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Comment by heisenbergs | Hacker News Reader

The responses here seem to not really acknowledge what a rabbit apple has been pulling out of the hat. 2-3x the performance both from a CPU and GPU perspective, whilst being far more energy and thermally efficient. Of course this was kind of known and rumoured, but now we know.

Finally real competition for intel. If only these chips were available to others. they are literally running laps around the competition.

Curious where Apple's pro offerings will go, and whether these will be available as servers...

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>Real competition for Intel

AMD would like a word.

I'm really worried that AMD has won the battle, but lost the war in terms of x86 being replaced by ARM in the next decade.

There is no danger to AMD in the PC market from ARM. Apple will not sell their cpu’s to other PC vendors, and other ARM chipmakers aren’t even competitive with intel, let alone AMD. What this shows most of all is that the instruction set is not what matters, it is all about the core architecture. Intel is still dragging the ghost of skylake along, while AMD has something better with zen, apple has their A cores, and everyone else is forced to use ARM reference architecture because they don’t have the resources to design their own core. Only nvidia has the ability to upset things.

No danger? It seems a very precarious position over the next five to ten years. If Apple find success with their strategy, then money is going to flow into the development of ARM chips from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, etc for their own products/servers.

I doubt this. Apple may end up with a massive competitive advantage over other laptops. I doubt Microsoft and PC OEMs are just going to stand on the sideline and watch Apple eat their lunch.

I would expect there to be an arms race on... ARM. And maybe MS suddenly stops treating Windows on ARM as a hobby project.

Well it is not like x86 was homegrown at AMD either, it is unreasonable to think they will be able to build great products on ARM.

Nowadays power efficiency for performance is nearly equal to the performance. So the M1 is the performance king for mobile and SFF. I'm exciting to see how Apple Silicon works for power hungry desktop/workstation area.

I think it's more of a X86 vs ARM battle and not particularly Apple vs Intel. AMD will suffer too. And Graviton, Nuvia, Ampere are all competing against X86 incumbents.

Are servers important anymore? Seems to me that servers are made to automatically scale on AWS, and that is it. 8vCPU may be equivalent to 1x M1, it doesn’t really matter as long as you can have 4 of them.

Yes, greater performance means greater density. That lets you do more with constant everything else. Look at the uses for HPC if you want ideas for applications.

Absolutely.

More performance/watt in the server room ultimately translates to cloud provides being able to offer more performance/dollar to users.

The thing that makes me fairly bullish on this transition is these are the low end devices. It will be interesting to see what they replace the 16" MacBook Pro, iMacs and Mac Pros with.

Apple dug Intel's grave.

> Finally real competition for intel.

Unless Apple is going to sell these chips for other laptops, desktops and servers the only competition going on here is Apple competing with itself. Besides, AMD has been competing with Intel very well for the last couple years and have now pretty much taken over the market with their latest CPUs.

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