Apple's M1 processor spotlights Intel's chip challenges
cnet.com
cnet.com
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20061205211900/http://www.mercur...
I suppose you could argue, then as now, that the disbelief is performative and not a real reaction. I have my doubts, though.
For current Mac users we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases if the developer is even planning on supporting it in the future. Catalina did a good job of punting a lot of old software to the side and decimated gaming on the Mac.
I know I am in a minority here but for me I want only one desktop/laptop type machine for both productivity and games. As above, Catalina decimated the gaming environment on Mac and frankly the iOS game environment isn't comparable.
So, yes in some limited cases Intel sounds a bit like Palm but the difference is in phones it was a wide open environment to exploit and the current desktop/laptop market is heavily entrenched with established 3rd party software that must go along for the ride and that condition did not exist for phones, though now it does.
Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market.
Are you kidding? All of them. I mean, Adobe, Microsoft?
> we still have no means by which to look at our installed software and know if Rosetta will handle it or in many cases
It will, the cases were Rosetta 2 won’t work are extremely rare, hand tuned vector instructions from high performance software that is probably well supported anyway.
As for games, yes, if you care about them at all, don’t buy a Mac. At least not until Apple changes its attitude towards it.
> Now if Apple could find inroads into the server market.
Yes, one can dream.
That would be catastrophic
I don't know if I'm an outlier but I recognized many of them. I have no idea if they (apart from some real biggies like MS or Adobe) have any Windows presence, and I know there are big Windows companies I don't know exist.
These observations of yours actually go together.
The phone business was highly entrenched in 2007 with carriers having all the control (especially in North America) over a highly sclerotic system that sucked almost all the value out of any third party apps. Apple truly disrupted them all: phone mfrs, carriers, and the app environment.
Apple has an opportunity to do the same with the cloud business. They have three lines of attack, ones they've used before. 1 - a lot of cloud code is platform agnostic (in Python or js etc) so for that the switching cost will be lower 2 - they have an edge in privacy protection and, on a cost basis, their NN chips vs Nvidia who has been lucky enough to enjoy a quasi-monopoly. People will pay for this, especially when/if privacy rules start to have teeth. 3 - Since they are vertically quite integrated and build their own chips, Apple can build web hardware optimized for high performance networking, lots of NNs, etc with kernels to go with. Their cost structure is potentially a lot lower even compared to open connect folks because they already have everything set up to build lots of machines so they can be quite profitable while undercutting the Amazons of the world.
Local server machines? Not a chance. And will they do the cloud? It seems likely they will be driven to it, but given their decades of poor execution on anything but hardware it seems better than even odds that they would flub it despite putting great people on it.
With full control over the hardware and not relying on Intel for the processor, Apple is aiming to reproduce its iPhone success in PCs. They have everything going for them.
The future looks bleak for Intel and AMD. They are stuck evolving a 30 year-old architecture.
In fact, this is where Apple shines in terms of long-term strategy and execution. They are able to create a revolution with a new product/architecture (iPod, iPhone, iPad and now PC), then iterate to make it evolve over time. In doing so, they create new markets. I really feel like the M1 is an inflection point in the personal computers market.
Can't wait to see how Qualcomm and Nvidia (with the acquisition of ARM), will respond.
ARM is over 30 years old as well.
With Mac desktops and mobile devices getting similar in hardware the question is how much longer it will take, till you can plug your phone to a screen, keyboard and mouse and end up with a decent desktop for most use cases.
(There are tricky questions in that for instance whether one can plug it out for a break or something and how well such a thing would recover and a question whether one would be able to separate work and private life in such a world, but all should be solvable)
imagine your iphone (with its 128 or 256GB) of storage being the storage device of your computer. But not necessarily the CPU. When you're at a more powerful computer (say a laptop or mini), you can plug in and all your processes now run on faster computer. When you want to go remote, you migrate the processes to the portable device.
imagine being able to carry a single computer in your pocket like this betwen home and work and not having to carry a laptop.
http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/files/wpid-compsac2006-fordis...
The screen has a USB A port, so a keyboard and mouse were useable with the dongle. It also has two USB-C ports allowing you to charge the phone through the screen. Touch screen was excellent too.
Dream setup, maybe AMD would hop on the RISC-V or OpenPOWER trains if it does end up looking like x86 is going the way of the dodo.
Unfortunately even that is gone. If you need multiple cores, Pref Watt Scale up with each core adding to it. Unless you want absolute single thread performances. But even that Apple seems to be winning.
We have enter the age of TDP Computing.
ARM is older than you may think :) AFAIR the ARM instruction set was developed just a couple years after the Intel 8086, 1983 vs 1978. They're both nearing 40 years, but not that modern x86-64 or ARM64 are the same as those old ISAs.
X86-64s on the other hand have compatibility not just to 32 bit, but also 16 bit. You can still boot dos 1.0 if you wanted.
Form my point of view, they only need to replace the decoding units and, perhaps, the simd units of a Zen core to have an arm cpu.
I suspect that Intel's near term prospects are defined by how quickly TSMC can get fabs up and running - not a great place to be.
Similarly, the full-range of PCs comment reads like they’re hoping nobody noticed that the low-end market is increasingly using cheaper ARM chips. Here again x86 compatibility is worth something but for a lot of people it comes down to whether it runs Chrome and Office, so there’s an upper bound on how much money you can squeeze out with such effective competition.
Intel has the resources to do better than this but I no longer have confidence that they have management who can effectively run the company.
I'm hopeful that M1 will drive both AMD and Intel to do better in the mobile space. AMD got a lot of praise for the 4000 series, but it's had nearly no availability.
To turn the phrase, there’s a lot of innovation in the M1 that only Apple can do.
There’s also a downside to being a walled garden, Apple is building itself a Great Wall, but the barbarians eventually got the better tech. So for example, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have Directx ray tracing. How many generations before Apple GPUs catch up with Ampere or RDNA3?
To some extent having the GPU architectures discrete allows them to iterate much faster as they aren’t tied to other dependencies, or left with inferior thermal and power constraints.
But I think a lot of people are more concerned with Perf/$ and Perf/Watt and will find Apple’s fully integrated approach is extremely hard to beat or even compete with.
In this case perf/$ is going to provide Apple an unbeatable margin, not necessarily the consumer an unbeatable price.
Even previous gen Mac Mini's with the T2 chip made it difficult to reinstall even MacOS due to Find My Mac.
Their expectations are not met when they find only a couple of guys in a plain office building.
They decide they can do it themselves and design the ARM1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_RISC...
Apply had a large stake in the company. Amusingly, it is possible that selling that stake latter, saved Apple - this
https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-...
This is a bit silly. Neither Intel nor AMD are particularly constrained by the underlying ISA that their chips are using.
-- IMO, the chip seems to bring some innovations, but nothing too new or disruptive for this market.
I'd say it's pretty decisive at this point.
When they switched from PPC to Intel, they had clearly been desperately trying to keep PPC alive and viable. With Intel they’ve been just openly showing the world they can do better and just daring anyone try to keep up.
In other words, innovation which solves x86 problems doesn't exist on other architectures.