Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

Here we go again. Comparing a 10w mobile RISC CPU to a 100w x86 CPU and somehow deducing that having a mobile CPU run desktop applications is a good idea.

I wish all the Apple fanboys would just hurry up and buy one so they would realize they are comparing apples to oranges and sit back down.

Nobody is buying an M1 to replace their gaming computer. And to insinuate that such a thing is possible or practical is disingenuous to the way PC hardware works.

Additionally I think the article is of amateur quality. It takes on an Apple perspective and assumes that there will be no response from x86 vendors basically because "how could you possibly respond to something as astounding as the M1?"

Don't worry. Apple hasn't taken over the desktop market yet, and they don't have the raw horsepower to do it anyway. And they don't want to. We are comparing embedded CPU's with proprietary north bridge architecture to industry standardized and socketed CPU's with an entire industry supporting it. Nobody in the market for a desktop PC is going to get a mobile Apple device just because the M1 is more efficient. Nobody goes out to buy a pickup truck and accidentally gets talked into a Prius. Just because you conflate efficiency with performance doesn't mean the M1 is capable of replacing a Ryzen 9.

I don't think this comment is going to age well.

I'm sure there are comments from the 64 bit PowerPC days that aged just fine.

A better analogy for the M1 is EVs. The M1 has near best in class single thread performance so similar to how Tesla's have crazy acceleration. Sure we've yet to see how efficiently M1 will scale to multithreaded or GPU work loads but all signs point to a very scalable architecture given the jump from A12 to M1. Simple extrapolation indicates that a M2 or M1x will match or beat most desktops while still consuming very little power.

> We are comparing embedded CPU's with proprietary north bridge architecture to industry standardized and socketed CPU's with an entire industry supporting it

Eh? x86es have had an integrated northbridge for about a decade.

You are right that as of right now the M1 can't really replace a gaming PC, but I don't see Apple currently really targeting that. However the real question is if that is an issue with the M1 chip or just an issue of Mac not really having much of the gaming marketshare.

That being said, personally I believe the gaming PC market is largely a niche market for the entire PC market.

At its core I don't see any reason the M1 chip can't play games (in fact we are seeing some good numbers come out of games that have a proper migration), it is purely a software issue.

It may not be able to compete with the top of the line custom built desktops, but the reality other gaming laptops that are far more expensive can't either.

Apple does not care about non-mobile games.

They stopped supporting OpenGL [0] and Vulkan support is a community effort [1].

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-opengl...

[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

edit: If you have something to add to the conversation, feel free to enlighten us. It does gets tiring discussing anything Apple around here because of the sheer bias.

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