I get positive impressions that they might pull off their vision whenever I watch new CEO Pat Gelsinger, like here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYEmR9F8OM
He's also targeting getting Apple back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsrCOkIth_U
He's also targeting getting Apple back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsrCOkIth_U
Very unlikely to happen. Maybe Intel could end up manufacturing Apple's M* chips, but it seems very unlikely at this point that Apple would ever go back to the Intel architecture - Apple would be ceding control if they went back and they're not going to do that.
Things would have to be desperate to do that.
The good news is Spectre style vulnerabilities are extremely hard to use and indeed have never been observed in the wild. Also, good security practices (only run trusted code on your own dedicated machine) provide full protection against theoretical Spectre attacks.
The only substantive difference is that Intel provides a stronger memory ordering guarantee. This is theoretically an advantage for Arm, but there are disadvantages too, so I'd call that a wash.
Apple hasn't released it's high power chips yet at 5nm. They've only released chips in the very low power laptop range (honestly lower than most any laptop uses today) and the power laptop range (not even high power laptop range). Comparisons will be interesting once we see the Mac Pro heat range M* chip.
It doesn't exist.
That's why people keep inventing hypothetical AMD 5nm parts to compete with the M1 as if it somehow scores points for AMD to win with an imaginary chip against a real one.
The irony of this is that the same AMD fanboys were (legitimately) dismissive of similar arguments from Intel fanboys for years prior to this. "If Intel was on 7nm Zen wouldn't be able to compete!" Maybe, but it isn't, and the only reasonable comparisons are with silicon that actually exists.
I have to come to the conclusion that this statement just a rallying cry. Woo the uninformed that Intel will get Apple back, and try and rally the informed using this crazy claim as a North Star: Intel will become so good in the future, Apple wished they could come crawling back, if not for their pride.
Case in point: 2x ProRes accelerators in the M1 Max.
These are critical to a significant percentage of Apple's core base and yet there is zero chance that we would see them in the Intel offerings.
I can still believe things would be different at Intel, because of his long history there, and he seems pretty passionate about it (although maybe he seemed that way at VMWare too?)
His track record at VMware was also my major concern when deciding whether to invest in INTC stock recently. In the end I decided for myself that VMware was probably unsalvageable. They had a dominant position in the datacenter (and still have), but were unable to compete effectively in the cloud as there is too little overlap between the VMware culture, commercial model, and product with what's needed to run a hyperscale cloud. Gelsinger managed to become CTO at Intel in 2001, which is I think is not something you can do if you don't have any leadership skills. Given that the Intel mission is pretty clear, and given that I don't think Intel needs to total cultural overhaul (just the management), my view is that he has a decent chance.
In my personal opinion, this was generally to the detriment of VMware's products (downward pressure to focus on features that made little or no sense, except to give Dell marketing talking points; bad impact on morale by doing things like decreasing employee benefits quality so DellEMC and VMware could jointly reap discounts), played a role in frivolous acquisitions, and generally (and understandably) caused OEMs other than Dell to disengage and keep VMware at arms-length.
I doubt he seriously is, I think that’s just rallying the troops by setting an aggressive, aspirational target, acknowledging the humiliation and trying to use it.
Which is what he should be doing so good for him.
It remains to be seen if he’s another Lisa Su. The odds are against it but I’d be excited if he could pull it off.
The only way they could maybe have a chance is for them to have something better than the equivalent M1 5 years from now.
It's not going to happen. Especially with x86
First, Apple has a history of dipping its fingers into several cookie jars simultaneously. They source from different suppliers to introduce supply chain redundancy and establish pricing power. This way, they ensure that a transition from a main supplier company to its competitor is always viable, because they build relationships and allow the competitor to generate enough revenue to stay active in that particular product segment. So even if Apple wants to make its own chips, it has a reason to do so at least in part with Intel as the IDM 2.0 push towards foundry becomes a reality.
Second, there are still some significant drawbacks to Apple's new machines. I want more external monitors, for one.
This is neither here nor there, but personally I think Apple should have spent $500 billion on its own chip fabrication infrastructure rather than doing share buybacks over the past ten years.
“ Overall, the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip supports up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz, while the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip supports up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz”
More than this?
Experiencing 120+ Hz spoils you. That said, ask me to tell you which screen is 120hz and which one is 165hz in a blind comparison, coinflip. Versus 60hz, just scroll a web page and you'll know instantly.
If the limit is 6K at 60Hz, you'll be able to run 4K at >60Hz. My M1 MacBook Pro runs a 1440p monitor at 165Hz just fine over Thunderbolt 3.
Weird edge case, I know, but: using Thunderbolt 4, what is the maximum theoretical refresh rate I can get from a 480p display? 1000hz?
I share the sentiment that it's unlikely that Apple will go back to x86 any time soon. But if/when Intel has a leading node, it think it is actually /likely/ Apple would manufacture their M processors on it. Intel is saying their nodes will be easy to port from TSMC, having two vendors gives Apple leverage, they reduce geopolitical and other supply chain risks, and and the two companies are literally in each other's back yard.
Eh. Right now Apple is matching a (desktop) 5950X at laptop level TDPs - the iGPU is way lower than a desktop 3080 but so is a mobile 3080 at 115W. If you doubt that number, a Pugetbench result just showed up. TBH the specifics of the"which processor is 5% better than the other here" slapfight doesn't actually matter here, compared to the fact that Apple is doing it in what, 60W? And the AMD+NVIDIA system is using a 300-350W GPU and a 142W PPT CPU. Yeah, that's high-clocked kit, but with results like that there's zero reason to doubt Apple's claim of it beating a (mobile) 5800H (probably sustained 62W PPT) with a 115W mobile 3080.
M1 Max: https://www.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/view.php?id=60176
Desktop 5950X/3080: https://www.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/view.php?id=60613
pugetbench premiere pro definition: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/PugetBench-for-Pr...?
https://i.imgur.com/dpBHGxN.png
Apple has never fibbed or bent the truth on their marketing benchmarks - and they have sandbagged before, the numbers have sometimes been higher than presented. They have nothing to be ashamed of here, this is an extravagant chip, it's twice the transistors of a 3090 to make your desktop 3060 ti / mobile 3080 run at 45W, and a near-fastest-in-market product in 15W for the CPU, enough to saturate the GPU for most things you'll want to do. In order to do that, they put the equivalent of an 8-channel DDR4 bus on it (it's 16-channel on DDR5 and DDR5 is significantly faster) and then used tiny LPDDR5 packages they could stack. Oh, and you can allocate any of the system RAM as VRAM, so you can do large-memory VRAM tasks like machine learning (albeit slowly of course - it's desktop 3060 Ti performance). For a portable workstation it actually pretty well owns.
Also the regular ol M1 had as much cache as a 9900K. For its 4 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores. The whole A15 design is just an extravagant display of transistors, Apple spared no expense, it's just a design exercise in "what if we built it ourselves and ran up the scoreboard and called that our 'external equivalent' expense". Apple will spend $300 to build the meme 5nm (nearly) icelake-SP-sized mobile workstation chip because a 5800H or 12Gwhatever would cost them $200 anyway and this thing dunks on those processors. Vertical integration matters at their scale, just like Google and Amazon and others.
With Zen4 on DDR5 and TSMC 5nm (actually N5P - it's a better node than what Apple is using for A15/M1) next year we'll see how true that actually is about it "all being node advantage".
I bet AMD can catch up to laptop-power-budget A16 (the next-gen Apple core that Zen4 will compete against - also on N5P) in performance with 142W PPT processors ("105W TDP") like their 5950X equivalent, I'm kinda doubtful they can close a factor-of-3 gap in perf/watt at laptop-level PPTs.
Yeah, Apple is clocking a lot lower and that's where some of the efficiency comes from... but look at the IPC difference here. They're matching processors that are running roughly twice as fast, at peak efficiency clocks. It's an insanely wide architecture, and it's hard to scale x86 like that - x86 instruction decoding has bad transistor-order-complexity for higher widths, due to variable instruction lengths and other problems. You can make all the execution units you want in the core, but it's hard to keep them fed if you can't decode enough instructions. x86 has already done a lot of the obvious tricks like instruction caching/etc.