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Comment by pella | Hacker News Reader

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar...

"Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it publicly pinned its hopes on addressing the always-connected PCs (ACPCs) market with a processor that could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1. This could be an exciting introduction for the Windows ecosystem, if all goes to plan."

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Qualcomm has been "on track" with desktop level chips based on their mobile platforms for at least four years. I've tested the first Windows on Arm laptop with a series 8 "desktop" Snapdragon in 2018. Yet, they still have to ship anything meaningful. They lake the vertical integration Apple has, and they will never have it. Hard for me to see how competitors (Qualcomm + Microsoft + OEMs) are supposed to go after Apple in this area, considering how incapable they are at working together in a productive way.

8cx Gen 3 (using ARM X2) performance in early benchmarks puts it (for the first time) around Zen 2 in performance while using a fraction of the power (anywhere from half to 5x less power under load and even better metrics at rest).

Qualcomm got impatient and entered too early causing people to write them off.

> are supposed to go after Apple in this area,

Talent can be poached [1] and Technology can be acquired [2]

[1] "Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips" https://hothardware.com/news/intel-poaches-head-apple-silico...

[2] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-comp...

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The real problem - Apple is slowing down [3][4]

[3] "Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In"

https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...

[4] "Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase And A15 Based IP"

https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...

details from [3]

"It appears Apple has not changed the CPU much this generation. SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now.

We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing. Instead of a new CPU core, they are using a modified version of last year’s core. One of these modifications is related to the CPU core’s MMU. This work was being done for the upcoming colloquially named “M1X” generation of Mac chips. Part of the reason for this change is related to larger memory sizes and virtualization features/support. In addition, there may be other small changes as well, but we need hardware in the hand to analyze that. We also aren’t sure if Avalanche and Blizzard are the next generation cores or the current modified Firestorm and Icestorm cores.

Regardless of the paltry CPU gains and potential core architecture delays, Apple is still the leader in performance per watt. With Intel design teams starting to get back on track, AMD executing almost flawlessly, and Qualcomm coming in soon like a hammer with Nuvia cores, we aren’t sure if this lead will be sustained. The A11 to A12 generation was seen as Apple starting to asymptote out on gains with only a 15% gain, and the A13 to A14 looked even more weak with 8.3% gains, but now with no CPU gains, let’s cross our fingers and hope the A16 brings a large architectural change." source: [3]

Doom and gloom for Apple is a common way to get clicks. The M2 in many workloads looks like ~20% increase which is certainly not a slowdown for YoY performance. Additionally, everyone is alway 2 years out from beating what Apple is selling today, ignoring where Apple will be in 2 years.

With that said, of course competitors can catch up with what Apple is doing. Doing things you link to is how, and it's exactly how competition works. We'll have to wait and see what AMD and Qualcom end up actually releasing.

How could we define a slowdown or speedup in YoY performance improvements, for the M2? It is the first successor.

Despite the M1 moniker, Apple has been doing in-house silicon for about 7 generations now - they started with A7 iirc, and M1 is part of the A14 generation, and M2 is part of the A15 generation. M1 is what would have traditionally been called an "A14X", meaning wider GPU than the phone-sized SOC. So there are basically 8 generations of YoY comparisons to make.

M2 is not a particularly large jump as these generations go, but it's on the same node and it's actually decent in that context.

Sure, but since they've moved into an entirely different class of device, I don't think the A<n> series establishes a very useful baseline. I mean, scaling the phone/tablet type chip up to laptop/desktop class must have made them bump into some bottlenecks that previously looked infinitely wide. Depending on how difficult those bottlenecks are to clear, we could see some years with quick progress, some years with not so much.

> Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt

Apple is playing a different game than it's competitors. They aren't looking to make performance gains no matter what happens to power draw and waste heat by endlessly cranking up the clocks.

The Anandtech deep dive into the cores used in the A15 and M2 show that Apple didn't just increase performance by about 18%, they cut power while increasing performance.

>Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14.

In our initial coverage of Apple’s announcement, we theorised that the company might possibly invested into energy efficiency rather than performance increases this year, and I’m glad to see that seemingly this is exactly what has happened, explaining some of the more conservative (at least for Apple) performance improvements.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...

Apple isn't winning at the game of performance increases no matter what happens to heat and power draw, because that isn't the metric they care about.

They care about performance per watt.

That's how dropping the M2 into the same entry level Macbook Pro they sold last year doesn't just bump up performance, it also gains you a couple more hours of battery life.

>MacBook Pro 2022 battery life tested — this is the longest-lasting laptop ever

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-l...

> More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers.

I thought that’s how it works in Silicon Valley these days, people leave the company to create a startup with the intent to be acquired once they make enough progress.

If apple were planning a risc-v future then this seems like much ado about nothing.

If not they have plenty of cash to throw at the problem when it becomes a real issue.

I wouldn’t bet against them since they take secrecy very seriously and everyone is predicting doom and gloom without any idea what they’re doing behind the curtains.

> Late 2023

>could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1

If you're aiming to match something that was on shelves for sale in November 2020 in late 2023, you're not really competing are you?

Their problem has never been technology or talent, just the fact they care a lot more about the margins they make on those chips.

The newest snapdragons have had gimped cashes for years now.

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