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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

I cannot think of any plausible way in which Apple could have influenced the date of this announcement, but the timing, given what is expected to be announced later today, is uncanny.

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As far as I remember the TOP500 list is updated more or less the same time every November and June. Google Trends agree[1].

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=top500

Since Fugaku has been in the works for a while, I wonder if Apple just tried to choose the date of their announcement to coincide with the Top500 ranking

It’s nice but I think Apple tends to downplay the ARM part of the story and focus on their own branding for the chips (A12, A13, etc).

The chips in the supercomputer are not exactly ARM, they do have arm-8 instruction set but that's just for loading the proprietary vector extension unit.

Pretty much a GPU alike stuff with arm-8 set to be able to run its OS.

No, it's not a proprietary extension, it's Arm's Scalable Vector Extension!

I do not get the "not exactly ARM" bit. The chip has a lot of cores that execute standard ARM code with SVE instructions mixed in. You can download the manual for the SVE from ARM's website. Following a quick search I also see that GCC has a flag for generating SVE instructions.

am out of the loop. what is the rumor?

That Apple will be moving at least part of their consumer machines to ARM-based chips.

ARM software can predict the future via https://github.com/go-bears/prognosticationengines!! Go Bears!

PS This is meant to be sarcastic.

Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. A powerful high TDP CPU will be great fit for Apple, while they continue to focus on low power and energy efficiency for their mainstream product.

> Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip.

This seems unlikely unless Apple has decided to sell their chips for the first time ever.

I suppose it could be interesting from Apple's PR perspective, but I have serious doubts that the supercomputer owner would agree to this. What happens to them when Apple discontinues the current chip in favor of the next one?

The A64fx isn't that high TDP, if the reported number of ~160 W for the entire thing (including HBM) is accurate.

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