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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like apple made multiple specialized processors for specific tasks, built a motherboard around that, and cooked all that into the OS. It's a bit of a cheat since they aren't building a generic computer architecture, but a very very specialized one.

This is different with say Windows architecture. In windows vendors work on generic cpus/gpus/motherboards. Some hardware isn't exactly available or uniformally accessible due to drivers and such. This is kind of the huge benefit Apple has by creating the hardware, OS, drivers, languages and libraries.

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This is what they do with everything. It is the reason for vertical integration.

Calling it ‘a cheat’ is somewhat weird.

The point is that a general purpose CPU is a bad solution for a personal computer.

The neural engine is about processing the ambiguous world that humans occupy so that the human doesn’t have to translate so much for the computer.

The GPU is about communicating visually with humans.

GP said a bit of a cheat not that it was cheating.

Point is that if you try to run a different OS, it will likely run slower, perhaps significantly slower than running macOS

Given that the individual cores benchmark at the very high end of any core available today, this is almost certainly not significant.

If another OS doesn’t take advantage of the specialized processors, it will run slower, but only on specialized loads.

Anecdotally, I saw some folks on reddit's linux board that were running Linux in virtual machines on the M1 and getting quite decent results.

I see Apple following the path of Nintendo. They don't need to compete on performance, their users aren't buying for performance. Vertical integration puts you at tremendous risk of falling behind.

The future is keeping Apple "fresh", "cool", etc... While keeping product costs low to compensate for a falling market share.

Really says something that Apple is willing to compromise on long term hardware performance.

Can you explain how they are ‘compromising on long term performance’?

I don’t see any logic that supports this claim.

How are they following the Nintendo path? These machines are clearly faster than the market segment, and apple is the leader in ARM CPU technology at this point, and they’ve been the mobile CPU leader for about 7 years, whereas Nintendo’s latest offering integrated mostly commodity technology from Nvidia Tegra. I don’t see how you can draw this parallel.

Nintendo has, since the Wii, shied away from bleeding-edge or custom components, preferring to use cheaper, proven tech that they can more easily maintain but is still strong enough for their needs. Just look at the Switch -- it uses the Tegra X1 in a device that launched in March of 2017, despite the X2 having been available for more than a year.

Apple, on the other hand, has been running rings around Qualcomm and other ARM vendors for a while now, and sharing tech makes it all the more important that they continue to be competitive.

I think only really the SNES/N64 years embodied the cutting-edge solutions associated with novel games. Their whole ethos to entertainment (especially the handheld line becoming the core product in a way) still feels embodied in Yokoi's "lateral thinking with seasoned technology" philosophy.

Yeah and I think it will be quite interesting to see in the years ahead how this kind of highly specialized approach to computing will stack up against the more generic wintel approach, and how customers will respond.

Customers may end up with having the choice between a very high performance system at competitive prices, vs an open architecture which has more flexibility in what you add, but which will ultimately cost more and have worse performance.

You can see this play out in different markets. Just look at Tesla e.g. They are taking the Apple approach to car making with full vertical integration. They are doing everything from making their own alloys to creating their own machine learning hardware.

I think we are at some kind of paradigm shift and the old guard has been caught off guard.

If that were the case, though, we would expect to see performance gains only in areas the M1 is specialized for -- but that's not what we see. The M1's GeekBench scores are impressively high, and general-computing workloads like compiling code are very fast as well, indicating that the M1 is fast in general, not just for specific tasks.

There's been a lot of hype about things like "specialized hardware for NSObjects," but AFAIK that's more of a flawed/outdated design on Intel' side than a specialization on Apple's: the "magic" is really just ARM's weaker & more modern memory consistency model, which makes things like reference counting substantially faster.

Apple did optimize for some common use cases, reference counting (as used by objc++), javascript tweaks, and for emulation for rosetta2. However they also made a great general purpose CPU that will run many standard codes impressively quickly for impressively little power.

Today all of this is exciting, but I have a bad feeling this is going to slide Apple towards a low performance future.

They Apple'd themselves and locked themselves in.

In 2 years, secrets aside, Apple would need to beat all 3 big dogs to be the top. How long can they sustain that?

Couldn't they could just switch back then?

They could at significant expense.

But why would they? The users don't buy for performance.

Basically every laptop from here on out is going to be benchmarked against these devices.

And battery life seems to be the sleeper performance metric here. Every review is going to be "you could get 6+ more hours if you just bought the macbook"

Today they overdelivered, why is it then so hard to believe they'll meet the expectations of a scaled up SoC? It's guaranteed.

How do you reach this conclusion? Their individual cores and memory architecture still beat almost everyone else on general purpose loads without any of the specialized engines.

They've been sustaining it for many years already, that's how they've gotten to the point of being able to passing up the incumbents. They didn't just start on this path this year, its the culmination of a long play strategy.

Apple has been beating “the big dogs” in performance for years with this processor and OS architecture in mobile & tablet segments. They’re switching laptop and desktop segments to this architecture because the mobile architecture already overtook the big dogs and has been growing the lead for a couple of generations. The A14 phone chip is already faster than most laptop CPUs, just like the A12 phone CPU was faster than most laptop CPUs when it was released.

IIRC iPhone did well on SMT solver benchmarks as well.

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