They will need to get developers up to speed porting their apps to ARM before they are even in a position to re-boot their Windows ARM strategy.
But this is a multi-year journey which is likely to give Intel/AMD time to produce something more competitive.
> But this is a multi-year journey which is likely to give Intel/AMD time to produce something more competitive.
And during this time Apple is going to release M2 Pro/Max, M3, etc. I just have a hard time seeing how Intel/AMD catchup in the laptop space.
It takes a good 5 years of doing everything right though.
These days the shrinks are smaller, i.e. 5nm -> 4nm -> 3nm, but each gen lasts longer, and provides very modest improvements in power and clock speed. They are also coming out in ever slower release cycles.
So now the competition has more time to catch up, and less of a disadvantage of they are a process behind. TSMC is currently leading, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others are bidding for the latest/greatest, while Samsung and Intel try to close the gap with their fabs.
Apple has an advantage of doing several generations in phones/tablets before bringing out the M1. Additionally they have an architecture license, so they do custom cores, not just what ARM is offering. This allowed them to tune their designs, use engineers from various companies they acquired to tune their chips, and get rid of the cruft, like 32 bit compatibility.
With all that said I expect Apples the perf/watt advantage to decrease over time. What does seem somewhat unique is they have build in a relatively small, power efficient, and inexpensive package (compared to similar functionality) 128, 256, 512, and 1024 bit wide memory interfaces. Sure you could build a dual socket Epyc with 16 dimms and likely burns north of 100s of watts and takes at least 1 rack unit, or you could buy a mbp m1 max. To match the M1 ultra you'd have to switch to some exotic CPUs that use HBM and sold by companies that typically send 3-6 sales people in suites before revealing their prices.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=533...
If I buy an ARM machine any time in the next 5 years, it will almost certainly run macOS or Linux, with Windows relegated to an x86 box that I use for gaming.
So not yet, but seems pretty close. Marcan has a Patreon if you want to support it.
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/05/27/news-ro...
I've been using VS 2022 on "Windows 11 for ARM" inside Parallels Desktop on my M1 Max MBP, and it's just barely usable as VS 2022 is 64-bit. JetBrains Rider is pretty good on macOS, and "VS 2022 for Mac" is coming along now, but full VS would be nice.
And the deal is that current ARM processors have higher IPC than even the latest Intel and AMD processors and are much more diverse. The biggest ARM CPUs have 128 cores that have higher multi-threaded performance than any CPU by Intel/AMD and a Cortex-X2 has higher IPC than any Intel/AMD.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...
a series of strategic and communication mistakes kinda wasted the shot, and when they finally fixed the desktop side of the experience was too little too late.
I was very confused that they wouldn’t have it, it just seemed bizarre to ever have win/arm without it?
That's Apple's marketing but the 12th Gen P chips are perfectly capable of keeping up with Apple on the performance side and AMD's likely to be able to compete on the power consumption side as well. Yes, x86 is likely to never match ARM on battery life, but I believe they can be reasonably close for it not to be an issue.
Not sure if it's Windows, too much work surveillance-ware, or just HP being garbage, but my M1 Mac will last twice as long as I've ever needed it to without getting plugged in. Even my older Intel MBP lasts most of the day.
That's still nowhere near what you get on a MacBook Air but perfectly usable imo.
My 2014 MBP13 still gets better life than my daily driver XPS13 9370.
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amds-ryzen-7-6800u-is-35-more-...
(my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)
They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse.
Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
Who is the bigger threat here? The real threat to user freedom is the tribalism of picking the "lesser evil" when there are workable non-evil solutions like linux.
I'm not Apples greatest fan (see my latest comment), but there is a major difference between iCloud or OneDrive being pre-installed, both which is OK with me, and Candy Crush showing up in the start menu on my work laptop or some stupid game altering my login screen, again on my work laptop.
And yes, I too am a Linux user.
Why choose between various dumb and evil options if nice is available? (I know, some people get as mad at font problems and alignment on Linux as I get on microlagging on Windows and boneheaded CMD-TAB on Mac, but each to their own.)
In my view, the only desktop-grade OS I prefer over the modern Mac is MacOS 9. It was much easier to use and understand from top to bottom. On the other hand, it lacked a lot of features I've come to take for granted (pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, protected memory, support for modern hardware, gestures, etc).
I do really miss the spatial Finder though.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
"iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing."
Power corrupts and when one company wields too much of it, shit will hit the fan.
Better than Microsoft or Google on privacy is not a high bar.
I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.
Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.
The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users.
So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for.
And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.
And then there’s this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-ma...
I remember a speech given by one of the leaders of Mac development at Microsoft saying that new features are tested out on the Mac first, and if they work out, they're brought into the Windows version.
Is that no longer the case?
I love the approach of testing new features on the Mac first, but it isn't sufficient since the Mac version was never updated to be 100% parity with the Windows version, which means some of the preexisting features would forever be missing from the Mac
However, I think MS/Intel will start losing also corporate space. With the staffing problems, companies are looking for ways to score cheap points, and I'm starting to see "free choice of a laptop, including MacBook" as one of the benefits even in some big corps.
For laptops, less than you'd think. A huge chunk of people buy laptops so they can work on the dinner table and then put their computer away easily when it's time for the family dinner.
Source: I spent about five years selling laptops to people. That was a while ago, but I don't think much changed here. If anything, things changed the other way (battery life is even less important for laptops than it was) since a lot of people also have a smartphone or tablet.
And as battery lives get longer, there are diminishing returns as well. The difference between 1 hour and 4 hours is huge. The difference between 4 and 8 hours pretty large. After that? Less so.
In my experience noise and heat (or rather, lack thereof) are more important, although also not hugely so for a lot of people, just more so than battery life.
Heck I'd love portable 21" and even 24" models.
I would have never expected a Unix workstation in such a corporate setup when I started 15 years ago.
If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. But Microsoft just is better here currently on a lot of fronts - the last time I chased my tail here it didn't pay off.
If Apple wants to compete for the business market I think they should! We need first class user account management that INTEGRATES with other stuff (ie, google email etc etc). Right now you can federate from active directory to almost anything (SonicWall/VPN for remote users, WiFi for onprem user devices, vSphere for VM management etc etc). If you sync to google you can then use google one click sign-ons everywhere on the web SAAS side.
We then need office running perfectly.
Then we'd probably do our legacy apps on some VMs and chrome for SAAS apps.
We also need to be able to run MacOS virtually. We have remote users who talk to an on-prem VMs, separates their personal and work stuff, we can lock down and monitor the on-prem VMs and they can watch netflix with no worries using home machine. How does this work with Apple? It's easy with Windows.
I think there would be some demand from smaller co's to make the switch if there was a solution which allowed what folks are looking for -> migration to cloud as offices go virtual with controlled "desktops" delivered to users while still allowing in office / warehouse / factory deployments.
I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.
Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there. Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home
Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems, Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple.. Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process
I think Samba went to GPLv3 and updates for it on mac seemed to stop entirely cold which killed this as the easy integration glue. Does anyone remember details? This great integration point went away and basically you end up tilting at windmills.
This is like someone screaming that Linux is a toy because it’s not really UNIX unlike SCO.
The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.
I save ~50 - ~100 character filenames all the time. I even cut, copy, and paste bits of them in that little box. It doesn't feel like a big deal to me.
But yeah, it's the little things like this that belie Apple's reputation for attention to detail.
Depend in any way on a Google Account for anything critical? That's something I oppose with all my will.
I still feel like Microsoft is the strongest software company on earth. Consider that not even the confines of this M1 MacBook prevent me from being able to compile & run my .NET apps without modification. Apple's hypothetical hegemony does not cross over in the same way.
Until Apple can get me to look at their Xcode offerings and think "wow fuck visual studio, GitHub, et. al.", I do not think their takeover of the computing world will begin.
But I agree. Apple is pulling ahead a decent amount here and likely will stay in that leading position for a while, like they did in the phone space, and that makes all the competitors that much less appealing.
That timeframe does not inspire much confidence in me, seeing as it is three whole years after M1-based products first hit store shelves.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
If you look at the trend, macOS is gaining worldwide market share while Windows is steadily dropping.
And macOS share in USA has already reached close to 25%.
As someone who can remember this never changing, that's a pretty steep slope...
Mind you, I would like to see them follow in Apple's footsteps on the train the M1 is creating. It certainly makes it FEEL like there is more runway down this path then Intel's, with caveats for potential hardware vulnerabilities like specter that simply haven't been found yet on Apple silicon to inhibit optimizations.
Note that is for desktop PCs: many people don’t own a PC/laptop so the market share is far far lower than that, especially outside of rich countries. Microsoft is now primarily just business software?
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Customers kept paying Qualcomm for their SoC with ARM designed cores, so once again, Qualcomm had no reason to actually do anything but sit on their patents.
Intel had a similar story, since Sandy Bridge "x86_64" part of CPU barely changed, most of the performance gain was somewhere from better process, more custom instructions (avx2, etc.), higher TDP (since ryzen).
It's not ARM vs x86, it's Apple ARM cores vs everyone elses cores.
But the process node is also not the main reason.
What matters is only microarchitecture. And Apple has by far the most performant microarchitecture design of all CPUs.
- Variable instruction sizes make the front-end more complex and limits the decoding width;
- Delayslot makes superscalar front-end more complex;
- Page size limits VIPT L1 cache size;
- Dedicated SIMD/FP architectural registers allow dedicated SIMD/FP physical register files;
...
The choice and design of the ISA is extremely important, it's hard to argue that the ARM ISA has no impact on M1&M2 performance.
But the ISA choice is obviously not enough to explain the whole performance of the M1&M2. Likewise, the manufacturing process cannot fully explain the performance of the M1&M2.
The Apple microarchitecture is by far the most performant and efficient of all high-end superscalar CPU.
But be careful with simplistic explanations, the microarchitecture is always constrained by the ISA/architecture, and the x86 ISA has some flaws that can affect the microarchitecture (least on the power consumption).
Quote: “Although I've worked on x86 obviously for 28 years, it's just an ISA, and you can build a low-power design or a high-performance out any ISA. I mean, ISA does matter, but it's not the main component - you can change the ISA if you need some special instructions to do stuff, but really the microarchitecture is in a lot of ways independent of the ISA. There are some interesting quirks in the different ISAs, but at the end of the day, it's really about microarchitecture.”
In the end, ISA is such a small part that impacts the design of a modern high performance CPU that it is almost negligible. It is physically impacting only the decode unit, but the decode unit is only a few percent of die area. Feel free to listen to the whole interview to get a feeling.
They're also using essentially the same cores between their mobile and desktop products. Apple is their own ARM ecosystem. An improved core for the A-series chips is an automatic improvement for the next M-series chip. Most arm licensees have to wait for ARM to come out with new cores.
The fact Apple can book the initial runs of any of TSMC's process nodes is just one of many of their advantage over other ARM and x86 manufacturers.
I don't think they have any chance to match Apple in terms of efficiency while buying third party chips. The advantage comes from controlling the whole stack I think. Apple knows exactly what accelerators will be available for each generation, and their communication between hardware and software folks is presumably much tighter.
Is the Wintel laptop/Macbook gap even that much larger than the Android/iPhone gap?
The market for non-Apple devices is, I think, pretty large.
That said, the big business is still big business: Azure (Cloud), Office, and device management (MDM) / active directory are big focuses even in a heterogeneous computing environment that includes Chromebooks and Macs.
Intel or AMD back on their feet can probably match Apple in perf/watt. And I guess they are the closest competitors in the PC market.
In the 10 years between my 40 core HP server's release and the Ryzen 5950x's 16 cores, performance increased ~10%, but the TDP of the 5950x is 10% of the quad xeons in the HP. This is ignoring the fact that a single 5950x cost less in any market than a single xeon in that HP upon release.
Does anyone else remember the Cavium ThunderX processors? Whatever happened to those? the perf/watt on those was supposed to be outstanding...
Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind. Microsoft would never do that, so Windows on ARM will presumably languish in application support indefinitely.
smartphones, even embedded devices, including cars nowadays are all on ARM, servers are building momentum too, not because it is shiny, but because of tangible gains on many aspects
> Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind.
That's not true at all, the chip doesn't matter when you sell software, hardware and services
It's like changing the internals of your Camera to provide a better experience and quality, why do you care about it? in fact you don't! You want a better Camera, company will pick what's best for the better Camera
Apple provide a transparent translation layer to accompany the transition with Rosetta, it's effortless for the users
That's the problem of Microsoft, they are incapable of designing proper UX solution to accompany their customers to better solutions, instead they force their customers to be stuck with inefficient solution, Microsoft don't even care nor dare cleaning their OS to provide up-to-date solutions
It's a bloaty mess of 5 generations of different UI/UX
Choosing Windows prevents you from having a seamless experience from your Watch -> Phone -> Desktop -> Car
That's what Microsoft fanboy don't understand, they protect their poor decision making, their inefficient products and ultimately, it leads to the death of their products
Microsoft Windows consumers are stuck
That's why Windows Mobile, Metro, UWP, WinUI all flopped, the platform is no longer up to date
And it's not just a chip issue, it's the whole ecosystem and culture, always too late to make changes, and here, incapable of providing a transition path, hence they are failing behind apple
to be clear though: spectre/meltdown are not an x86 issue. POWER, SPARC, and indeed even ARM (although only some of their products have OoO/speculation) were affected as well. There is no magic to ARM that magically makes it secure if you don't protect against side-effecting.
I generally agree with the rest of your points, Microsoft is stuck in legacy hell with x86 and they are stuck with a customer base that specifically values that (everyone else has departed for linux or osx, they have "dead sea effect"ed themselves into a high-maintenance customer base), and they've done a super shitty job in general with 5 different generations of UX lava-layered over the top, and x86 is clearly falling behind in energy efficiency. But security isn't something intrinsic to ARM or x86, you can design a secure x86 processor and you can design an insecure ARM processor.
IIRC, M1 was even vulnerable to some of the otherwise Intel-only Meltdown (cross-privilege boundaries) exploits, let alone the more-or-less ubiquitous Spectre (only within same-privilege boundaries) exploits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...
You're not in the minority for thinking this, there was some serious journalistic miscarriage there. To a lot of people, Intel and AMD are the whole world and if it doesn't affect AMD then it's Intel-only. Even people in tech journalism.
(thought I remember Oracle eventually admitting SPARC was vulnerable as well but I can't find it so maybe not)
As I recall, the initial investigation focused on Intel, AMD, and some ARM implementations, so that was what was reported; I personally didn't attempt to follow up on any subsequent investigations on other architectures, so I was unaware of any specific results on SPARC et al, good or bad.
Yes they do, I am typing this in a fully functional 10+ year old Thinkpad running Linux and getting updates to software.
I know people with with Apple Laptops that they can no longer get security updates due to the chip change. There only option is to install another OS to keep on that hardware.
But they chose to pay for a brand new model instead of leaving their OS of choice.
So, Apple is able to pull these people along raking in the doe because they are willing to send 1500+ USD to Apple every few years.
Good for Apple, PT Barnum comes to mind with Apple.
Why do you lie? The newly announced macOS supports Intel based macs
https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/macos-13-ventura-supported-ma...
Maybe if you stop accusing people of being fanboys, discussions could be more productive.
In fact, your entire post is all trolling, FUD, and no substance or arguments.
When you hide the problems, they resurface years later, and here we are!
Apple moving to ARM allows their entire lineup to have a seamless ecosystem, apps runs natively everywhere, iOS/iPadOS/macOS
Microsoft indeed is stuck and had to come up with a full VM to support an OS with a different architecture, and android apps for a different kind of chip! is that FUD? am i a troll? come on, let's be serious!
Exactly, i used to use microsoft products, until recently i switched all my machines to linux, i don't even use apple products, i have an M1 only just to test my software, for everything else it's a VM
My claims are objectives, from experience, and everything is documented and archived
To your blind fanboy eyes only the opposite can be true?, "apple sucks, microsoft is the best?"
You might be living in an alternate reality where "Windows Phone XAML Edition Pro 2004" is #1 in the charts, and the cloud native OS is "Windows Bloated Server Millenium 1914 Product of Seattle Hell Yeah Brother"
And if you consider that arm cellphone chips are already behind Apple cellphone chips (which the M1/2 improved on)… not great performance for windows.
The biggest problem is the hardware: you're basically just buying a poorly performing laptop with probably lagging Linux support if you get tired of Windows, and you could just buy an M1 Macbook and get superior performance and battery life for the same cost, and you can even just run Windows on that using Parallels and still get good performance. The AArch64 laptop market is mostly just Qualcomm processors and Apple, and if you actually care about the performance profile, there's basically no comparison between the two right now with current offerings; the Mac is the winner, and you can even run Linux on it.
In general, compared to a Macbook:
- It has a touchscreen
- It has a detachable keyboard
- It has a pen input
Microsoft's execution on the device is flawed. (IE, in order to use it as a laptop it needs a much more sturdy hinged keyboard,) but there's clear differentiators in their lineup.
IMO: Apple's lack of a touchscreen and detachable keyboard (or 270 degree fold) really hurts the Macbook lineup. If I could get a Macbook that I could also use as a table, or an iPad that truly ran OSX, I'd be happy.
Me I am a Linux user, had already had a job that "forced" me to use Linux back in 2009 (yes, my boss demanded everyone used Linux, in 2009 and I absolutely did not complain as it had been my choice since 2005).
I came to Mac that year and was very enthusiastic about what I had heard was like a polished, commercially supported Linux distro.
I left three years later after having spent significant time trying to adapt to it.
I was relieved to get back, even to Windows.
Last fall I got a Mac Mini.
Some of the warts are now fixable, but I only use it for things I won't have to do in anger or fear or anything like that.
What you mean to say is: you buy a laptop for which Linux has drivers for. Windows is not in this equation, my friend.