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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.

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.

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"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, invested aggressively in it, from silicon to security and everyone got caught with their pants down.

There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here.

Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

In the consumer space there are only 2 paths for a viable competitor to emerge. 1) a coordinated ecosystem attack or 2) an individual company doubles down.

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.

How far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?

TSMC advertises 5nm as +15% performance OR -30% power consumption. Either one of these won’t be enough to bridge the gap in mobile. Even throwing in another massive 20% IPC improvement wouldn’t do the trick.

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)

Laptop Zen 3 is already equal in multicore perf to the M1 for the same wattage IIRC. While being on 7nm still. Don't underestimate AMD.

Apple ships a 30w charger with the M1 air. I can't find any zen 3 shipping with less than a 65w charger.

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.

Does the charger wattage mean anything? Couldn't it be that they are including a larger supply in order to charge faster?

No. Ryzen Laptops do consume a lot more power than the 15w the m1 consumes under load.

I don’t have any solid numbers on 5800u, so I didn’t want to make any claims.

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...

There's also 3) which is another sea change in computing, something that would lead to current device categories becoming irrelevant, and a currently overlooked company positioned to capitalize on it. To me, that seems more likely than 1 and 2, and due to the acceleration of the rates of consumer adoption, it should happen relatively soon.

Yes, that is a good point. It's also hard to know what this is. But for me, the end game of computing is just computing everywhere, reading the world and writing to our screens and our touches programming everything around us. Ultimately this is going to be an ecosystem, not a company. Maybe some better standards emerge that can tie everything together. But as far as devices go it seems to processors, network, storage, sensors everywhere. It's going to be hard to build a new computing company on top of those things with the current investments in cloud and consumer devices, without just being acquired.

Good thoughts. That’s along the lines of my hopes. Imagine if no one ever thought about buying a computing device or computing again because it was cheap and everywhere. There wouldn’t be any more consumer preference regarding how computers feel, how fun they are, how long they last while mobile, etc. All the preferences would shift to a different class of products that happened to be connected to computing in some way.

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.

What do you mean by “doubling down”?

Invest in more Apple like things: vertical integration, cross-device compatibility, app quality, more device types, more accessories, more spinoff platforms (similar to MagSafe, AirTag, etc)

> they wont forever. They never do.

retina imacs and macbook pros beg to differ

8,9 years later still no good alternative

I can’t disagree. I mean the new iMac has some design issues IMO (I hate the white bezel), but damn, the combination of good display (I’d LOVE to buy a 4.5k standalone 24” monitor, 27-28” 4K just isn’t good enough imo), goodish design and an incredibly powerful processor for $1299 is super compelling.

> the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute

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...

It exists, but not everywhere... I think Kirin was close to being on par for a while, it might even have been dangerous? With regards to privacy ? Plus there must have been some serious PLA money involved... anyway now this ARM cpu cannot be fabbed by TMSC because of the sanctions.

If that even happens, chances are the current industry leaders already know about it and are building their own variants to prevent an extinction event. Maybe that technology is more wearables like AR glasses but even that is probably going to be eaten by Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/22/apple-glasses-sony-oled...

We might get something on-par from a Samsung fab: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-exynos-with-amd-rd...

(ryzen APUs are due for a facelift in the graphics department)

In a space that requires, quite literally, a decade of good product development plus investing a trillion dollars to make a product that can compete with other companies that have already invested a trillion dollars, it's only natural that there be very few competitors in the market, and they're all competing on different things so they can still make a profit [apple only builds for their own products so they can go the console route and make money on the backend; intel/amd do general purpose computing and thus relatively low-margin but wide market-share; nvidia only does GPUs and server stuff because they can specialize in it very well).

Yah, people saying the possibility of an apple dominated silicon industry is a bad thing must have forgotten what the Faustian nightmare that was the last 5-6 years of intel dominance. Competition is good. Intel and AMD will either adapt or wither. It’s not like apple is cornering the market through Broadcom-esque machinations or shady tactics. They put out a remarkably compelling processor that is both efficient, powerful, and relatively easy to get (yah, macs are expensive, but the Mac mini at 700$ comes with the same m1 you get in these new iMacs). I also really love how apple is only offering two almost identical models of the m1. It’s powerful enough for the vast majority of computing tasks and I am so relieved I don’t have to spend time figuring out what the fuck intel is doing with their cpu skus. No doubt an m1x or m2 will come for the bigger iMac, but it’s super refreshing.

> Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. > If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86.

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.

Maybe the magic is just the discipline to somehow keep tuning and optimizing everything across the chip. Year after year they release another power-sipping design with another 10-20% performance. It's not a sudden tsunami, but an ever rising tide.

You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.

There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.

Each individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.

The individual risks are small now, but they weren’t when Apple was recovering from near death.

Apple started working with ARM in the 80s, eventually used in the Newton. I don't know that they did design directly, but they influenced the changes that became ARM6.

I would speculate that the Palo Alto (P.A. Semi) acquisition is what kicked off this round of the Apple semiconductor (r)evolution.

The risk of Apple deciding to design their own chips was massive.

Vertical integration is certainly contrary to mainstream management philosophy these days. Today, the more dependencies you can work into your business plan, the smarter you seem. You’re an expert juggler, woo! That free API you were using got retired? Not your fault, who could have predicted?

To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.

Like IBM circa 1968?

Well, the world was changing and new opportunities arose. I think it's different now compared to then.

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.

Vertical integration for our Mgt guru generation could not last. In fact the problem of intel not farming out its fab business (and recognise its asset is x86 etc) is the problem. What apple smart at is cut the line to fab.

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.

I guess it's not black magic apple is doing right here. From my experience with big companies, Intel just got buried in its processes, approvals, middle-management etc.pp.; they still got the talent, and in the past years there wasn't any serious competitor to them.

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.

I'm really hoping one of the other chipmakers jumps on the RISC-V bandwagon. There's substantial potential to do to ARM what ARM did to x86 here. If Intel/AMD/Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever started talking about a significant RISC-V offering I'd be buying as much of their stock as I could.

RISC-V doesn't offer the same advantage over ARM that ARM has over x86, so that's unlikely to happen.

I work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.

That sounds really interesting — what makes RISC-V better than ARM for this?

Partly the design of the core, partly the open source nature. Speaking from experience, it's really hard to push the envelope with ARM chips as they refuse to license them for FPGA deployments so there's not a lot of work being done there.

What stops anyone from implementing ARM ISA on FPGA? If you think of an ISA like an API - that's something that is not copyrightable, so in theory anyone could do ARM on FPGA. So I am guessing that nobody wants to bear the cost of such development and also risking potential lawsuit?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. There's no real upside and you risk a lawsuit. There are plenty of other ISAs that will work and are licensable for FPGA development

At the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired.

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.

This is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is rarely the goal for small-to-medium projects.

Example:

https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/

I don’t think the claim was that tooling could not handle these custom instructions; I think the claim was that nobody wants custom instructions in cross-platform software.

ARM didn’t do anything to x86. One specific team at one company did something. Maybe two if you’re super generous and include graviton.

ARM is destroying x86 across the board, not just at Apple. They've long won the mobile space and are now making significant inroads into the server market, long thought to be the last bastion of Intel/x86.

What's the revenue of ARM server CPUs?

It doesn't matter. The revenue for x86 server CPUs goes down every time Amazon install a CPU they made themselves instead of buying an intel chip.

Good luck getting that info from Amazon, though at least a third of their offered instance types are ARM based.

> The opportunity for competition exists

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.

Sure if someone is starting from scratch. We have Microsoft, Android and Linux which are alternative computing platforms, and android + linux are already fully ARM. Apple's chips are still much faster than most Android ARM chips, but Android ARM manufacturers are not starting from zero.

You mean the business practices wherein Apple is 10x better on privacy than everyone else to the point that Facebook and Google are now being forced to be honest with users, disclose all the user data they are stealing and selling, and disclose all the privacy and security risks inherent in their business models?

Sign me up for more of those kinds of "business practices", thank you very much.

Apple is reportedly beefing up their mobile ads business. Hard to say privacy is the reason when Apple immediately attempts to benefit directly financially and likely with some privacy hits.

Would be helpful if you could support this with some links and evidence. I monitor this issue a lot, and haven't seen anything that presents added privacy risks, at least not yet.

Might be referring to App Store ads

It depends entirely on how they beef up their ads, doesn't it?

The last I read Apple plans to add or expand one more ad slot on the App Store. Is there a bigger ads initiative?

Ad targeting doesn't have to be based on violating the privacy of everyone on the planet. Surveillance Capitalism is just the business model that was chosen by Facebook and Google.

Ad targeting can be based entirely on the content of the page where the ad appears.

ARM also has some decades of cruft attached to it.

ARMv8, ie, AArch64 is a redesign/new, and entirely 64 bit with legacy (32bit) support mode tacked on. The design was done to be able to remove legacy without another redesign.

To my understanding, this is quite unlike AMD64 (ie, Intel's current 64 bit ISA licensed from AMD) - which extended x86.

The 32-bit mode is optional; M1 doesn't even support it.

AMD64 is a really beautiful design for the constraints it was operating under.

Does anyone know who(mses) designed the instruction set?

No, the aechitecture used in m1 is from 2012

This is a really cute pep talk. "Think outside the box. Just like apple did." But it is completely devoid of meaning.

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?

Engineering mastery is pretty cool all by itself, right?

> Apple isn't harnessing magic here.

In 2009, the price to have a chip prototype was about $1M/year in software licenses and $50K-$100K per fab evaluation with half an year delay.

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.

> The opportunity for competition exists

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 wonder how much they paid to engineers to pull this off. If none of them has become a multi millionaire by now, the competition would have an easy way to poach them.

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