As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.
If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86.
That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over the ARM space; in fact I think we will see the emergence of new players as ARM isn't as finicky about licensing their tech as Intel is. The only reason Intel even had a competitor (AMD) in the past 20 years is because they licensed x86 to them before it started becoming the de facto choice.
Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.
There are things that lead me to believe 1) can't happen. Google ultimately acquiring Fitbit instead of ecosystem compatibility and integration. It seems like the giants are needing to acquire the pieces to build their own Apple, rather than partner with them. Also Google and Microsoft have complementary businesses but they barely coordinate on this. The closest thing I have seen is Android helping Microsoft with Dual screen Android devices. In most other areas they are setup to compete (chromeos vs. windows, azure vs. gcp, stadia vs. xbox cloud, gsuite vs office, bing vs google search etc).
2) Samsung is the most equipped to lead this.
On the flip side, once you go bigger the game changes. If you increase the M1 power consumption to amount for interconnects, more memory lanes, more IO, etc the M1 seems to offer worse power to performance that shouldn’t be too unexpected. ARM just announced they are splitting into V1 (performance above all) and N2 (best power, size, performance combo)
Mac mini uses like 25-27w at the wall. 15-25w TDP for the 5800u doesn't include RAM (it's LPDDR4 at 1.1v will use a lot more power than M1 LPDDR4x at 0.6v). 5800u also has a chipset that consumes a few watts.
5800u has some features that the M1 does not (these would likely increase M1 power usage), but still doesn't seem close in power consumption.
4800u isn’t that different as far as power goes (mostly different in performance). A mini-PC with it uses almost 70 watts under load.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...
I see glimpses of this with some of the cheap commodity hardware available, but transportation and design costs are still too high.
Ability to break in would, I suppose, depend on that cost of design and adoption. The ability of large companies to efficiently acquire, though—-not sure what would change that situation.
retina imacs and macbook pros beg to differ
8,9 years later still no good alternative
I see what you did there!
It's probably because the ecosystem is multi-threaded and there's lots of deadlocks and unprotected reads/writes...
(ryzen APUs are due for a facelift in the graphics department)
They didn't even do anything special. People have been telling multiple ARM IP holders to build a wide, powerful chip for ages. Especially for the server space.
Apple is just the first one to actually do it. AMD and Intel have been doing it all along, which is why it's so impressive that Apple's chip is finally in spitting distance of them despite being a fairly normal design with some specific optimizations for use cases.
The dual wake-up call from AMD and from Apple (ARM), combined with the money Intel has in its pocket will have a serious influence on the cpu market. Unsure if they'll come out ahead, but it will get interesting and probably cheaper, not only for consumers.
To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.
Still ibm then have no consumer whilst apple now has no business and cloud business domination ... still lots of space to play.
But if windows moved to arm with the same result I cannot say intel can survive though.
In 1968 there weren't that many computing devices around. When video games and home computing came around, there were massive opportunities and the entrenched players missed some of them.
Same with mobile phones, same with the internet, same with smartphones.
RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.
Example:
Perhaps, but I guess it would take on the order of a decade for a competitor to build their technology including an ecosystem with customers.
And who says they won't copy Apple's business practices?
> but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.
That's because the complexity of the semiconductor industry is daunting. You need far more than a team of IC designers, especially if you want your product to become successful in a world where there is one main player.
Sign me up for more of those kinds of "business practices", thank you very much.
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To my understanding, this is quite unlike AMD64 (ie, Intel's current 64 bit ISA licensed from AMD) - which extended x86.
Does anyone know who(mses) designed the instruction set?
On what grounds do you suggest you know anything about how apple accomplished M1?
Or are you just intuiting that it was some sort of "outside the box" thinking?
Maybe it was raw engineering and management mastery combined with elite head hunting and millions of dollars poured into research and design over the course of a decade?
Nah. Apple's too cool for that. Probably some eureka moment during meditation class, right?
That was 12 years ago. I guess software licenses go up and I am certain that current processes have chip prototypes to cost $500K-$1.5M per evaluation.
Yes, you can say everyone sit on their hands and/or asses.
I say that having money in bank for several dozens of thousands of chip prototypes certainly helps Apple in the design.
This is so deep and powerful if you really think about it. This is what we were promised. While not perfect, I applaud Apple for at least trying.
I'm happy to be wrong, but I think you're buying too much into the SV/media fearmongering on a handful of companies whose main business is actually just attention economics.
I'm pretty sure it's device count. Which means we are comparing $90 smart phones to $1200 iphones that will result in thousands of dollars spent through the apple ecosystem.
In 2019, Apple captured 32% of the global revenue for the mobile phone industry and 66% of all profit in Q3 of 2019 [1]. Asymco used to report on this frequently but I'm having trouble finding recent examples [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-... [2] http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/02/apple-share-of-phone-revenu...
Success is not a crime.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...
I was using admittedly vague language for rhetorical effect. I only technically meant the past 21 years.
Nothing gets me thinking about disruption more, than new, faster, cheaper platforms. We’ve had to accept 10% better per generation for way too long.
The other day there was an article here about Swift on the server and it was full of replies from people who would love to use it more but lack of investment from Apple makes it often a poor choice. It's doubtful even Apple is using it much server-side in house.