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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly.

The reason I think so is when I was at Google is was 7 years between when we told Intel what could be helpful, and when they shipped hardware with the feature. Also, when AMD first shipped the EPYC "Naples" it was crippled by some key uarch weaknesses that anyone could have pointed out if they had been able to simulate realistic large programs, instead of tiny and irrelevant SPEC benchmarks. If Apple is able to simulate or measure their own key workloads and get the improvements in silicon in a year or two they have a gigantic advantage over anyone else.

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That's bizarre. As if CPU vendors were unable to run "realistic" workloads. If they truly aren't, that's because they are unwilling and then they are designing for failure and Apple can just eat their lunch.

As a data scientist, I feel this. Intel and AMD don't own an OS or an app store, and you might be surprised how hard it is to get good data. Data is the new gold. If a company that can corner a piece of the market, they can collect data no one else can, and from that companies are often forced to partner or they can't properly provide services that will keep them competitive.

This makes me think that any sort of data advantage Apple may have has nothing to do with them owning an OS. Intel has a massive computer network, managed by their own IT team, just like any other large corporation. Intel could collect whatever performance data they want from actual users of actual programs just as easily as Apple could.

Apple doesn’t just control an operating system or an App Store. They also control a development toolchain and the two primary languages compiled for their platforms, as well as most of the frameworks used in commonly used apps (excepting the dreaded electron). They have a platform that’s been tailored to be profiled and optimized.

One early benchmark showed allocating and destroying an NSObject performing drastically better on the M1 vs recent Intel Macs. This wasn’t an accident. It’s probably not representative of performance overall. They have enough vertical integration to make their own first party solutions clear optimization targets.

This sort of "data," that optimizing contention free locks could have big rewards, isn't something that you need to control the OS or compiler/profiler/debugger toolchain to understand and learn. And for that matter, Intel has excellent compilers and profilers too.

All it takes is looking at what's going on in commonly used code, deciding to optimize for X, Y, and Z, and commit to it. If Intel isn't doing this already, that's all the fault of current management for not making it a priority.

The only way that Apple's vertical integration helped them make that management decision is that they were able to say "our customer is a typical laptop user." Intel tries to cater to much larger markets, so perhaps when management goes to plan a laptop chip, they are less aggressive with deciding to optimize. But I have a feeling that Apple's optimizations are generally good for nearly all code, not just for specific use cases.

There's really no explanation for why EPYC "Naples" was so bad other than AMD did not internally understand the performance of realistic large-scale programs. I mean even if they had taken anything off the shelf, for free, like MySQL, they could have determined at some point before mass production that their CPU, in fact, sucked. But they shipped it and prospective customers rejected it.

Don't discount how a weak organization can make poor decisions even when all necessary information seems to be readily available.

Apple is the only large company with a functional organization. Could that be it ? Coupled with their unparalleled ownership of a family of platforms (intel’s OS comparably is nonexistent).

I think you're probably right, but it's funny because I think Intel was well known for having really exceptional organizational function in the past. They used to be paranoid about everything!

> Intel and AMD don't own an OS or an app store

They could run their benchmarks on the Debian repository and it would probably be representative enough.

If they haven't done so, perhaps because it seemed tedious or unimportant, well, that mistake would be on them.

Intel do own an OS, Clear Linux, but they probably lack profiles of typical usage of that OS, and probably there are not many users of it apart from Phoronix when they do benchmarking.

https://clearlinux.org/

It’s a big world out there. Workloads in data science vs gaming vs hft vs packet processing vs web servers are all extremely different.

Even if you know about them, you need an expert in each to truly push the hardware to the real limits that get hit in the respective industry. The small differences between real implementations and simulated loads can drastically alter the performance characteristics and cause proc manufacturers to miss the mark.

There’s another factor here, that I learned when I did a six month contract at Apple Retail Software Engineering.

In short, Apple has a number of 10x engineers that they move around to whatever project needs the most help, whether that is hardware, or application software, or operating system software, or services infrastructure, or whatever.

If some project starts getting enough negative “above the fold” coverage, then they will be temporarily gifted one or more of these special engineers.

Do that enough times, and those 10x engineers will gain enough experience in enough different areas that they will be able to reason well about the other end of whatever pipeline they’re on, and will know other 10x engineers that they can work with on that other end of the pipeline, because they had previously worked with them on some other project in the past months or years.

And those 10x engineers really will make a huge difference in what that project is capable of delivering.

The key failure of this operating mode is that most of the 10x engineers never get enough time to transfer much knowledge or skills to the others on the temporary team they are currently working with, and so things will start slowly deteriorating when they are necessarily moved on to the next project.

Rinse and repeat.

> I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly.

Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads).

By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.

Interesting point. This would suggest pretty sizable synergies from the oft-rumored Microsoft acquisition of Intel.

Microsoft doesn't need to acquire Intel, they need to do what Apple did and acquire a stellar ARM design house that will build a chip with x86 translation, tailored to accelerate the typical workloads on Windows machines and sell those chips to the likes of Dell and Lenovo and tell developers "ARM Windows is the future, x86 Windows will be sunset in 5 years and no longer supported by us, start porting your apps ASAP and in the mean time, try our X86 emulator on our ARM silicon, it works great."

Microsoft proved with the XBOX and Surface series they can make good hardware if they want, now they need to move to chip design.

Microsoft has a pretty good relationship with AMD from the Xbox. AMD already made an Arm Opteron. Windows has been multiplatform since NT 3.1 (Alpha, MIPS) and then in 3.51 adding in PowerPC. You can download Windows for Arm for free and run in on a Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft has at least one homegrown processor that it has ported Windows and Linux to with the confusingly named 'Edge'.

https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/18/microsoft_e2_edge_win...

Microsoft doesn't even _need_ to target Arm, they could easily team up with AMD or go the whole thing solo and target anything from RISC-V, Arm to an in-house ISA.

> Windows has been multiplatform since NT 3.1 (Alpha, MIPS) and then in 3.51 adding in PowerPC.

What was the last version of Windows to support either of these platforms?

PowerPC was the last architecture standing. It was supported by NT 4.0 SP2 (technically this means Microsoft supported it on paid support contracts as recently as 2006).

Windows Server 2008 R2 supported Itanium.

There are rumors of Ryzen CPUs with ARM ISA, but I think AMD has enough on its plate.

Apple has at most 10% of the computer market and is just one player among many. I am skeptical Microsoft with their 90% dominance would or should be allowed this much power over the industry.

The traditional personal computer market isn't nearly as important as it used to be. However you slice the pie, there's no way you can define the pieces to be 10% Apple and 90% Microsoft with a straight face.

90% dominance of what is increasingly a small niche market. Apple controls a large fraction of the mobile device market, and everything else runs linux.

The fact is outside of the tech scene, most businesses and consumers runs Windows. To say this is a "small niche market" is laughable. Microsoft is everywhere.

Compare how many millions of desktop PCs there are in the world, versus the billions of mobile devices.

From what I understand, Microsoft is excellent at hardware design. They’re just focused on a different market (services->business rather than consumers->services)

> Microsoft acquisition of Intel

Could that possibly be approved by governments?

Nope. Not a lawyer but I doubt it at all.

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