Apple, ARM, and Intel
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Semiconductor manufacturing is truly one of the few remaining manufacturing industries in which the USA has a competitive advantage (albeit quite eroded by TSMC over the past few years).
Especially with US aviation circling the drain, this is an industry we can't afford to lose. Removing semiconductors from US manufacturing statistics makes US manufacturing statistics go from "stagnating" to "extraordinary decline".
And it's not just the manufacturing sector. Semiconductors power some of America's most valuable companies (including but not limited to the FAANGs).
US economic and actual security absolutely depends on a robust supply of world-class semi-conductors manufactured on-shore.
Congress should take the advice in this piece and avoid making the same mistake with Intel that it made with Boeing (piling the bulk of all federal and state support for an entire sector into a single clearly dysfunctional company)
Unfortunately this election gives us a choice between an utterly unacceptable racist crackpot and a bland candidate who belongs to the old guard who still believes that you can have an economy based on nothing. That doesn't make me optimistic.
> The US followed the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies.
Bashing metal and low-tech widget-forming has never really been a core competency of the US. It was useful to keep people employed for a 50 years or so but for the past century the US seems to have aimed for technological synthesis and increasingly high-tech production as a core strength.
> The US' loss of technical and manufacturing expertise is going to be extremely hard to reverse, and reversing it is going to require a rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology and things like "maximizing shareholder value" as the prime directive.
It is unnecessary to reverse something which was not lost in the first place. As others have repeatedly pointed out all over the comments on this article the US has continued to climb up the manufacturing food chain and dominates the top-end. It may employ fewer people, but the productivity and economic benefit of the US manufacturing sector has simply not declined at all and therefore no 'rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology' will be required.
If you think the far east only dominates low-tech widget forming, you should look into where the iPhone and Macbook are manufactured :)
I also know that the iPhone and Macbook are not particularly difficult pieces of engineering and that the tech required to make the shiny bit of tech you see in the store is the bit of the iceberg beneath the waterline that represents a lot of the value in what we are talking about.
If we want to trade vaguely related aphorisms: “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.” The tip of the spear is less impressive than the logistical tail that makes it possible.
For many years, I have observed that folks in the Bay Area (if I might use that as the shorthand for those at the "top-end" of the technical food chain) tend to dismiss and deride the work further down the food chain, whether that work is "bashing metal" or piecing together business applications.
There are two truths I believe about this work that some do not acknowledge:
1. People who bash metal or piece together business applications have expertise and knowledge that folks higher up the food chain do not have.
Most people who make their living high up the food chain did it by proving they could rise up above those further down the food chain, so it makes sense to believe that this work is beneath them. But the domains are different, and the choice to live high up the food chain necessarily means that one chooses to miss out on experiences and knowledge that those further down the food chain will have.
2. The folks higher up the technical food chain are dependent on those lower on the food chain.
If I might pick up an imperfect analogy: Sharks are higher up the food chain than fish. Fish get bossed around by sharks. But sharks are dependent on fish to survive, not the other way around.
Unfortunately wanting something to be true, and it actually being true are not the same thing.
Even if a whole bunch of your peers say the same thing, it still doesn’t make it true.
I’m not really sure what to say... please go and do some actual research on this topic.
> the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies.
Business schools recommend the opposite. Outsource everything OTHER THAN core competencies. Core competencies are your competitive advantage; keep them in house.
The core competency of the US today is finance. We've been actively outsourcing everything else we can.
Since when? It didn't look very competent in 2008...
As a percentage of GDP, manufacturing has been on a downward trend, but that's because of the growth of service industry.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...
If not, The 1997 number would be ~$2,200B, after adjusting. That would still only be a slight decline.
But that's not really the point. The point is, look at those numbers sans semiconductors and you see a pretty scary decline in manufacturing output.
It is totally fair to point out that this has been a strategic choice to focus on profitable industries, and that that's even a good thing. That's sort of the point here: the choice has been made, semiconductors are now a key industry for the US manufacturing sector, and AFAICT we don't have any plans for what would replace semiconductors.
IDK if we have a healthy amount of manufacturing output, but it's pretty clear that losing leadership in semiconductor manufacturing would be quite bad for the USA.
Not at all: https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-united-sta...
Semiconductor manufacturing is a component of the second-largest US manufacturing bucket in 2017, and was only #8 of the top 10 manufacturing buckets for job growth in 2018. It is certainly an important sector for economic and strategic reasons, but you are significantly overstating its importance.
But I'm not talking about jobs, at all. The US needs a robust manufacturing sector so that it remains economically competitive. Figuring out how to translate that economic competitiveness into material benefits for individuals is a separate problem. Confusing the two is itself a risk to our economic competitiveness. (To make this point is a somewhat hyperbolic way: if the goal is jobs, build a canal through the center of the country. Using spoons.)
Also, I think the manufacturing output numbers alone miss something important from my original post. Losing semiconductor manufacturing as a core competency also threatens the most profitable and important components of the US services sector.
Why, then, did you ignore the other chart I pointed out that specifically dealt with the economic value?
> Also, I think the manufacturing output numbers alone miss something important from my original post. Losing semiconductor manufacturing as a core competency also threatens the most profitable and important components of the US services sector.
I agree that losing this competency would be damaging. I disagree that it represents a threat. The threat is the continued consolidation of certain types of semiconductor manufacturing into an ever-shrinking pool of companies. While it would be slightly better if that pool were partly concentrated in the US, the size and diversity of that pool is a much bigger issue than where its members are located.
The only other chart lists "Computer and electronic products" as the second-largest manufacturing sector, which seems to confirm my assertion that semiconductors have been an important source of growth. It's the second largest category and has had annualized real growth rates 2x+ the rest US manufacturing for decades.
I don't see any breakdown of semiconductors/not-semiconductors for that category, and this is a 2017 snapshot as opposed to longitudinal data, so it's hard to say anything more specific using the data you linked to.
> The threat is the continued consolidation of certain types of semiconductor manufacturing into an ever-shrinking pool of companies. While it would be slightly better if that pool were partly concentrated in the US, the size and diversity of that pool is a much bigger issue than where its members are located.
Sure, I agree. (Caveat of course that geopolitical diversity matters too. N separate SOEs would increase diversity in a way that wouldn't be particularly helpful to the USA, for example.)
In any case, this is actually something I more-or-less agree with, and hence the last sentence of my original post.
It also causes a huge vulnerability.
as the developing world improves their standard of living, so does the same decrease for people in the developed world, because these developing nations are no longer dependent on the developed one's.
It was always just a question of time with globalization in effect.
personally, i think that this is a good thing though. we in the developed world have been living unsustainable lives for generations, living off of the developing nations.
though thats most definitely not the only reason why everything has been getting harder for the working population. automation, higher efficiency, extreme concentration of wealth and more do their part in the current situation as well.
>According to a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 76 percent of China’s urban population will be considered middle class by 2022. In 2000, just 4 percent of the urban population was considered middle class.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-explo...
Meanwhile, in America:
>Fewer millennials in 2019 are middle class compared to baby boomers when they were in their 20s
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-middle-class-is-sh...
Also, valuearb is kind of right. Except that the right solution is more efficient onshore manufacturing, not offshoring.
Of course it does. They do have that extra trillion people to bring the average down.
However, moving the manufacturing jobs from here to there has certainly raised their average standard of living while reducing our own.
The unemployed here are not better off.
In addition, a Walmart cashier, Starbucks barista or Uber driver does not have the same standard of living that a UAW member once did.
People are, on average, worse off than the preceding generations, all in the name of higher profit margins for the few.
>Across Western Europe and North America, the middle class is shrinking, according to a new report by the OECD. With each new generation, a smaller share of the population find themselves earning middle incomes.
When the Baby Boomers, who were born between 1943 and 1964, were in their twenties, some 68% were in middle-income households. Only 60% of Millennials, who were born between 1983 and 2002, could say the same at a similar time in their lives.
https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...
The only examples I can think of right now where we are genuinely number one is high priced low volume boutique aerospace (SpaceX and other new space companies, satellites, experimental military aircraft, electric planes, etc.) and of course weapons.
We can manufacture decent cars, but at least half of this is under the direction and management of overseas companies like Toyota and Nissan. US car companies have been on the ropes for decades.
We seem to be losing the bulk of aerospace, generation turbines, electronics, chips, medical devices, power equipment, materials, ... ?
Seeing graphs like this makes me wonder if I am living in the late days of the USSR when I'm sure many optimistic graphs were published by Pravda.
As for medical devices and tech, the US probably creates more new drugs and treatments than the rest of the world combined. when's the last time china, india or russia made a break through in medecine? When's the last time the US did? Last year?
This view is rampant throughout this thread and I keep wondering why South Korea is omitted. I thought SK semiconductor tech was comparable the US and Taiwan?
But beyond SK I cannot think of any other countries with competitive fabs.
Also only a tangent but I really believe that deal where TSMC is going to put a N7 fab in the USA is either going to get restructured into something way smaller or never ever going to happen.
2015.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/
(PS. This took less than 30 seconds to find and confirm).
(PS. This took me most of a minute of reading the link you provided).
Russia invented and built and then sold to the USA the RD-180 rocket engines that are used for the first stage of the American Atlas V launch vehicle.
Which the USA will no doubt "reverse engineer" soon :)
The OP needs to get out more often.
SpaceX, a privately-held American company, is the only source of innovation in rocketry at the present time. Their reusable launch platform plays in its own league; everything else is steam power, Falcon is internal combustion.
That's just a fact. Unlike insisting that China, Russia, India are incapable of innovation more generally, which is risible.
My vague impression, in fact, is that jet turbines are quite a bit more difficult to manufacture than rocket engines, even if the latter are thought of as 'higher tech'.
I'm fairly certain we'll discover, in the next ten years, that China is quite capable of making cutting-edge computer chips, and just hadn't gotten around to it yet.
I've never shared my countrymen's obsession with insisting on being 'the greatest'. This country is great in its own right, along many dimensions; it is, in fact, right at the cutting edge for medicine and CPUs; denigrating the work of other nations only detracts from this.
My impression is that “real” rocket engines include a jet engine just to pump fuel. They have many other pieces as well.
Not that a modern high-bypass turbofan is simple, but don’t discount the complexity of rocket science.
It will be the same story for jet engines, Chinese improvement is very rapid. It was the same story for every rising power so far, there is no real reason that China will never be able to build a jet engine, and no reason that they will never be able to run a fab (and indeed, they are accelerating quite fast).
They have started to deploy the WS-10 Taihang engine for their J-10 fighter, but the performance of this engine is markedly worse than comparable Western engines. Military grade engines are hard!
Even the US relied on foreign jet engines for a time, although you won't hear about it a lot - for example, an absolutely huge amount of engineers were hired from AVRO in Canada after the development of the superior Iroquois engine (which had by quite a margin the highest nominal thrust as well as the highest) as well as other Orenda engines, and their work was absolutely instrumental to the US becoming superior to the USSR in jet engine technology. I don't know if this is publicly available information, so you might have to trust me on it, but I guarantee you even the US had a 20+ year period where it had to steal engineers and tech in order to jumpstart it's lead, which is exactly what we are seeing with China.
So say they iron out the kinks in the WS-15 (though odds are they'll settle for the WS-10). They then have a roughly 1990s era engine, when the US will be deploying Adaptive Cycle Engines etc.
As far as adaptive cycle engines, China is also already researching them. They also have a lead in supersonic combustion as of today.
As true today as when it was written!
We're also really good at manufacturing houses and food. Besides cars, houses, and food actually representing a good chunk of physical things we buy, more of our spending is moving towards software/information in which we have a crazy lead.
I see it as manufacturing was displaced by an even more value adding industry. Though certainly it isn't good for our national security to be relying so much on imports for physical goods.
Tesla does, after all, manufacture cars — it doesn’t just write software that goes into cars made by others.
Slight refinement: it’s a barbell: production of low value goods that are not worth shipping has remained, e.g. paper. But that’s just damning.
You need to research a bit more what is behind these digits.
A lot of funny accounting where companies which haven't manufactured literally anything on US soil for decades somehow manage to accrue billions in "manufacturing output"
Or is it the other way around? Manufacturing is declining, and services are growing because they're the only jobs left for former manufacturing employees?
While I highly support US investing there more, it’s not something that gives US blue collar jobs in the rural America. And push for more manufacturing in USA is about that.
The US should be focusing on decoupling the need to be able to survive (food, housing, healthcare) from holding a job instead of pushing for bringing back these jobs that are not likely to ever come back.
At the moment regional differences in the price of manufacturing labor are so large that corporations are basically labor market arbitrageurs. But arbitrage opportunities are by their nature kind of ephemeral, ending when the relevant markets stop mis-pricing things.
Your POV seems to be that labor is correctly priced in the current cheapest labor market (the "Race to the Bottom" hypothesis) but I don't know that this is automatically true. It's at least possible that one can only arbitrage the price of labor in developing markets for so long until they develop and drive up the local price of labor, and until they are all developed.
"The Jobs Ain't Comin' Back" is an appealing position for professional automators like us, because it lays the credit for manufacturing labor market dynamics at our own self-important feet, when in actuality it's shaped largely by brutally exploitative and probably transient (on the scale of decades, though) labor-price arbitrage. In particular the current manufacturing labor market artificially rewards centralization because the profit made by labor-price arbitrage is so large compared to shipping costs.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that manufacturing is either Sweatshops or Robots in the long run.
It probably won't be in my lifetime, but my kids need to plan for the day when there isn't a cheap labor source waiting to tap. It will be a good problem to have (think about all the engineers making life better), but it will be a problem.
Which at the moment looks to be china, despite textiles trying to move to lower cost countries, the magnetic force of ongoing factory automation in china might pull them back. The US deindustrilized to early for any of these really to come back without some seriously focused "billionaire" class investors putting their money first (aka Musk).
That is a lot of spending that could be transitioned to robotics if humans become too costly.
1: https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/2019-training-industr...
This is a fairly optimistic point of view, IMO. What I think is much more likely to happen is the following cycle:
1. Manufacturing comes to a new place due to low wages (relative to the cost of labor in the previous place), lax environmental regulations, low tax rate for corporate profits, and very low worker safety regulations.
2. This goes well for 20-40 years, but as things typically do, environmental regulations are put into place by the local government, the tax rate rises to pay for the externalities of the low wages, and workers organize, agitate, and win higher wages, more safety regulations, and worker protections. All of this raises the cost of labor.
3. Manufacturers move to a new location because it is much cheaper. This causes people in the old location to lose their jobs, become impoverished, and craters their economy to the point where the government, implored by all of these laid off and angry workers, need to do something to help the situation. This results in a lowering of wages, rolling back of environmental regulations, lowering the corporate tax rate, and repeal of the safety regulations and worker protections.
4. Twenty years later the manufacturers come back to the country because people have become so desperate for jobs that moving back to the country is relatively cheaper compared to the country that manufacturing just moved to.
Just view the policy decisions with respect to manufacturing that the leaders of the United States and Mexico have proposed to "bring back" these blue collar jobs. It all follows this playbook.
To the extent that this is true, one cause is that governments (with the notable exception of China) handicap themselves by honoring agreements, which they absolutely do not have to do absent a bigger, badder government to make them. A savvy, Machiavellian US government policy would:
1. Promise corporations the world
2. When factories are built, expensive machinery shipped in, and personnel trained, renege and hike taxes, but not so much as to force a write-off
3. When foreign governments make it difficult for US corporations to operate factories abroad and they ask for diplomatic support, shrug and tell them play stupid games, win stupid prizes
4. Do not apply the above policy for US corporations doing natural resource extraction abroad.
(i.e. act more like China)
Micron is perhaps a candidate, though not sure it meets all your criteria.
My last statement is ridiculous, but also TFA is correct in its diagnosis of Intel.
So... where does that leave us?
I don't pretend to have good answers to your question. There are some smaller shops nowhere near the scale of Intel. Some foreign-owned companies have fabs in the USA (including TSMC). Also, Intel is made of people who might be interested in striking out on their own.
But, yeah. Building things is hard and expensive and risky.
The "diagnosis" of Intel is that it threw away the chance of higher volume for lower margin which gave TSMC a bunch of money to catch up to them. (I think that's a very hindsight is 20/20 kind of view too...I don't think anyone thought that the iPhone would become larger than the entire PC market when it came out...and at those volumes Apple would eventually realize anyway that it wouldn't make sense to keep paying Intel to make chips for them.) I don't see how a start up is going to capture that volume without some sort of pseudo-captive market to grow with (which is basically how the various companies in China are progressing...).
And the wall at 14nm is them not investing in EUV, so they'd have even more work versus say the 14nm/28nm transition.
Well yes, but... you could hire a bunch of foreigners to run things, as that's where the current experience mostly is, as you point out. But that experience includes use of semi fab equipment, essentially all of which is built in the USA.
That said, I'm not a fan of industrial policy; not sure what results were generated by the megabucks spent on Sematech (and I worked for Sematech sibling/neighbor MCC in its day too).
I haven't followed them much since, but 10 years ago, they were doing good stuff when I worked there.
I didn't know, but I'm not surprised.
Because "winners" in this sense right now just means "who can build it cheaper" -- and there's no intellectual bankruptcy there. The answer is pretty much always "K, build it cheaper? Build it somewhere else then."
It would be as if in the late 70s deciding we had to subsidize supercomputer and mainframe computer development, to hire all these talented engineers who were wasting time building and programming kit computers and “pc”s that could never be as important to our economy, and our “technological leadership”.
We can’t industrial plan the future.
The market doesn’t care if US democracy triumphs over (or even survives) Chinese state managed capitalism. But I think a lot of us have skin in the game on this one.
China has long recognized the strategic importance of this kind of thinking, see the massive subsidies they provide many of their industries to create the very dependencies you’re crediting as a natural market efficiency.
As far as new investments though, China arguably picks their winners and has learned valuable lessons in boosting manufacturing from garage to factory. Their lead in solar manufacturing was astronomical.
The US have also done this, look at how Boeing, HP, Intel, the Auto industry and others had their start. Lots and lots of loans and grants.
If anything our policies are overly conservative and careful with new investment, investing heavily in the "idea factory" models surrounding higher education and subsidiaries. Fortunately that's also led to a large and mostly competent investment community that is willing to bet the farm on new companies.
Comparing the industrial & investment growth to industry in Europe and the ME has informed my view that we do a pretty decent job. Corruption is there, but it isn't the norm that I've see in other parts of the world.
When China plays clear favorites with its companies, the US is forced to compete in tis unfair market.
This is especially relevant for industries that require such an extreme amount of capital to be bootstrapped, that it is essentially impossible for a competitor arise in the market fair and square.
and let's not forget disruptive pizza delivery services.
Taiwan now puts effort trying to attract new talents. The "gold card visa"[1] is quite easy to get, just earn more than usd5.5k/month at your last/current job, or work in a "trendy" field (AI/big data/energy/biotech...) and you get an "open visa" for 3 years without restrictions for ~300USD. If you're looking for change, I highly recommend her Taiwan! Happy to reply to any questions
Over a year of anecdotal data using my own senses, which I consider extremely sensitive to allergens.
Maybe some pollution data will indicate otherwise? It's certainly no rural Kansas, and I bet industrial hot spots in Taiwan suffer (like near TPE), but yea I felt great in Taipei. Far better than most Asian cities, perhaps comparable to Tokyo.
> based on reports by the World Health Organization, that the air quality in Taiwan is generally the worst of all of the Four Asian Tigers, in particularly drawing attention to the annual mean PM10 level of Taiwan (54 micrograms per cubic meter). The annual mean PM10 level of the country's capital Taipei (47.1 micrograms per cubic meter) made the city rank only 1,089 among 1,600 included cities around the world. Based on 2004 data by Taiwan's Department of Environmental Protection, the annual mean PM10 level for Taiwan had, for the last decade, been worse than the European Union limit value (40 micrograms per cubic meter) every year.
I always enjoy taking a break from Japan and going there. People are more spontaneous, food is more varied, it’s refreshing.
For safety, from 0 to 10, I'd give it a 9.5. I like to joke about the daily biggest national news being a grandma who lost its cat, since not much "bad things" happens here. Most of the thing I lost were returned, for example I thought I've lost my bag with my ipad few years ago in a bar, but someone returned it the day after x)
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/06/13/2...
I would've thought that was India.
As long as you give a WIDE berth to blue trucks you should be fine.
I found safety to be a non-issue the last time I was there. Taipei feels like any other big Asian city and even on smaller side streets I didn't feel unsafe. In smaller towns and such, I also wasn't nervous.
Despite that, I've never felt safer at night than I have in Taiwan.
Each of these places has a stereotype. Each are amazing the vast majority of the year. Pick your poison for the rest of the year.
Taiwan needs to open branches of all production in US and plan for mass evacuation of its population, so it doesn't wind up wasting it's time like Hong Kong must do.
A land invasion of Taiwan would quite possibly be the most painful land invasion imaginable.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/hope-on-the-horizon-taiwan...
> The first phase is the decisive battle in the littoral, extending up to 100 kilometers from the island. Key capabilities at this phase will include sea mines, and large surface vessels equipped with Taiwan’s capable, domestically manufactured anti-ship cruise missiles, the Hsiung Feng 2 and 3. Taiwan’s surface fleet includes larger vessels from the legacy force, such as French-built Lafayette class frigates, U.S.-built Kidd-class destroyers, and U.S.-designed Perry class frigates armed with both Hsiung Feng and Harpoon missiles, as well as a new class of fast attack Tuojiang class catamarans that carry 16 missiles. Taiwan also fields anti-ship Hsiung Feng missiles mounted on trucks that will disperse in order to survive initial strikes. While evading detection in Taiwan’s urban and mountainous terrain, they will launch strikes at surface ships throughout an invasion.
> The second phase seeks to annihilate the enemy at the beach area, which extends approximately 40 kilometers outwards from anticipated invasion beaches. This phase calls for Taiwan’s navy to lay mines in deep and shallow waters off suspected landing beaches. A new fleet of automated, fast minelaying ships are being built for that mission. In the interim, mine-launching rails can be installed on several classes of surface vessels. While invading ships are slowed by mine fields, swarms of small fast attack boats and truck-launched anti-ship cruise missiles will target key ships in the invasion force, particularly amphibious landing ships carrying the initial wave of PLA assault troops as well as roll-on-roll-off vessels carrying follow-on vehicles and armor.
On top of that, hike along the west coast at any time. As you hike along mountain paths you'll stumble upon bunker after bunker.
Besides that I <3 Taiwan!! As a tourist I loved pineapple cakes, beef noodle soup, night markets, high-speed trains, and plenty of fresh mangoes and coconuts!
I love Taiwan and its people, and I hope everything stays peaceful and will do my part to keep it that way like voting and writing policymakers, but if I’m an expat I wouldn’t be emotionally invested in a total war for survival.
Air quality has regressed though, because they shut down the nuclear power plant after Fukushima.
Just like the TN visa. That's a deal breaker right there.
Then again, given the right mix of COL and wages, that might be tolerable, especially in a situation where something makes me willing to follow through on that plan.
Also, charitable donations, which includes working for charities for free, as well as voluntary work, are tax deductible for the "tax entity", which if you are married you can choose to be your marriage.
So depending on what your partner does, and likes to do, if you are in a very high paying job, it might make more economic sense for your partner to "work for free" donating their work to a charity.
This essentially would mean that you get 100% of your income, free of taxes.
Example A: your salary 200k, your partner salary 50k. Combined taxes: 250k * 0.45 = 112k. Earnings: 250 - taxes = 138k.
Example B: your salary 200k, your partner exercises a 50k job for a charity for free. Taxes: 200*0.45/2 - 50k = -10k = 0k. Earnings 200k > 138k.
I'm not suggesting that your partner shouldn't work, only mentioning that if you are moving to Germany for a high-paying job, that is just one part of the equation. IANAL, nor a tax advisor, so I'd recommend you explore the options and evaluate the package "as a whole".
For a lot of people, being able to work for a charity for free for a couple of years can be much more rewarding than a 8-5 office job at a FAANG.
You will however need to continue file US taxes at a lower rate. America is one of the few countries that expects its expats to do that. Retain an accountant who specializes in this.
Drop me a line if you were ever here and longing for a joy ride ;)
I brought up the possibility of Bootcamp supporting ARM Windows on HN yesterday, and others responded with some rightful criticisms.
From mrkstu:
> The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon—it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it.
And from pavlov:
> I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM.
Supporting legacy x86 apps is 'windows support', not 'running windows'
Microsoft gives away the ISOs for non-LTSB builds for free - it’s the product-keys that they care about.
Windows on ARM requires UEFI, so that's not a problem.
The great thing about x86 macs is that you can run x86/x64 versions of Windows, at decent speeds, through the likes of Virtualbox or VMWare Fusion, and have access to a vast amount of legacy win32/win64 applications.
Nobody needs to run legacy arm windows binaries, there simply aren't any around.
It would be a shame to lose access to decent windows VM performance on the Mac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Processor_Upgrade_Ca...
Nope. You can run UWP on Xbox, but most games don't (because functionality is limited).
Apple "just" needs to properly* support UEFI for Windows on ARM to boot
*properly == supporting the minimum requirements for Windows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...
There's an effort to make even the Raspberry Pi support this standard: https://rpi4-uefi.dev/
Reading my way through the specification at the moment, and I'm failing to see how UEFI does anything user-friendly at all. It seems to only be useful to entrenched business interests (read Big *) and to a lesser extent maybe OEM implementers. Whereas all the cryptographic subsystem utilization by industry seems to be being used against users in the interests of fortifying market position.
Wish I'd have added my voice to the din back when I was first reading about it back in the oughts. Didn't realize how much of a pain in the rear it was about to make my computing life.
Too late to turn back the clock now. I just wish I understood what was so wrong with the old BIOS POST->handoff process.
Probably need to sit down with an Old HP or Dell XP box and try to figure that out. Besides the Rootkit issue (which frankly, it feels like there are less intrusive and user-abuse enabling approaches to dealing with) I don't buy that the end-user got a single blessed thing out of UEFI; only lost.
They didn't really follow the specifications so there were a lot of differences, but it was definitely UEFI. Actually, one of the reasons Hackintosh bootloaders have gotten so much better recently is they don't need to deal with BIOS ==> EFI translation.
So clearly Apple saw something in it.
>The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum or UEFI Forum is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from thirteen "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, ARM, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_EFI_Forum
Apple started their adoption of EFI before the UEFI was a thing.
They're derived from PowerVR cores which do have WDDM (AKA windows) drivers. They're not great, but usable. Paying a third party to write new drivers isn't a crazy idea either.
Remember, they don't have to be perfect, just usable.
> > I don't think there is a standard BIOS for ARM like there is for x86, so multi-boot would probably require Microsoft to support Macs explicitly in Windows on ARM.
Microsoft ARM machines use UEFI. It should work fine if Apple implements an UEFI loader on top of iBoot or whatever.
They do have regular Linux drivers, Imagination just needs to get it's head out of it's ass and recompile them for x86.
https://www.imgtec.com/news/press-release/imagination-and-ap...
Switching to ARM on macOS will save them money as they don't have to pay Intel and can reuse existing designs and relationships with TSMC.
But actively investing money and personnel to support Windows, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, virtualization, etc on a platform that sells 20ish million units in an year, compared to the hundreds of million of units that iPhones/iPads/Apple TVs, etc sell - probably doesn't make financial sense.
Especially with how they've treated macOS lately, enabling easy transitioning via Catalyst, SwiftUI support, making it easy to reuse code for iOS. Switching to and getting more revenue from services, thus them being a bigger priority.
And there's the argument of doing all of that instead of investing more time into macOS with the whole Vistalina thing going on.
Again no idea whether it makes financial sense, they've more than likely done the math and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Personally I only used bootcamp for gaming a couple of years ago but then I just ended up building a desktop PC. It's just the better option as it will probably outlive all my Macs and I can upgrade parts as needed.
You really only need Bootcamp for gaming, and with Nvidia support waning on the Mac, you're going to have a second rate gaming experience even in Bootcamp.
Around 2010-2014, MacBooks are great hardware even for Windows. But after that, some good Windows devices are released (like XPS 13) and Apple starts failing (like TouchBar, keyboard, USB-C only, ...).
That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics...
On top of that, instead of bootcamp Apple could still support virtualisation to be able to run Windows ARM on Apple ARM hardware and write a paravirtualized GPU driver that just translates guest DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan to host Metal, similar to what pretty all other hypervisors are doing already.
While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics—after all, the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on uses Intel HD graphics when it doesn't have to spin up the Radeon.
And I wouldn't really want to bet that the Intel onboard graphics are/will be less powerful than Apple's.
But there's no reason those have to work in Windows. Apple isn't going to care if Windows gets crappy battery life.
The bigger question is, if Bootcamp would only work with a small portion of Apple's machines anyway, and you'd have to run a version of Windows which no one really wants, and Windows just generally isn't as necessary in 2020 as it was in 2006... is Apple going to bother?
After all, Microsoft would like to encourage software companies to make their products available for Windows on ARM as well, being on ARM Macs would make WoA more desirable. Besides allowing Windows to run on ARM macs must be preferable to MS over Apple investing in some Win compat thingy, while Apple would like to avoid investing in Win compat. It's an obvious win-win if Apple wants to do it that way. Apple could on the other hand decide to close the platform further, or manage to do this itself.
The only way I see this happening if someone else would do the work. And that someone else would have to be Microsoft. Why? They're the only ones with an incentive to do it. ARM Macs would be a highly available, highly performant development platform for Windows on ARM. Apple could be accidentally solving a supply problem here for Microsoft - a supply of quality high performance ARM desktop hardware. Apple might even be inclined to work with Microsoft (or they might not), but even if unlikely the only way I see this play out is without Apple paying for any of the work.
Even for gaming it can't run anything released in the last 15 years in the current Snapdragons, which by itself excludes a really big portion of Bootcamp use cases.
it was pretty much: mac workhorse by day, windows game machine by night
all that's fading away.
There are decent quality laptops shipping with ARM already, like the Thinkpad Yoga: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050758/lenovo-yoga-5g-sn...
There's also the obvious: Pinebook pro.
You can feel it on a rpi if you use it for a day, it's not that it's underpowered, you can grab a 15yo celeron that is much slower and single core and it will have less perceptable latency. The Celeron will "feel" as if it's working, the ARM chip will "feel" as if it's laggy.
I can't quantify this behaviour, but it's consistent across all ARM CPU's I've ever used with traditional desktop software.
Notably these issues don't seem to exist on Android or iOS, someone once told me this is due to the UI elements having a higher priority than anything else on the system.
I/O is actually the real prevalent bottleneck for desktop interactivity on all modern hardware. Even older x86 systems with spinning platter hard drives are set up for a more responsive desktop experience due to the I/O performance being suited for the desktop. Modern Android phones and iPhones also have much better I/O setups for interactive use (UFS for high end Android, Apple actually uses NVME because responsiveness is so crucial) .
Certainly CISC vs RISC has nothing to do with it as that discussion really has no bearing on the situation anymore on discussions about modern ARM and Intel (see my other post).
Not really, if the system has enough free RAM to use as disk cache. For many scenarios, that suffices to run quite acceptably.
I'm not saying SBCs are "unusable" for desktop use cases, I'm saying I/O is the likely explanation for desktop responsiveness issues they encounter on SBCs.
I hope they’re able to devote two cores to UI/UX at a much higher frequency than the general compute cores. That would take some engineering know how, but could negate the performance complaints largely.
User-perceived latency has little to do with the clock rate of a processor, though. What you need is:
1. Immediate feedback upon user input 2. Progress animations that move, even if progress is indeterminate 3. High frame rates on your animations 4. No frame stutter or torn frames
Out of the four, low clock rate will mainly impact frame rates and pacing, but that can still be mitigated by using what you have as efficiently as possible.
> Unfortunately, though Apple will likely find very great success with their ARM Macs, it does not necessarily follow that the architecture will gain significant ground outside the Apple-sphere.
Does not imply heavy workloads, compilation being offloaded to cloud is something already being done though.
I suspect that ARM will cannibalise most workloads, since it's shown very strong early competence already in photo and video editing on the iPad Pro, I highly suspect advancements in that direction will come to quallcomm CPU's in future.
ARM can eat the earth but it will not be a shift in a single year, I was suggesting a likely way forward and that is bottom up, coming from low end laptops to higher end laptops and eventually workstations and servers.
Just because it's not for -you- right now because you need local compilation does not mean a JS coder or a normal office worker would be unable to use an ARM based machine.
Nothing prohibits ARM from ever being workstation grade, it's just not the focus right now- but you seem to imply that because there's no workstation capable CPU that there never can be one, which I find disingenuous.
Just because it's not for -you- right now because you need local compilation does not mean a JS coder or a normal office worker would be unable to use an ARM based machine.
I don’t know what workflow other JS coders have, but mine starts with local development in Node. Does V8 produce code that’s as optimal for ARM as x86_64? That’s a pretty big deal to me, and can in fact be very enabling. The local development experience really needs to be good to build a platform, otherwise development will be halting and piecemeal the way embedded development usually is.
> never tested on android
just as planned
???
I’m back-end, not front-end. I think I mentioned Node, right? Why would I test backend code on a phone?
In modern contexts, the RISC vs CISC discussion still gets brought a surprising amount. But it is simply not relevant anymore.
See also previous discussions on Apple SoCs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19327276
But even the 8cx is limited to mainstream "browsing-only" type of laptops for one simple reason - there isn't demand for anything else from OEMs right now. So Qualcomm will not design a more powerful chip until the demand appears.
This is in contrast to Apple, who can "generate the demand" simply by making such much more powerful Arm laptops available and convincing people to buy them.
This is also one of the main reasons why Apple tends to have the more powerful processors in the smartphone market. No OEM is asking for a mobile GPU powerful enough to run advanced video editing on the devices and whatnot. So the suppliers comply.
They even implemented a x86 emulator in order to run your usual native software on it.
What they need is an x64 emulator. 32-bit apps are few and between now.
This quote from the article is the big takeaway. Apple isn't going to make a lateral move here. A processor transition that nets Apple merely comparable performance would destroy the Mac brand. Apple needs a CPU that runs native code significantly faster than Intel on every device and it needs to be able to emulate Intel chips at reasonable speeds.
I suspect Apple knows this and that their chips are going to hit the mark. But we'll see.
I mean I could see that happening when pairing a current A13 with a much bigger battery like a notebook has, but as others have said, the performance will have to be superb, so maybe we'll be seeing half the power efficiency? Were you thinkg 50+ hours or more in the lines of 20+ hours?
That being said, you could argue that the sporadic and discrete nature of phone usage has nothing to do with continuous "strain" on the CPU in a Desktop usage which could change the consumption.
So I went looking for performance numbers related to memmory, and found some anandtech tests[0], the summary being:
* L1, L2 and L3 are comparable to AMDs 4900 processors (which I'll take as baseline for "best x86 mobile", with a grain of salt).
* LPDDR4 1600 MHz vs AMD's LPDDR4 4266Mhz (dual channel, can't find if A13 is DC too, but I'd expect it to be).
* RAM latencies in excess of 340ns, vs "65+"ns for AMDs. Let's take that as "sub 100ns" since they're not giving straight numbers[1].
* RAM bandwidth to memory in the order of 20-40GB/s depending access patterns. That places it around the x86 "counterpart" which is capable of "around" 25-50GB/s
* Bandwidth in the caches is different too, but I didn't want to risk a bad interpretation on my side. It'd seem the Ryzen hits larger numbers (so better), but I admit I'm not used to reading these charts and feel a bit "out of the water" there.
Seeing all that... I'm not sure the memmory system is on par to what x86 has to offer with its "best contender" right now. And let's also remember that Intel is still beating AMD in memory latency (which helps them drive better numbers in some "real world" benchmarks as we see in certain games, for example, where Intel still leads despite the "raw power" Zen2 has shown).
My take is that a "slow memory system" could be a big drawback for a CPU in real world tasks, resulting in a chip that, on paper should be great, but once you sit at a computer to use it "feels slow".
Of course this is complex to test and try, and far more than I can analyze sitting at home driving searches over the internet.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15708/amds-mobile-revival-red...
For the last couple of years every time Apple has tried to do some acrobatics on the Mac platform it has failed miserably.
- Yosemite
- Butterfly keyboard
- Touchbar
- Catalina
I'm not much of a CPU guru but a switch to ARM seems like the most ambitious and risky of all these, by far.
"What a portable Mac should be" is going to mean different things to different people.
My perfect portable Mac (based on what's available) would be a 16" MBP, because I care about screen real estate first and foremost, followed by a desire to have a fast chip/gpu, battery life be damned. Other people prefer other models like the 13" MBP or the 13" Air for other reasons.
IMO it encapsulated everything wrong about Apple's approach to laptops during these past 5-6 years like the butterfly keyboard.
Even things like the Intercom web dashboard - a use-case you'd think a laptop like this would be ideal for with a customer support staff member - it simply couldn't manage comfortably. Though to be fair a high-spec £400 Chromebook couldn't comfortably run Intercom either...
In the end it could very well be the perfect demonstration of why a move to ARM would be worth it.
The main issue/downfall of the Macbook was the slowness and the heat. Those are also the two strengths of the A series of chips- performant w/o excess heat.
You take the exquisite form factor and marry it to Apple's chips, and you potentially have a drool worthy portable powerhouse, though the sticking point may be getting a magic keyboard in that form factor vs the butterfly.
Frankly, if I had to point to one corollary between when the changes worked and when they did not, the most obvious would be that Steve Jobs is no longer around...
The other one is the popularity of iOS.
Edit:
Also the departure of Forstall in 2013.
Maybe what happened is that Ive took over the reins and made the life of the engineering teams too difficult. I'm optimistic his departure will bring good things to the Mac. So far we've gotten a new keyboard.
The biggest win around their 2020 lineup of macs is that they walked back the keyboard design and are offering a new version of the air that doesn't have the touchbar.
Don’t forget Apple has done this twice already, and it’s the only company that has done this at this scale and succeeded. If there is a company in that can pull off a cpu architecture switch, it is Apple.
Last time they transitioned from a niche architecture to the architecture that was already mainstream - and happened to be faster and more power-efficient as well. That was basically a no-brainer, it could not fail from a market perspective (from a technical perspective however, it could), because it essentialy tore down previously-existing compatibility barriers between whatever software the mainstream of computer users used and what Mac users used. This time, they would transition AWAY from the mainstream laptop and desktop computing architecture to a niche architecture in that area, which, while still maybe being more power-efficient and maybe even faster (we'll just have to give them the benefit of the doubt there until we hold actual hardware in our hands), erects new compatibility barriers between the mainstream architecture and all people using software based on it and Apple's computer offerings.
This can only work from a market perspective if they either are big enough to drive such a momentum of customer and developer attention to this "new" platform that they essentially manage to make it successful all by themselves, or if they actually happen to be the harbinger of a future movement to ARM in desktop computing scenarios which will at some point in and out of itself be much larger than Apple's share of desktop computing space.
If either one of these happens to turn out to be true, they will be able to make that transition work. If none of these turn out to be true, they will fail (measured by falling Mac market- and mind-share), regardless of whether they execute the transition well from a technical standpoint, which I agree they will be very likely to do.
It's Apple. Developers will make software releases in just months if they think the market will be there, and they will. Knowing that a new market is opening up that is not so crowded (like Nintendo Switch), will make developers very, very happy.
Even Palm Pilot succeeded. You just have to convince people that Mac-users are willing to pay for software, which seems to be the case.
The amount of developers nowadays are also crazy.
AFAIK today Apple is the only big developer making exclusive macOS products. If you think about it the vast majority of big apps are crossplatform projects (Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, all browsers, audio, video editing, animation, 3d, etc).
There are ARM servers, Apple processors may become server processors. They could run iPhone, iPod applications on Macbook. Full day on one charge. Linux works fine on ARM. x64 in VM for compatibility.
It is the best time - Intel is record low with vulnerabilities and process - switch to AMD or switch to ARM.
Edit:
For example, how many times has Apple implemented a new keyboard on the Mac? And how many of those times they failed spectacularly?
https://mac-optimization.bestreviews.net/four-apfs-problems-...
Okay, the ones using this only for ~~work~~ office work, the browser and Netflix won't mind, but for the rest this presents a huge separation from what is available elsewhere. I must miss something.
Even beyond games, the thing is that nearly every development platform these days is an abstraction above the hardware - be it the JVM, the web browser, etc - and the rest (of the new ones coming out) are built to be cross-platform from the get go. Just look at how smoothly Rust/Cargo can target different architectures. I'm sure the same is true for Go.
I highly doubt that. The architecture difference is too big, and gaming studios are not known to press that button even if it's available. The native Linux gaming support story speaks to that. That they will port existing games is even more unlikely.
Will be funny to re-read that comment in the future, be it right or wrong.
The existence of gaming on Mac I think is largely due to companies that support it by choice, like Blizzard, and I don't see why they would abandon the platform due to a CPU architecture change.
Unity and Unreal do not only exist for their multiplatform target, but because they are premade engines to make games with in general. Many games made with them support one single platform.
There is absolutely a commercial incentive to release Linux games. Developers would not do it otherwise, or at least they would have stopped after one try. They did not.
I highly doubt that Blizzard supports MacOS out of goodwill, and I doubt even more that if it was based on that, they could easily continue doing so after a cpu architecture change. They'd have to port whole custom engines plus middleware. That would not happen in that case.
One thing I assume is correct: If there is money to be made here engine developers and game developers will make it happen. But I don't see why it would be that easy.
So the people the play games on Mac are not the same group that play latest AAA shooters or arcade games, they are people that play some casual games or retro games on their laptops so no "hardcore gamers"
So it is possible that this people when they buy a new laptop would not buy an ARM Mac buy a Windows one to continue playing the casual or old games - sure Apple can ignore them because as percentages is nothing for their giant vault of money.
But the good news it that game life cycles have gotten much longer; where in the past a game was seen as a fire-and-forget project, these days a game may get active updates for five or more years after launch. And not just AAA, but indies too.
Meanwhile I see Mac players upset their 32 bit games no longer work (like the Sims3 players and I also see some Mac users in r/winegaming ). Again Apple can do whatever they make them more money but for example gamers voice was heard in Ubuntu/Linux and Canonical did the work (for free) to continue supporting gamers.
But I have had a pretty nice experience with GeForce Now. I don’t see why that would have to change with macOS ARM.
As someone who does web development work on a MacBook Air and plays games on a Windows Desktop it’s good news for me. I think the fraction of Mac users that play games on Mac is pretty slim.
And most software that I depend upon is either 1) open source, or 2) developed for Mac first and foremost with a solid backup app that is open source. The one exception is Microsoft Office, whose Mac versions are second thoughts and second rate software, but necessary for collaboration with a world that has locked itself into closed formats. Office would likely get an Arm version for Mac too, I would think.
I don't buy computers just to read websites (I can do that more comfortably on an iPad), or just to write documents (ever heard of the FreeWrite[1]?), or just to play games (I'd rather use a game console). Rather, I buy a computer because it's a single device that can do all of those things.
I almost added "and switch between them seamlessly" to the end of the last sentence, but of course on a Mac with Bootcamp, that's the one exception—you have to reboot in order to play a game. Still, on a laptop, I consider the ability quite valuable—I don't want to carry around a second computer just to play a quick game of Spelunky from time to time. If I couldn't do that at all on a Mac, it would be a point in favor of Windows.
---
2) Macbook Pro & Macbook Air have a total share of 78%. I’m ignoring other models, since we are talking about ARM on notebooks, not towers. That brings the number of players to 3,1MM
3) We can assume that most people still rock macbooks since 2012. But let’s start counting from 2013. (We don’t have unit sales, but only the total amount, so I work with the amount that most websites quote) Apple, on average, sells 18MM Macs per fiscal year. Till today, that is 135MM Macs the market.
4) We need to estimate the amount of Macbooks vs Macs, but I cannot find a single stat on this. I’m gonna pull this out of my ass and say that it’s around 90%. The Macs have always been supplemental to Macbooks and Apple has been “forgetting” about them a lot. This brings the total to 121,5MM
5) That is 2,56% of people who game on Macbook. I would say Apple doesn’t care about ~3%. This stat also doesn’t account for hardcore vs casual players. Eq. Those who won’t care vs those who will switch platforms.
The fraction of people using Macs that care about gaming is tiny, and among them those who care about Steam even more so.
OTOH would Mac users have cared more about gaming if the platform hadn't shipped with obsolete versions of OpenGL and Metal had been introduced much sooner?
Before Metal was introduced in macOS the included OpenGL version was like 4-5 years behind.
Only 4% of people using Steam are using a Mac, gaming isn't that popular on macOS, unfortunately. And it's getting worse with the OpenGL deprecation.
Think about how many games died when they dropped 32 bit support.
But I can't get behind that argument. If all you sell is 20-25 million, to possibly lose 5 million of that is huge. Think about how much they would have to save with the processor move (or how much performance they'd have to gain to make up for it in new sales) to make it worth it. Also, the effort will be huge to make the transition work.
All while there is the easy alternative to just use AMD processors if they wanted a performance boost?
I mean, I'm happy about this. It will probably further cement Linux as the only relevant gaming OS next to Windows. But I'm still surprised. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if it happens.
That ought to put things in perspective.
Even if Apple is getting some bulk discount for buying 10000 CPU, I have troubles imagining 50% off. Intel is known for enjoying their margin, not for giving steep discount.
If they were paying even 50% of list price, Intel's revenue coming from Apple would be much higher than what it is right now. Also, laptop CPUs are priced very differently from desktop CPUs.
Besides how many new users might Apple get by selling laptops that are cheaper and have longer battery life.
This is a long term race that Apple will fail because it failed to nurture its roots.
And, Apple's asinine decisions around OpenGL don't tell us anything about what users actually want.
Depending on how the announcement and rollout goes I could see myself buying one of the last intel 16” MacBooks, or just being content with my 2018, and either way not upgrading for a while.
I suspect that if the transition is “successful,” the first year or two on ARM will include a few noticeable trade offs, but those will quickly be “washed away” by a substantial performance gap where Apple’s hardware is just a LOT better than everyone else.
And if the transition is “unsuccessful,” well, I may end up finally buying a gaming PC... or just deciding I don’t care about the small handful of PC games I play and sticking to console.
Gaming on Mac has been second class for.... ever, so I would say anyone who really cares already has a windows machine.
But one last thought, keep in mind that while the quality of games is somewhat lower, the quantity on iOS is off the charts, including many games with high end graphics.
In a weird twist of fate, it’s possible that Apple’s decision to merge its desktops and laptops into the same architecture as its mobile phones actually increases the total addressable market so much that game makers are _more_ interested in doing the small amount of extra work it would take to make a game work on Mac as well as iOS. This happened when Firaxis started making Civ for iOS and then ended up updating the Mac version to use Metal, and when they did the performance was worlds better.
I welcome competition. I want CPUs to get faster again.
Companies that still care will compile an ARM version just as easily.
2) Macbook Pro & Macbook Air have a total share of 78%. I’m ignoring other models, since we are talking about ARM on notebooks, not towers. That brings the number of players to 3,1MM
3) We can assume that most people still rock macbooks since 2012. But let’s start counting from 2013. (We don’t have unit sales, but only the total amount, so I work with the amount that most websites quote) Apple, on average, sells 18MM Macs per fiscal year. Till today, that is 135MM Macs the market.
4) We need to estimate the amount of Macbooks vs Macs, but I cannot find a single stat on this. I’m gonna pull this out of my ass and say that it’s around 90%. The Macs have always been supplemental to Macbooks and Apple has been “forgetting” about them a lot. This brings the total to 121,5MM
5) That is 2,56% of people who game on Macbook. I would say Apple doesn’t care about ~3%. This stat also doesn’t account for hardcore vs casual players. Eq. Those who won’t care vs those who will switch platforms.
I love Apple Arcade's subscription model, but it's still coming up to speed. The offerings it has aren't great yet, but I suspect they will be with time. If Apple can improve its offerings on Arcade, I'll never look back. I don't need to play the latest FPS and I suspect other Mac users also don't fit that demographic. If Valve doesn't want to port Steam to an ARM-based macOS, I'll simply drop Steam. It's that easy because Steam offers very little of value for me, personally. I've heard from others that they feel the same, though I can't say how prevalent that feeling is among Mac gamers.
Wow.
That way they could run old code simultaneously with new code - x86 apps get their memory flagged (by the MMU perhaps?) that all code from this memory region gets executed with the x86 decoder stage, and code in normal memory gets executed with the ARM decoder stage.
And to be honest this is entirely what I'm expecting of Apple - yes they are not concerned with backwards compatibility but no one is going to buy a multi-ten-thousands-dollars Mac Pro or even a multi-thousands MacBook Pro if it can't run Photoshop or their favorite sound editing/DJ suite.
Unless you're doing something at least moderately esoteric, if you have an actively-developed macOS application today, you'll be able to produce an ARM version of it tomorrow (or, y'know, whenever Apple actually activates this capability) by ticking the right box in Xcode.
There might very well be a compatibility layer available for a transition period (there was for 68k->PPC, Classic->OS X, and PPC->Intel), but that's not at all the same thing as saying Apple will build in hardware-level x86 support in perpetuity.
Will this also take care of existing low level optimizations? I can easily imagine Adobe and everyone in the sound/3D area to run custom specific x86 Assembler code in hot paths.
This is Photoshop only in name, in reality it's a rewritten dumbed down version that shares a few of the UI tropes.
Can we please stop pretending these cut down iOS apps are comparable to the real software
There it was implemented as new jump instruction for both archs in order to mode switch.
x86 is infamously hard to decode, though. Often you speed it up by tagging instruction boundaries in the L1$ which you wouldn't have in the Apple ARM devices by default. If you're willing to just decode one x86 instruction per cycle I suppose the overhead wouldn't be unreasonable.
And I've seen some x86 uarchs that tag boundaries in L1, but I've seen some that don't too. I wouldn't consider it a blocker.
https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?actio...
"Intel, by integrating design and manufacturing, earned very large profit margins on its chips; Apple could leverage TSMC for manufacturing and keep that margin for itself and its customers."
Take a look at the "Low End" iPad and the iPhone SE. They are both excellent price/ performance devices with highly competitive processors.
In so curious so see this. Unless I missed it we haven't seen consumer high end ARM chips that are readily available running a general purpose OS.
Like the Raspberry Pi is cool, but it's still trash in comparison to an average x86 laptop.
Let's see if those really high geekbench scores translate to an excellent computing experience.
I mean, of course a single VST works like a charm, single VSTs already worked fine on 500 mhz CPUs with win98-era computers and Cubase VST. The question is how many tracks with synth + 20 filters behind can you layer before having to freeze things.
You have active cooling for the sandy CPU the iPad does not.
> I don't doubt that it could run at 4.5GHz in a desktop package, with a proper fan and heatsink.
well, I don't know at all. I'm pretty sure you can't take a, say, 2.something ghz U-series intel i7 CPU and make it go a lot beyond 3ghz
That's real common actually. The current from the diodes on the I/O pins has to go somewhere.
I imagine Intel Quarks will though. Probably any of the SoC versions as well.
I've actually had to design around this in a board once. Had a chip where the reset line didn't hook up to all the logic inside it. Originally just put FETs on the power lines, but that wasn't enough and I had to gate off all the I/O lines too.
> According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible. They then became interested in designs dedicated to low-power applications which led them to the ARM family. One of the only major users of the ARM for performance-related products at that time was Apple, whose Newton device was based on the ARM platform. DEC approached Apple wondering if they might be interested in a high-performance ARM, to which the Apple engineers replied "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we'd use it." [1]
Regardless of the degree of DEC's contribution, the ARM phoenix arose out of the flames of the Apple Newton.
Further irony is that Intel acquired StrongARM from DEC as part of a legal settlement, then sold StrongARM/XScale, then created Atom for this market, while in parallel they developed a low-power 386 for the RIM Leapfrog/Blackberry but later concluded that this market was not large enough (forcing Blackberry to switch to ARM with the introduction of their Java based SDK)[2].
Intel has made some magnificent missteps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
[2] Graham Tubbs "Harvesting the Blackberry" https://books.google.ca/books?id=oSaoNQcFTzMC&lpg=PA25&dq=Pi...
If ARM becomes the standard on the desktop for a significant portion of machines, then I think that we'll probably start to see more ARM processors making inroads in the server and workstation market, which I think will be a huge win.
What is the ARM cruft? I think there's a processor mode transition, but I don't know the architectural details. The worst thing about ARM (as in any RISC processor) is that the instructions are devoid of semantics -- there's no "call" that is just a plain instruction, there's a "jump with flags saying to put the current instruction pointer in the location pointed to by another register and increment that register". This is kind of interesting as it allows all sorts of crazy non-tree-like call patterns, but practically speaking the scope of what compilers can generate is limited, so the implementations of the architecture will tend towards supporting certain usage patterns, which will mean seemingly equivalent instructions will have different performance characteristics, etc. Are there other specific cruftiness about ARM that you can point to (either here or referring to other posts or blogs)?
An effort that Windows seems to be in the direction of abandoning. (Plus, writing these kinds of compatibility layers is complicated but not super complicated. What you really want is performance, and that’s hard.)
You're not wrong, but the point seems a bit pedantic—Microsoft is clearly investing a lot into making WSL2 feel native, and it runs acceptably fast.
Well, but that's Ben Thompson's point, I think. If it's true that developers prefer to deploy to the same architecture they develop on, then one of two things are possible:
1. Developers largely abandon the Mac.
2. ARM becomes more common on servers.
Apple is presumably betting on #1 (or is just willing to lose the developer audience), but it's a gamble.
Lots of developers don't need to deploy code to servers, of course, but it's easy to see a situation where the momentum is felt by all. macOS's UNIX support has made it, well, I don't quite want to call it the "de-facto" development platform, but something approaching that status.
[0] https://youtu.be/Kkn9CLppLkI
[1] https://youtu.be/JLQAh6IHPc4I see the Swift compiler can output LLVM IR, can you do the same thing with Objective C code bases?
Imagine developing apps on an ARM-powered macbook, deploying onto ARM-powered servers owned by Apple, specifically for applications to be used on MacOS & iOS devices.
Could you have an external Intel coprocessor like we have external GPUs?
(I know nothing about how this would work, obviously the traditional way would be to just have an remote x86 server for running those tasks)
For example, emulation of x86 on ARM is expensive due to subtle differences in memory model. Why not make an ARM chip that can operate with x86's memory model?
The Pro model will use x86. And retain the compatibility of all macOS apps, some of them may likely never made the move to ARM. They just keep patching it to run on latest macOS. Along with Windows Bootcamp option. That will be Mac Pro, iMac Pro and MacBook Pro.
The Non-Pro model will use ARM. You will end up with a 12" Macbook that is priced at $799. With a possible 14" Macbook at $899 ( The BOM cost of an iPad Pro 11" would be the same as 12" Macbook, you are essentially swapping the cost of back camera modules to additional 128GB NAND, the Touch Screen And Glass Panel to Track Pad and Keyboard. ) It will be like the Macbook 2015, except it doesn't cost that ridiculous $1299. And $799 might have been the cheapest portable Mac in recent history as far as I could remember. Even the 11" MacBook Air was priced at $899.
It would greatly expand the macOS market shares. Which has very much stagnated for the past few years. Out of 1.4B PC market, Apple has 100M macOS users, 7% marketshare. Compare this to 4.5B Smartphone Apple has 1B iOS users, 22% marketshare. And the most important thing to me would be that Apple also accept / admit Tablet computing will never take over the Desktop / Notebook, or keyboard / trackpad paradigm. It is good enough for large enough of a market to worth continuing the investment into Mac other than trying to get iPad / Tablet to kill it.
The only problem with this hypothesises is that the software would be very messy. Would Xcode force all Apps by default to compile with Fat binary? Is Apple going to tell its user the different ? ( Not that I think it would matter to Non-Pro user )
Anyway, this will be an interesting WWDC. ( Or may be everyone got it wrong Apple isn't doing anyway to the Mac )
I also wonder if any chiplet designs will find their way into Apple's Arm-based lineup.
And Apple is already extensively using multiple small chips put together to form their A13 APUs, so they are not far from the full "chiplet" already (they just are not using silicon wafers as the interface yet).
Right now I think that the main barrier to the Mac Pro already being on AMD CPUs is the lack of Thunderbolt. Already there is 1 Thunderbolt AMD motherboard, and with Thunderbolt becoming part of USB 4, that barrier will fall next year. So it will be an interesting race: is Apple pushing for AMD Mac Pros, or ARM ones?
A company from a sovereign country claimed by China.
Advanced robotics will offer a chance of a fundamental restructuring as labor costs continue to contribute a declining proportion of COGS. The factories and supply chains could be completely distributed and resilient. But the example of the Internet is discouraging: the ultimate end-to-end system ended up highly centralized too.
Perhaps Intel should buy GlobalFoundries or license Samsung technology to develop competency in building designs for other customers.
People say Qualcomm is catching up but I'm not sure what kind of performance we'll get from the first ARM PC processor from Apple. It will probably run circles around the 8cx.
One full of excellent prima donna's who don't work together at all.
The other full of good players who work really well as a team, communicate well and get out of each others way.
Who would you bet on winning?
But if they have the same number of cores it's generally a power tradeoff. A 12W chip can give 12W to one core or 3W to 4 cores. Transistors are optimized for a particular voltage & current, so when they run at a different power, performance scaling is not linear.
This is one of the key things they got wrong.
Mobile and tablet devices are not real computers. I can't run any software I want on them. They're locked down, managed, console type devices. There are other weaknesses at the OS and hardware level too, but the lack of flexibility and control is the most fundamental and hardest to change.
If you opened up the OS to versatility and user control you could easily scale up an iPad with a bigger battery, more cores, and cooling, and you'd have a fantastic laptop. The UI would need some work too to make it suitable for more complex tasks, but that's an area where Apple excels when they want to.
The locked down nerfed nature of mobile OSes is hard to change though because it exists for good reason. It addresses a primary need in their market niche. These devices are marketed to non-technical users, and in today's constant war zone environment a non-technical user without those controls will be inundated by malware and spyware.
Still, this keeps them from being viable replacements for desktop/laptop systems in the professional market. For that reason desktop is not going away.
We have two markets here that really do seem to demand two solutions.
The desktop market decline wasn't the death of desktop. It was the loss of the low-end of the market, with non-technical and casual users migrating to phones and tablets. That transition is nearly complete, and the desktop/laptop market that remains is likely to remain until and unless something appears that truly does address that market niche.
It's not a growing market but it is probably a stable one. Having a strong presence in that market is important for Apple because it's the market where developers live, and without developers who is going to make software and ecosystems for the rest of their devices? Who will ensure that these devices reach their full potential and thus are maximally appealing to consumers?
No, doing everything in cloud is not that thing. I want to actually own my data, and broadband is still far too slow to make that workable for a wide range of tasks anyway.
Yeah this is just an Apple journalist bubble belief that doesn't really reflect the real world in any way and is starting to get tiring.
We keep hearing from them how iPad Pro is a computer and how it's so much more powerful than a real laptop yet we still never see it do anything more than tweeting, writing articles, extremely basic video editing and a painting app.
Yet I look around every workplace and its still just a sea of laptops doing incredibly varied work across multiple applications and systems most of which still just isn't possible on iPads.
If Apple pulls any walled-garden nonsense around what apps I can and cannot install on my Mac today, at the extreme I can install Windows/Linux and run the majority of software that's available for those platforms.
If they move to ARM-only, I lose that choice.
I'm curious if there are any better benchmarks that will run on iOS.
If they pass on the savings to consumers, looking at the price escalation with iPads I don't see why we should expect it to happen.
if they don't build that garden wall higher which can include no bootcamp support
while TSMC is doing great they are sill in Taiwan, a country which China has been making a lot of dangerous noise about and considering what is happening in Hong Kong how long before Taiwan suffers a similar or worse fate. That is a lot of manufacturing tied up in one area
That said, if a laptop rolls around that doubles the 10 hour battery life on existing configurations - they'll scoop up a ton of users regardless whether it can run Windows or not.
I don't know how doable that would be, but the iPad Pro has a 28 watt hour battery, the MBP 13 has a 59 watt hour battery, a theoretical Macbook without a discrete GPU and a smaller motherboard footprint of an A13 chip, leaving space for a bigger battery and providing about the same performance could possibly hit 20 hours of battery in about the same space.
AMD ryzen to EPYC with Lisa Su and TSMC became king of pure-play foundry under Morris Chang.
i think there is a pattern here. a good engineer CEO have a vision of what a company can be while a CFO turn CEO only see the bottom line.
i don't know how long Intel can keep squeezing 14+++++++++++++++ nm.
I shudder to think about how long it will take to debug all of the Python3 wheels and Node packages macOS devs are accustomed to. I already have issues with versions of both language's packages failing to install with other versions, and that's on the same platform, OS and CPU architecture.
Still, I'm excited. Intel is way overpriced compared to Arm at similar performance and power.
Macports's support for legacy versions of OS X is unique, and dare-I-say incredible.
They also state that the A13 trounces every other ARM chip by 2x yet uses a chart that doesn't include the Qualcomm 865 which is in current flagship android phones.
It doesn't really hurt the main point of the article but the logical appeal falls flat when you don't seem to really understand what you are discussing at a technical level.
A13 still comes out a fair bit ahead in performance, but not in energy usage.
Qualcomm 865 doesn't make that much difference. Not to mention the 865 wasn't out when those benchmark were done.
I fully don't agree. It appears as the exact opposite of what the rational use of market forces should be.
As the article talked about, relying on chips that can only be sourced from allies that are not defensible from your primary potential adversary is a major risk.
Why do you think Boeing et al are on the government defense teat? It's not just as a disguised socialist job program and Congressional slush fund. There are some legitimate reasons for government funding.
It's not "aid", it's government spending on national defense infrastructure and manufacturing capability.
I don't see that claim supported by the text:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-semiconductors/u-s-la...
"A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill to provide more than $22.8 billion in aid for semiconductor manufacturers, aiming to spur the construction of chip factories in America"
Do you have some quote to support your claim?
It doesn't look as such. As far as I see it's mostly additional tax breaks for the companies that would anyway be awarded taxpayer's money through the defense contracts, and the "security" is a magical excuse for that.
The contracts could already have the desired conditions, but this is a way to avoid showing the real cost of them.
Republic of China is a big target of People's Republic of China. Sure, there shouldn't be a war, but in the worst case scenario, USA is kinda screwed by having all their chip manufacturing there. Notice that the new TSMC factory is with big emphasis on military contracts.
Nobody should have any illusion: "in the worst case scenario" this "where" any chips are manufactured will be simply totally irrelevant. It's obviously a wrong model to plan for anything. The realistic model is the scenario which is not the "worst case." And then, the question is just is the "aid" reasonable or is it better compared to other existing or possible market forces.
Why giving away money "to spur the construction of chip factories in America" when
1) the U.S. is anyway an immensely big customer and simply deciding on how it buys what it needs can already influence the markets
2) the existing companies already have "chip factories" in America.