon will give Apple the potential to add features that can't readily be replicated by Intel-based laptops (as we already see in the phone market). Does the same logic then hold in
2297.
by klelatti 6y ago
Whilst most of the discussion has been on Intel vs ARM performance and power consumption as a rationale it's probably worth mentioning two others: - Complete control of the Silicon. Apple will be able to place its own silicon IP on the
2298.
by klelatti 6y ago
But the A12Z (based on the A12) is not using the latest TSMC process as used for the A13 (which is almost certainly in higher volume production than Intel 10nm). Plus, if Apple can afford to put an overclocked / high-binned TSMC chip i
2299.
by klelatti 6y ago
Possibly the fact that the 432 was so slow and the momentum was with the 8086 and successors following the success of the IBM PC. RISC, which in some senses is the polar opposite of the approach taken with the 432, also started to generate
2300.
by klelatti 6y ago
Thank you for this tremendous piece of silicon detective work. Really hope that that there are further instalments to come, for example covering the microcode. Just to highlight too that footnote 1, describing the lengths that the Intel eng
2301.
by klelatti 7y ago
Any ARM CPU that Apple uses in Macs will almost certainly be 64 bit A64 only - A64 is the only instruction set that has been supported on Apple SoC's since the A11 in 2017. A64 is part of ARMv8 which was announced in October 2011 and w