Yes, we can have power-efficient phones and laptops, but what about other product categories? I think the market should be more modular so that any company can build cool stuff with top of the line CPUs, not just Apple.
As a hacker, I think with Apple's dominance computing is becoming less interesting. It's like opening a LEGO box, and all pieces are already fused together.
I'm happy that Apple is showing that the king is naked, I hope that a new wave of ARM based devices (not just from Apple) will influx new life on the PC Market.
So other metrics like power draw get more prominence. Apple managed to get both with a chip design, but I don't see it as a trend yet. I wouldn't even call it innovative in itself, it is just a very good iteration of CPU tech. I think that is awesome because it challenges other companies again.
For performance intensive applications like gaming or CAD, GPUs have become more relevant.
There is a lot of special software for physical calculations (lenses, materials, etc.) that require raw CPU power for n-th degree numerical solutions, but these are niches that cannot sustain an industry.
My main device I use in private for a lot of development has a standard intel CPU and I only looked at power usage because I knew it would be fast enough. I wanted it to be as silent as possible. Turns out it was indeed fast enough for anything I wanted to do. Maybe I buy a new one in a few years, but it didn't yet fail me in any way.
This is just not true. I do NOT have an M1 yet. I have a group of co-workers that do. This group is normally what I would call the critics that are never happy with anything. With out fail each one of them has raved about how fast and responsive their M1s are. They say it nothing like anything else and is a game changer. They also rave about the fact that they can go a day without needing to find a wall socket. This is a group of devs and hardcore networking people.
From my view, no matter how powerful of an Intel system I have running Windows, macOS or Linux, the desktop UI are not up to the speed of an iPad. Getting that in a laptop...that would be great and I plan to try it out in the form of an M1 Air.
What I read: Desktop environment should have more UI effects like iPad.
The rave reviews that the M1 Macs are getting for performance and power efficiency shows that large step improvements in CPU performance are noticed and greatly appreciated. We just didn't have anything as good as the M1 before to really understand how much better computing could be.
I disagree. At least in the datacenter there are still lots of workloads that are CPU bound. And many of these workloads are not easy to parallelize. Right now there are about a bajillion startups in a Python codebase that are hitting scaling limits, where the single-core GIL limits are starting to hurt responsiveness.
Yes, they could re-write into Go and get higher performance and better concurrency at the same time. But most orgs don't have the bandwidth for re-building their software stack from scratch. They'd much rather throw money at hardware.
My guess is if you had a datacenter CPU with 2-3X the single-core threaded performance of top-level Xeons, it would sell like hotcakes.
Many companies would rather throw money at beefier hardware than play around with experimental JITs that may or may not break standard behavior in unpredictable ways.
My point was that most consumers don't understand these things, and just assume that "computer speed" is one-dimensional: it's either fast, or not fast.
Free dancing bears and network effects will always win.
When Steve Jobs announced iPhone on stage in 2008 he said it was a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,"
That was saying the quiet thing out loud and Apple is playing it much cooler on PR around competition these days.
But Apple Silicon combined with Apple software is very likely at least 5 years ahead of the competition, because there is not currently an assembly of organizations that can integrate to offer anything like what Apple is doing _now_.
What makes this article particularly interesting is it points at beating NVIDIA and AMD in graphics and reducing the size of the enclosure by half.
I find it interesting that Apple just redesigned the Mac Pro only to have to redesign it again for Apple Silicon.
Oddly, the failed trash can Mac Pro may have actually worked for Apple Silicon designs.
I suspect that Apple will provide web services to Apple developers that breaks pricing for Intel / NVIDIA based cloud compute and further burnishes the value of building for Apple platforms.
Apple can fab at max scale if it can consume its own chips in its own data centers that can flex between serving Apple or AWS or Azure customers.
It’s going to be a rough go for the PC market because not everyone is going to make it through this—-at least not as the companies they are today.
Zen3 looks pretty on par with the Apple stuff, maybe it's finally time for OEMs to adopt AMD in a serious way so they can invest into R&D even more.
Also at the end of the day performance oriented people aren't going to care so much about process node idiosyncrasies. Does it perform or not?
Not that I would be mad if AMD meets or heck even bests Apple. Competition is good for all of us :)
Why can't others just "get better" and make their own chips that actually compete?
That's not to say it would be impossible for another company to try to get themselves to where Apple is today—but it would be far from trivial.
It's not like they're an example or anything... I mean, it obviously doesn't work for every market, but I just see it as kind of strange that someone hasn't taken a page from Apple's playbook over the years when it would suit them.
When Steve Jobs came back as "iCEO" in the late '90s, Apple stock was roughly $8/share (pre-splits). They weren't a total nobody, but they certainly weren't interesting enough to any big fish that there was any push to put pressure on them to act like a more "traditional" company. And Jobs kept doing things his way for the next 15 years, until his medical retirement and untimely death, and those things increased Apple's stock price fairly steadily. Until the iPhone came out, of course, at which point it increased dramatically.
But by then, people were already used to the idea that Apple would do things Apple's way. (And some people were so used to the idea that Apple was Doomed that they still preach it every time there's any new Apple news.) And it's so utterly clear that Apple doing things Apple's way works—for Apple.
Any other company trying to do things Apple's way—or even its own unique way, rather than the way the markets want—would be fighting an incredibly strong current.
So many people, even those who should absolutely know better, seemed to get caught in the trap of believing that a company—any company—can only be "viable" if it can constantly outdo itself and all its competitors.
1985 - 1997
Anyway, thanks for the reminder that the period without Steve Jobs was less brief than I tend to think.
"We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term...
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies...
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions..."
Maybe there's something to this approach?
[1] Bezos letter to shareholders, 1997 - https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...
But who's fault is it? I would tend to think that it's Windows Arm port that sucks since Qualcomm chips offer good perfs for Android phones.
It is extremely likely other companies will step up with new offerings. But it will take 2-3 years (where Apple will reap the benefit of being early).
Dell had a 2560x1600 LCD in 2007. https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-ultrasharp-3007wfp/specs/ https://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/general/ultrasharp%20300...
Dell and Sony also had laptops going as high as 4K in 13" form factors around the same time. Yes they were high end. So too was the MBP.
I remember using laptops with LCD screens in 2010, and even before. They weren't even Apple laptops.
My point is that PCs have offered high end specs at affordable (but above average) price points even before Macs had them. And the fact that many PC laptops still offer low res screens point to price being the deciding factor which moves the PC industry forward, not Apple.
I still wish Apple would release a reasonably priced stand alone display. The Pro Display is amazing but I could never justify it :/
What exactly is stopping, say, Qualcomm, to introduce "top of the line CPU"? Apart from engineering merit?
Investing in a top end CPU is expensive and currently there is no buyer for a workstation class CPU other than Apple.
Microsoft's ARM efforts have been lackluster and sales has been lethargic. The last time Microsoft tried to jump to another architecture was an expensive failure. Who is going to invest hundreds of billions in jump starting this category with a track record like that?
Likewise, Linux. While Linux is a great development platform, Qualcomm isn't going to gamble tens of millions on developers migrating en-mass to a Linux/ ARM platform.
Someone has to put up the money and it's a bunch.
Currently, the only company willing to bet enormous amount of money and frankly the entire Mac platform to change status quo is Apple. Maybe (and I really hope so) Apple will push other ARM processors on the desktop as a side-effects - while Qualcomm is more or less "just" the packer of ARM designed cores, and if I understand the market it's entirely out of their reach to design M1-class CPU, maybe Apple will push ARM to design more efficient desktop cores. Maybe Amazon or Google will do that with their custom ARM silicon now when Apple demonstrated that processors doesn't need to be hot to be powerful. For so long Intel sold us basically the same thing, and we cheered when AMD was just a couple percent faster. However this ends, I'm glad that someone at least rocks the boat.
Nvidia is the most likely company to build a higher end ARM CPU to compete with the M1. With the ARM core and their GPU expertise, they could conceivably crank out something which performs much better than Qualcomm.
They did their level best to get maximum control and this was and is a huge turn off. If they made it as open as x86/x64, and pulled out all the stops to get software support equivalent to x86 like Apple have done with their system, then it would be a compelling proposition. As it is, it has woeful software support, and Microsoft did very little to address this.
All technological innovation is coming from Apple? That's a mind-boggling statement.
Apple released a great CPU, which replaced the last best CPU, and some other CPU next year will be better than both (it could be another Apple chip, it might not be).
At the end of the day, the average consumer wants performance insofar as their device can run apps they want (benchmarks means squat), and battery life. Apple moved the envelope forward here, but let's not pretend they landed on mars.
This is how apple has lost its way.
Apple should be more "modular". (and that would lead to what you want)
What people don't realize about steve jobs was that he was the great integrator. He got different folks to work together.
The mac pro from his era had pcie slots and worked with add-in cards from lots of vendors. You could add 4 hard disks.
Another way of looking at it is to read that silly book "The 7 habits of hightly effective people" from decades ago.
Basically said the arc of maturity is:
- dependent (child)
- independent (teenager)
- interdependent (fully developed)
After Steve Jobs, Apple regressed to independent. Instead of using its market power to foster the ecosystem, it has regressed to teenager level and just does what is good for itself. There are no other hardware manufacturers anymore and now their software developers don't feel like partners and tread carefully.
Thing is apple can probably do well for itself independently but... It's lonely at the top especially if you've turned your back on the rest of the ecosystem.
lol - the only reason the Apple II had slots is Woz threatened to quit if SJ won on excluding them.
The Original Mac wasn't designed to be opened by users. You had to have a LONG handle Torx screwdriver to open it. Job's was VERY much into appliance computing. Any expansion baked into any Mac was in spite of, not because of, Steve Jobs.
Many things I like/appreciate about the man - his obsession over all computers being sealed was NOT one of his more endearing characteristics. Obviously he was flexible - we had Mac's with slots back then and we do now too. But there has been no "regression" since his passing.
Hardly!
https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/
> Jobs was a huge headache for Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership, who received memos almost daily complaining about his temper, his dismissive attitude toward the Apple II platform that was the only thing supporting the company, and his refusal to listen to reason when one of his sacred precepts was threatened. Jobs’s headstrong authoritarianism had been a big contributor to the debacle that was the Apple III launch. (Traditional wisdom, as well as an earlier version of this article, would have it that Jobs’s insistence that the Apple III ship without a cooling fan led directly to the hardware problems that left Apple IIIs dying on buyers’ desks by the thousands. It does, however, appear that this version of events is at least questionable; see the comments section for more about that. Be that as it may, everyone involved would agree that Jobs did an already muddled project no favors.)
and yes, the reality distortion field was his preferred method for that.
I had meant, based on your previous comment, that he had used the field on you :-p
I'd consider an Apple laptop if I knew any game I wanted to play would work, and I never play the latest AAA games. But so far I checked and StarCraft 2 does not seem to play well, despite being a 12 year old game. (That may change with software updates?)
I was all set to replace my 2015 MBA with an M1 MBA, but in watching his (and others) Cities:Skylines performance I'm now thinking I may switch to gaming on Mac full time. Only problem is 16GB of RAM is NOT going to cut it with C:S - so I now am waiting for the next batch. 32GB should be plenty and I would be shocked if the next group of machines didn't have at least one laptop that could go to 32GB.
Hopefully still HBM too.
Looks like at least some people have had good luck with StarCraft II.
I'm hoping a cloud gaming service takes off that works more like a dedicated remote desktop rather than an a la carte storefront the way they all seem to be.
I think Apple just showed us that being less modular can bring huge benefits.
As an example, in a modular world, the CPU designer would add instructions that speed up encryption/video decoding/whatever, larger vector registers for speeding up ML stuff, etc.
In a M1 world, the system designer might say “we don’t need them in the CPU; the system will have custom hardware that can do that better”, or even “yes, that would speed up the system, but we better spend that transistor/heat budget on X”
If Microsoft doesn't go down this path for Surface, don't hold your breath any other vendors will.
PC's are not where innovation happens. Intel had USB for almost two years yet PC's still shipped with serial/parallel ports. Then the candy colored iMacs hit, and all the accessory makers started chasing them with candy colored USB accessories and then all the sudden the PC vendors woke up to USB. USB was a disaster on Windows 95, Marginally better on Windows 2000 but didn't get decent until XP.
Wifi - Apple not only released wifi on their laptop but a whole ecosystem - Access points too. One app to configure and manage everything. Push button simplicity. Wifi thrashed around on PC vendors and was relegated to PCMCIA cards with dorky external antennas before Apple baked it in and pretty much embarrassed the rest of the industry to stop nickel and dimeing everyone as an add on and just include it as base tech. Or at least bury the antennas in every laptop and still charge people for an optional internal card. How long did that continue for?
I'm sure there are some others I could think two but I vividly remember living through both of those as I had a foot in each camp at the time (actually I was more PC back then since before the iMac is was the craptastic, uninspired and overprice Performa years for the Mac - the PowerPC iMacs brought me back into the Mac fold).
PC has always been focused on high volume, low margin, least common denominator hardware. Big bins of unremarkable but functional interchangeable parts. Major Pro's of that strategy are pricing and choice. Major Con's are instability/incompatibility/driver issues and lack of moving innovation forward.
Apple has never (and will never) play in the value market. Remember how Apple was supposedly doomed because they didn't have a netbook? Who still uses netbooks (or even remembers them other than us geeks?) By not playing in the value market (or race to the bottom) it frees them up to do things like the M1.
Fast/Good/Cheap. Pick any two
And anyone can easily beat Amazon's pricing if they can just run a data center competently too - after all the building blocks are there.
Seriously?
The big advantage here is the ability to pull all of this functionality onto smaller and more highly integrated SoCs and packages. This is the antithesis of modular.
If you are looking for similar performance, the best you can hope for is a more accessible competitor. Someone like Nvidia or Qualcomm releasing a SoC with comparable features.
The big problem there is Qualcomm and Nvidia both have closed drivers so they are only marginally better than Apple. Since Qualcomm does such a lousy job supporting older CPUs, arguably worse (what's the value of a CPU with only 3 years of support?).
Still... the Fujitsu A64FX is really interesting but I doubt we’ll ever see it outside Japan.
Ampere Altra is similarly interesting but it’s hard to convince management to put faith into a startup with its own specialty CPU.
Amazon has Gravitron 2. Microsoft is doing something with "their" SQ2, though at this point they're mostly faking it by putting a badge on an uncompetitive Qualcomm part, but I'm sure they'll get there.
The M1 is a wonderful chip, and it has done loads to push the industry to really adopt ARM -- possibly the greatest fat-computing transition to ARM yet -- and it should help across every market, and loads of hardware from competitors.
HP ships nearly 50% more PCs. Dell sells just a few more. I don't know that I would say they are dominant, after a release of a single low power, high performing part.
What many in the Apple ecosystem are missing is the steady, rapid improvement in performance and efficiency coming from AMD, who apparently few have heard of, because only Intel CPUs were found in Apple for 14 years (and we're not all gamers!)
In early 2020, AMD released massively dominate laptop CPUs, but OEMs have only tepidly adopted them. It looks like about 20% of notebooks are now being sold with AMD, and that number is going to grow in 2021, as the lead time for new designs using AMD will have elapsed.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3569437/amds-notebook-pc-sha...
I'm not saying these AMD chips are better than Apples - the battery life is at best half!
Although, I can't help but read your comment as satire! "What if PC components were modular!" I also enjoy building sets from LEGO bricks, and putting together my computer from parts!
Huh? They're saying you won't be able to do that with an Apple CPU.