If only there was a world where Apple would sell M1 chips separately from their walled garden.
Ecosystems with great UX and paid subscriptions plus a 30% cut on all transactions are far more profitable than the margins you make selling commodity hardware. Just ask famous phone manufacturers like Siemens, Nokia and Blackberry why that is. That's why SW dev salaries are much higher than HW dev salaries as the former generates way more revenue than the latter. That's why Apple doesn't roll out their own cloud datacenters and instead just gets Amazon, Microsoft and Google to compete against each other on pricing.
Apple only rolls out their solutions when they have an impact on the final UX, like designing their own M1 silicon.
And number two, selling chips comes with a lot of hassle like providing support to your partners like Intel and AMD do. Pretty sure they don't want to bother with that.
Before they start selling chips I would rather they open iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color discrimination.
Outside of the countries where iOS is on par with Android (I think US, Canada and UK are the only ones, maybe also Australia) in terms of popularity, I don't know or have seen a single person using iMessage, of course there's a lot people using iphone outside of the mentioned countries, but absolutely nobody uses iMessage.
The whole discrimination of the color bubble seems to only happen in those countries were iOS is the same or more popular than android and people is actually using iMessage.
0: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-i-phone-ownership-among...
Right now 99.9% of those Russians who use the internet can be reached via either VKontakte or Telegram. WhatsApp is also popular, but thankfully not around me so I was able to delete my account and never look back.
Uhm, iMessage works transparently. I just use Messages app, if my recipient uses iPhone it get an iMessage, if they use something else, they get SMS.
It’s probably easier to just move to one of the 99% of countries where nobody uses iMessage.
That doesn't affect me though as i don't live in the US and am too old for that kind of stuff but I do remember how easy it was to be mocked or bullied as a teen for not having the same stuff as the herd, even before smartphones were a thing.
Everything runs faster, cooler, quieter and battery lasts longer. Is that not part of the product UX?
The Apple chips are made for running macOS/iOS. Seems there are some hardware instructions that are tailor made for increasing the performance of Apple software so they can make sure everything is working toward a common goal.
They are trying to compete, and have different levers to pull with varying success. When the performance per clock or per watt levers don't work well enough, then they increase the power, and the end result is heat and inefficiency.
On the flip side, integrated solutions add another lever... writing hardware that does exactly what your software needs to improve the user experience.
AMD, ARM, and even Intel have some cool, efficient solutions, but not across their whole portfolio of products, and not at the higher ends of performance. But they are always competing, incrementing and working to get closer to that ideal.
Apple was able to focus on their exact market segment and get there rapidly.
It allows apple to focus on what they want without being limited by and two their hardware provider’s strategy.
When so many telcos charge outrageous prices for SMSs, it's a useful feature.
Other folks are starting to get there but only from the mobile device direction, e.g. Tensor. Maybe I should look closer at what Microsoft has done with ARM Surface.
As for Amazon specifically though, I've got no idea. They're a large enough company that they could buy out an entire fab or foundry if they wanted, AWS makes more than enough money to cover the costs.
What are the innovations in them? From everything I've heard, they just basically reverted all the changes most people hated for the last few years and slapped a new chip in there.
Walled gardens are inherently anti consumer market plays that make things worse for everyone except the people milking money from the idiots paying into the walled garden.
Also, the RPi's SoC is made in an older 28nm process (that's one of the reasons why it's cheaper).
It's not like Apple has a meaningful moat around state of the art silicon. And that's a Good Thing.
One of them: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_features...
Yet Vulkan, shows they cannot fix their love for extensions spaghetti.
Most of the time with crappy drivers that are a shadow of their DirectX ones?
On Windows 11, it’s OpenGL 3.3 on top of DX12, because Qualcomm doesn’t provide an OpenGL ICD at all.
> crappy drivers
Special mention to the Intel OpenGL graphics driver on Windows. If you thought that the AMD Windows one was bad, the Intel one was somehow significantly worse.
Additionally iOS and Apple have much better tooling for Metal than plain DirectXTK/Pix, or that toy SDK from Khronos (that Google also uses on Android), if we compare vendor tooling.
Any game dev gems have basic examples on doing an API loading layer.
Vulkan is mostly a Linux thing, and even the Switch has its own native API, NVN, it is not Vulkan nor OpenGL on the driving seat.
Here enjoy, https://www.ogre3d.org/
Thats exactly what every graphics API has done, because the underlying chip architecture is never free and open (and often, is neither).
If the issue is that you are targeting a proprietary intermediate API rather than bare metal, that is also how Nvidia's drivers work.
Broadcom chips are not available on the open market and they won't sell to you unless you are an enormous company(or have a "special relationship" as RPi did). Effectively you can only buy one attached to a Pi.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-P...
Should be roughly M1 performance, but on RISC-V.
who knows when that is coming and when are we going to be able to buy regular laptops from e.g. Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc with that.
By the time that happens, Apple may already be on their third, fourth? generation on M1. Which is going to much much much faster than M1.
Will it really?
It isn't a given. They might bring amazing progress, or not.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter all that much if it isn't available to third parties. It's not as if everybody else is sitting on their ass.
SiFive's not a fat company, their research budget is tiny, relative to the likes of Apple. And yet, they're coming up with competitive cores.
Things are so much easier when not restricted by a shitty ISA (x86). I have taken a look, and I really like RISC-V; I find it better than ARM.