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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

Apple is moving to ARM, the most recent iPad Pro outperforms its laptop line (last I saw, at least), they've spent a fraction of what Intel, AMD, and VIA have invested into x86_64, and basically every major Apple leak mentions that they're investigating moving the Mac line to ARM in a generation or two.

A new architecture can offer that much advantage; x86_64 wasn't even the third most-performant implemented ISA when it was released, and every other ISA makes gains far faster than it. SPARC and POWER are still competitive with it despite having 1/1,000,000th the amount invested in them, and in just a few years and with comparatively nothing invested into it, RISC-V is starting to rival a portion of the chips (though not the upper line of them yet).

It "won" because of backwards compatibility, nothing more.

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That's just not the case; Apple were already well behind in performance at the point x86_64 came out, due to them being stuck on POWER. They actively moved to x86, despite big compatibility issues, because of how much better they were.

The evidence is that architectures are just not as important as all that. x86 is clearly pretty bad in many ways, but clever tricks and microcoding have been able to overcome those issues.

This is a complete misinterpretation of the above comment.

> Apple were already well behind in performance at the point x86_64 came out, due to them being stuck on POWER.

The issue was chipsets and peripherals, not POWER performance (which generally always beat x86 at the same point).

The problem was that the entire ecosystem was built around communicating with an x86. So, you couldn't get a Northbridge or Southbridge equivalent that was even remotely close in performance or power consumption to those in x86 space.

Unless you decided that you were going to take on everything in chip design, you couldn't compete. And Apple didn't decide to take on everything until Intel told Apple to pound sand and pissed Jobs off.

>not POWER performance (which generally always beat x86 at the same point).

Do you have a source for this? First time I've seen anyone claim that the G5 was competitive with contemporary Intel CPUs.

Contemporary Apple marketing that was extremely proficient at putting Power in a favorable light (just sneak enough Altivec into every comparison to make up for the rest) + every single (of the then few) Mac users who parotted it religiously?

Those were different times for Apple. The ship was noticeably turned, but the storm not over yet.

By the time the G5 required massive liquid cooling rigs and was nowhere near ready for laptop use... even die-hard Mac users were not parroting the party line any more. For most, the Intel move was a welcome one, as that was also during the height of the move from desktop to laptop. There was almost no chance for a decent G5-based laptop, at least not one as nice and sleek as the G4s that were already in existence.

Absolutely false. They had to use liquid cooling in their top Mac at the time and it was still behind an opteron. Then the intel core architecture came out and pretty much destroyed it performance wise.

There has never been a PowerPC system that beats x86 at any price point.

You are far too young.

The 601 based PowerPC's were the first to be able to do 3D graphics on the microprocessor well.

The G4 based titanium Powerbooks were sufficiently better that they became iconic at a time that Apple wasn't regarded that well.

Sure, the G5 and up were disastrous, but the writing was on the wall well before that. Chipsets on the G3 and G4-based systems used more power than the processor and that only became untrue because the G5 was quite so poor.

The way I remember is that they couldn't get a PPC of the current (at the time) generation suitable for laptops - too power hungry, too hot. IBM weren't interested in supplying such a part so Apple were really left with no choice. It was a similar story of moving from 68k to PPC - the 68060 wasn't what they needed.

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