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Comment by rangibaby | Hacker News Reader

I think the real elephant in the room is ARM. iPad Pro has the performance of (at least) a toaster “real” laptop. Sure Apple is expensive but very soon you are going to see cheap and actually good ARM PCs. That can’t be good for either Intel or AMD.

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It seems like only Apple has made a performant ARM core so far, though. Will they license the technology? It doesn't fit their historical business model. Or do you think someone else is going to make ARM fast?

There's really nothing to stop another ARM licensee making more powerful ARM processors, there's no special Apple pixie dust, it's just a matter of investment. The other licensees just got lazy and psychologically trapped by their price models into thinking in terms of deterministic, incremental annual performance and feature improvements. They 'knew' nobody else would break that cycle because the margins weren't big enough to support the investment needed to jump so far ahead. If the margins and volume in fast efficient ARM laptops are there, then there's nothing stopping them from happening.

One of the huge differences is Apple hasn't gone down the root of making octo-core ARM CPUs. They stuck to dual-core designs all the way until (and including) the iPhone 6S, then the iPhone 7 going quad-core, and the iPhone 8 going hexa-core. They've very clearly avoided following the big.LITTLE that most ARM licensees have followed.

The last two generations of Apple chips are big.LITTLE.

It’s already happened. Just wait till Fujitsu has their post-K chip out.

> There's really nothing to stop another ARM licensee making more powerful ARM processors, there's no special Apple pixie dust, it's just a matter of investment.

Apple CPUs are designed in-house, not by ARMH. It's not magic pixie dust, but designing a CPU core architecture from scratch is a non-trivial investment of which very few companies are capable.

Really? Only Apple?? What about Qualcomm or Cavium? Arm cores are now in the premier systems offered by Cray and HPE. See here for comparison to Skylake for Crays system: https://twitter.com/simonmcs/status/930425114922958848 Here for HPE’s: https://twitter.com/hpc_guru/status/930194415787888642 there’s also the Centriq from Qualcomm, I think there were some numbers posted at the goingarm HPC users group. Bottom line, there are plenty of super fast Arm processors that match or beat the best Intel can put out.

Why should an iPad need laptop like performance? The iPad is still a consumer device ( probably going to get downvotes because this statement), while something like Surface Pro is both.

I'm not sure how long it will last though.

The iPad Pro, at least, is explicitly positioned as a working machine, with "far more power than most PC laptops":

The A10X Fusion chip with 64‑bit architecture and six cores puts incredible power in your hands. So you can edit a 4K video on the go. Render an elaborate 3D model. Or create and mark up complex documents and presentations.

https://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-pro/

> The A10X Fusion chip with 64‑bit architecture and six cores puts incredible power in your hands. So you can edit a 4K video on the go.

I'm not discussing the current hardware, i acknowledge their marketing about it. I'm discussing the tools and usability on a iPad Pro. I'm saying that the usability of a tablet, is merely consumerism and doesn't needs the power of the iPad Pro.

Ps. I had both in my hands and i can create stuff far easier on a Surface Pro vs iPad Pro. I can't imagine even development on a iPad, i can do it on a Surface Pro though.

AMD has invested heavily in developing ARM based chips.

But it didn't go anywhere and it's largely abandoned, just like Intel's supposed foray into mobile SOCs a number of years ago.

Supposedly Jim Keller did work on that, besides Zen.

They simply stopped talking about their supposedly awesome new ARM chip. My personal guess is that they're reworking it, targeting RV64G now; Because why bother with ARM licensing.

Sort of. That kind of died given lack of funding. Others have invested far more: Fujitsu, Qualcomm, Cavium, Cray, HPE,etc.

Agreed. Also, the last time HN discussed this, PTX came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15658031

> My view is CUDA has already won, and everyone else needs to get over it. Even clang supports PTX now, which is a reasonably device agnostic representation, albeit controlled mostly by Nvidia. Perhaps intel will introduce their own extensions to this ISA.

> Even if my precompiled CUDA application could run on Intel GPUs at 50% of the throughput, I'd be happy if I could later tweak and recompile it to get the full benefits from their hardware.

I, for one, can't wait. I am not convinced that it is going to be Apple, but I do believe ARM or something like it will replace my Intel laptop.

How much more convincing do you need that it will be Apple? No one comes close to them in ARM performance. The iPad Pro’s processor is so overpowered compared to the software you can run on it, it’s incredible that we don’t have ARM MacBooks already.

Even if they make MacOS ARM-compatible, its users will be left with tons of applications that won't work anymore on an ARM-based architecture.

Considering that Apple does not compete on price, making developers and users unhappy to save on costs does not seem to me a very Apple-like move.

Seeing iOS get more and more desktop features in due time is much more likely, IMHO.

Apple is the one company in the world which pulled off this sort of migration - twice - without leaving users in the cold.

First, 68k to PPC, then PPC to Intel. Both times they included the ability to run binaries from the previous architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

And both times they had a transitional period in which their toolchain was modified to produce "fat" binaries, including executables for both the old and new architectures.

I find it stunning that people think Apple couldn't pull this of a third time.

Both times, the performance boost of the new architecture significantly offset the emulation overhead. It's going in reverse this time, emulating the old instruction set with a weaker processor.

Further, there's a lot more focus on battery life these days, and while many apps will be tolerable from a UX perspective if you halved their speed, that also means the CPU is spending twice as long at the highest turbo states. Ouch.

I also think Apple could pull it off, and actually want to see it happen for the health of the PC industry. But I haven't seen anyone declaring it's not possible, I think that's a bit of a straw man.

Both times the new CPU architecture was faster than the older one, granted. But still the emulated software would be slower on the new models with the emulator compared to bare metal execution on the old models.

I assume Apple will make some more improvements to close the gap between x86 and ARM, and switch when it makes sense for them. I also assume that, with the Mac App Store, they will start forcing developers to ship software compiled to both architectures ahead of making the switch. This way, only software that is distributed outside their store would be slow, which is going to become more and more niche as Apple enabled stricter signing enforcement by default in macOS Sierra (by default, only apps from the Mac App Store are allowed to run).

Given that Apple has full control over the CPU itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the first ARM Mac has a CPU with a handful of extra instructions which bridge the performance gap. I bet they already did extensive profiling of x86 code from any major app (esp. those submitted to the app store) and identified 5-6 instructions (to be made available to the emulation layer only) which avoid some of the most expensive translation / abstraction / emulation steps.

They don’t have full control. Apple can’t add instructions, only Arm can. If they want something new they have to go back to Arm, sure hey probably have lots of pull, but that’s the way it is. And one reason ppl like RiscV.

Actually - if I'm not mistaken - what you say holds true for almost any other company but _not_ for Apple: They are holders of an architectural license, which gives them (and very few others in the world) this freedom.

It was discussed a while ago here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190521

Architecture license means you can use the ISA (provided by Arm). Micro arch means you can license the core implementations form Arm. Apple is an ISA license, meaning they have full control of the micro arch as long as it passes verification by Arm. That’s the beauty of Arm, you get rid of the problem of creating the whole software ecosystem...it’s already there, and companies like Cavium, Apple, Qualcomm are free to add their secret sauce and benefit from the mature software environment. At least, that’s the hope.

Prior to ARMv8, all licensees could add additional specialized instructions or even entire instruction sets using the ARM coprocessor model.

By changing a few registers, you could alter how instructions were interpreted. This was used by some vendors for hardware-software interfacing, and by others to provide specific acceleration primitives for their specialized workloads.

ARM used this mechanism themselves to offer an optional floating point unit, with specialized vectorized floating point instructions.

Unfortunately, support for coprocessors has been removed from ARMv8.

I think it's more likely that Apple will just let OS X and the desktop/laptop computer form die on the vine as they turn iOS devices into more and more of a 'pro' product with more and more of OS X's features and more input modalities, etc.

To me this is a bit of a frightening scenario given the closed nature of iOS.

Many Chromebooks in schools are already running on Rockchip ARM processors.

Yeah - the older ones were horrible, but the latest generation in the Chromebook plus etc has pretty decent performance.

I was interested to learn that, though the "OP1" processor in the Samsung Chromebook Plus is manufactured by Rockchip, the "OP" brand belongs to Google and is used for ARM CPUs optimized for Chromebooks: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/22/14691396/google-chromeboo...

I used Samsung Chromebook from 2012 with Exynos 5 ARM CPU for Java development running Eclipse and a web server locally. It was not speedy but very OK setup for a laptop costing 250USD. The main problem was speed and amount of memory, not raw CPU performance.

Given that I expected that some company would release ARM laptops with better specs memory-wise especially after introduction of ARM64 CPUs, but that did not happen. I guess Intel has still too much grip on the industry.

When you have zero locally installable apps, it's not really hard to support a different CPU type.

My money would be on ARM based Macbooks rather than Windows machines.

MS has x86 working on ARM however: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-x86-on-arm64-emulati...

The first ARM-based Windows 10 PCs are due to be released soon.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/31/15711334/microsoft-window...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-on-arm-hps-leak-hint...

ARM-based Windows machines already exist -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_(2012_tablet)

They worked out well

Technically there already is one - the Touchbar is controlled by a dedicated ARM co-processor.

There was a report on MacRumors [1] (yes, so take it with a grain of salt) that the iMac Pro is likely to ship as an A10 Fusion + Intel Xeon.

The A10 would apparently be 'always-on' for things like "Hey Siri", and would actually handle the boot process, passing the EFI firmware for the Xeon to boot with.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s...

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