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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>The fact that they can be like this is really proof that their market position is much stronger than most HNers seem to think it is.

Elsewhere on the HN front page is a computer made with a Russian internal CPU. The CPU has a custom ISA based on x86, and isn't open. The documentation is poor, and nobody has the source code for the compiler. It's also about 5 years behind the state of the art in x86. How can a product like this exist? Easy. Russia needs them for military hardware because they're not going to put Intel in their defense radar systems. The manufacturer has a niche to sell to.

Instead of being 5 years behind, Apple's closed and undocumented ISA is 2 years ahead. How much moreso, if the Russian CPU can survive in the market, can they.

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Seems clear that Russian CPU is targeted towards the Russian defense industry, where all that NIH and secrecy can arguably be leveraged into national security as its a less cost-sensitive application.

The M1 is a CPU for global consumer products.

Of course, and Apple's ISA is targeted towards the People Who Buy Macs industry. By not making it available to datacenters, they are supporting other CPU vendors in the race to catch up. It will help AMD a lot in their bid to catch up that all investors can see that Apple won't be competing with them.

> By not making it available to datacenters, they are supporting other CPU vendors in the race to catch up.

This is by far the most charitable characterization of this monetization scheme I've seen so far. Some would argue this is actually in place to ensure that purchases go directly through Apple each time (i.e. a one-to-one of customers to hardware purchases), rather than through a cloud provider who may purchase hardware once and allow thousands of customers to access it. c.f. Apple's restrictions on subletting use for no less than a single day per "machine".

"Apple is extracting value at monopoly-pricing levels" == "Apple is leaving tasty treats on the table to lure competitors." They're the same statement but phrased in different ways. Any price above the equilibrium lures competitors - that's how markets avoid monopoly pricing, in the absence of external factors that protect the monopoly.

The Russian CPU isn't surviving in a market

I exist there for I am?

They key word is market - The Elbrus is obviously propped up by the Russian government and it's tentacles. It's not an invalid business model but it's not a good way to measure technology.

It's not surviving in a market, because it's not in a market - it's being produced for a specific consumer, whose requirements are idiosyncratic enough[0] that the market refuses to service them.

0: a very low bar in this case, given the existence of things like Intel Management Engine, but it would be much the same if they insisted on something less justifiable like running all the CPU pins at 12-volt logic levels

> The Russian CPU isn't surviving in a market

How so?

It's actually not that different from Apple Silicon when you think about it.

Apple Silicon: you only get it when you buy an iPhone, iPad, ARM Mac, etc. in the Smartphone or PC market; and it enables features that make those devices competitive.

Russian Elbrus: you only get it when you buy some Russian military hardware in the defense market; and it enables features that make those devices competitive.

Because guaranteed sales from the government is clearly not the same as having to compete with Intel and AMD

M1 does not compete with Intel or AMD. (M1)(Apple)(OSX) competes with (Intel | AMD)(Choose any OEM)(Windows | Linux). All sales of the M1 chip are "guaranteed sales," to Apple itself, building macs.

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