Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel

You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.

Microsoft had an AoT x86->ARM (and now, amd64->aarch64) binary translation layer before Apple's Rosetta had that capability (at least, publicly).

Oh, it can if Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft push it.

Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.

Once the M1 came out everybody HAD to upgrade, so Apple got a huge boost for a couple years as people cycled out their x86 stuff.

Latest data shows Apple's computer sales slumping much harder than the PC industry in general.

Then they released AS and the first round of hardware looked competitive because at least they seemed to have something different, a real advantage worth paying more. At least that was the marketing. I believe it got many to update very old hardware that was kept running because Apple offerings seemed so out of touch; then some others got interested to "complete" their iOS devices and even traditional PC users got sucked in for novelty factor or battery life argument. In practice if the second-hand market is to be looked at, many went back to other machines and the market is inundated by underpowered, overpriced, close to entry level machines (people figure out the hard way that 8GB of RAM is very tight for a post 2020 computer no matter how good your software optimisation is...).

Now the second release of AS was disappointing to say the least (pretty bad considering the price hikes) and I think many are holding to see what they can do with M3. So the sales have dropped a lot, at least as much as all other OEM if not more (especially in comparison to previous years).

So I think what they call the market share is actually the sales number, that doesn't mean much. If you account for all the hardware that got retired plus all the hardware that sit unused (waiting to be sold or else) macOS market share has been slightly slopping upward at best. Mostly stable in practice.

When you look at the sales numbers, it is almost 80% laptops. They barely sell any of what you would call a "PC". It makes sense; since laptops is the only place where AS has any advantages and it is also the only way to use your extra expensive "computer" as a status symbol. This is also what most employers are going to buy for their staff because unless you need real power where AS is almost disqualified from the get go it makes everything easier. They used to sell a lot of iMacs (especially the 27" version) because it was very convenient, but they don't have those anymore so...

If anything, macOS is becoming less relevant as a computing platform by the day and more of a luxury alternative brand. So its market is becoming less relevant by the day too. I think Apple is on the path to become to computing what Campagnolo is to cycling...

Traditional PCs are not going anywhere and for way more reasons than just upgradability (your car is not technically upgradeable but is made with components from many different competing suppliers).

We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.

Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.

Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.

It did with .NET but most software isn't .NET I think.

Apple got burnt, multiple times, by both Intel and Nvidia. That set them on a complete war path to move to arm where they control the chips. As part of that war path, their goal was to drop x86 entirely so they needed the transition layer.

Microsoft has no need to drop x86 entirely, in fact x86 will continue to remain a good part of a market for the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe RISCV suddenly takes off because even Qualcomm has begun pushing a cool billion dollars towards RISCV development due to ARM/Softbank attempting to make them destroy their IP. Heck, ARM/Softbank is basically trying to destroy the ARM market for profit by terminating Qualcomm's licenses by 2025.

Until then, whatever Apple has over 80% of the worldwide desktop market hardly matters.

And after how UWP was managed, there aren't that many that care.

...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.

Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.

Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.

I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.

I think an AMD 7900-like approach where the memory controllers/cache are on tiny external chips is particularly practical. Its efficient and economical. I hope AMD (and others) repeat this with laptop CPUS.

GDDRX is not a good fit for laptops anyway because its so power hungry. GPUs and the Xbox/Playstation use it just because its the absolute cheapest bandwidth/$, at the cost of everything else.

HBM is very expensive and being hoovered up by the AI market. I wouldn't count on seeing it in consumer stuff again.