Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

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Apple is the most valuable public company in the world. They have been making their own SoCs for the iPhone for over a decade. Their internal-consumption focus along with the bankroll of the world's most valuable corporation means that they can make the best chips. Intel's market cap is just 1/8th of Apple.

Intel chips have basically stagnated for about 5 years and they abused their monopoly and market leader positioning by offering marginal improvements each year in order to protect margins, as well as fab shrink problems that insiders describe as coming from culture not dissimilar to Boeing; just with less lives at stake.

In the meantime, competitor foundries have caught up, and exceed Intel's ability to ship in volume. ARM obviously is eyeing the desktop, but more critically server market so the latest ARM IP is geared towards higher performance computing, quite well I may say.

State of the art fab + state of the art processor IP = state of the art processor. Not a huge surprise :)

Yet Apple can't even make a working keyboard.

They can, they just compromised on an overengineered but stupid design so that they could shave off half a mm on their laptop thickness.

Butterfly keyboard works fine for me. It's actually my favorite MacBook keyboard so far.

Agreed. I have both the 2019 16" and 2018 15" side by side, I greatly prefer the butterfly keyboard.

They made working keyboards for years and have gone back to doing so. The bit in the middle was a blip.

nah. the "gone back" wasn't far enough. I liked say the first generation macbook pro, with concave keys and longer throw (although the creaky case was not as nice as the sculpted aluminum ones)

I had a friend with an old old powerbook and the key shape reminded me of a thinkpad.

They can do it, but the flat short throw keys are too form over function.

I still use a 2014 era Apple wireless keyboard and prefer it over any of the mechanical variants I’ve tried. Key travel distance is a personal metric.

the first macbook pro didn't have THAT long a throw.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/MacBook_...

Right, I had that mac and the KB was fine, as is the 2014 wireless model I have, despice neother being long throw. I'm fine with short throw, it's a preference.

The 2016 keyboard fiasco was too far for me though, and even now with my 16" 2019 mac with the "fixed" keyboard, I still prefer the wireless 2014 model, or the KB from my 2014 MBP.

I, for one, prefer a keyboard that is comfortable to type on even if doesn’t have the greatest travel over a significantly thicker laptop.

I’ve had many macs and all the keyboards have been best in class. I just skipped buying a model with the bad keyboard. That was made possible by the fact that their laptops have serious longevity so I could just hold onto machine until they fixed it.

I think when a threat comes along, intel steps up.

they WILL compete, and they've been playing leapfrog with AMD for years.

I'm waiting to see the intel response for the new 32 and 64 core chips from amd.

Maybe. The problem is that I'm guessing Apple wants to move to their own ARM not for more compute, but more power efficiency. Intel has never been able to deliver on the low power side.

> Intel has never been able to deliver on the low power side.

Yes they have. It's why we have 10+ hour thin & light laptops. The quad-core i5 in a macbook air runs at 10W, that's comparable per-core power draw to an A13.

Controlling the CPU will give Apple more controls to tune total-package power, particularly on the GPU / display side of things, but CPU compute efficiency isn't going to be radically different, and that's not going to translate into significant battery life differences, either, since the display, radios, etc... all vastly drown out low-utilization CPU power draw numbers.

> The problem is that I'm guessing Apple wants to move to their own ARM not for more compute, but more power efficiency.

I'm guessing the switch is for those reasons, plus a more important one (my opinion only), control.

If they use their own chips, they're not stuck waiting on Intel (or any other x86 CPU manufacturer) to build CPUs that have the attributes that matter to them the most.

What I really don't understand is why can Apple out-compete others by that much? Sure they're bigger than Intel but for them, Chip design is only one small part. Have they outspent Intel, Qualcomm, AMD & Co so massively?

Why should we expect anything significantly different than a year iteration on what they already use in the iPad Pro?

A laptop (or desktop!) computer has a significantly higher energy budget than the iPad. The SoC Apple uses in those devices could conceivably be clocked higher and/or have more cores than the A12 parts they're currently using in the iPad Pro.

You can't exactly just shove a turbo on an under-powerd commuter I4 engine (fuel efficient) and expect it to turn out well.

I wouldn't imagine just upping the vcore and the frequency clock will just magically make it faster and compete at the same level as an intel chip.

I'm deeply skeptical as a developer, you -will- get compiler errors, and it's going to suck for a while.

Well, it entirely depends on how they designed the chip. If they planned ahead they could design the chip for 4Ghz ahead of schedule and then take advantage of the higher frequency once they decide to actually release a desktop or laptop with an ARM chip. I don't believe that Apple did this so they will either create a new chip exclusively for desktop/laptop or they just keep the low frequency.

> You can't exactly just shove a turbo on an under-powerd commuter I4 engine (fuel efficient) and expect it to turn out well.

Isn’t this the exact concept of the VAG EA888 motor used in the Audi A4 and extended all the way up to the S3?

That said, the rumored chip is an actively cooled 12 core 5nm part which is more like an RS3 motor with extra cores/ cylinders

Way different thermal envelope? iPads are passively cooled.

Isn't that a selling point of ARM? Would you prefer a passively cooled but only slightly slower laptop or a faster laptop with a noisy fan?

I don't think there can be a universally accepted answer to this, as there are so many different user priorities for laptops.

Having said that, I think the top requirement for most laptops is that "it's gotta run what I need it to run on day one".

For a huge amount of light users, ARM Macs are going to satisfy that requirement easily.

Once you move up the food chain to users with more complicated requirements, however, it's less of a slam dunk... for the moment.

This is like saying Qualcomm and Samsung should be able to make top tier desktop chips but the reality is that it doesn't translate so easily.

I guess its all trust that Apple can pull it off and there's no detailed rumors yet?

That's because neither does build even a top tier mobile ARM chip. Each of their best offerings is about half as fast as Apple's A12X/Z

Because with the A series they show that they know how to make a good CPU that fits into the thermal restrictions of the chassis.

>fab shrink problems that insiders describe as coming from culture not dissimilar to Boeing; just with less lives at stake.

Since normal processors calculate a lot of important things, I'm wondering if there really are fewer lives at stake. Of course it would be more indirect, but I could imagine that there are many areas where lives are tied to PCs doing the right thing.

E.g. what if a processor bug leads to security issues in hospital infrastructure.

Like Meltdown and Spectre?

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