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Comment by kimixa | Hacker News Reader

And yet they seem to be the only people picking the apparently "Low Hanging Fruit" in ARM land. We'll see about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years now, but you still can't buy one to actually test.

And don't underestimate the investment Apple made - it's likely at a similar level to the big x86 incumbents. I mean AMD's entire Zen development team cost was likely a blip on the balance sheet for Apple.

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They don't care as much for the ARM stuff because software development investment vastly outweighs the chip development costs.

Sure, maybe they can do better but at what cost and for what? The only thing Apple does truly better is performance per watt which is not something that is relevant for a large part of the market.

x86 stuff is still competitive performance wise, especially in the GPU department where Apple attempts are rather weak compared to what is on offer across the pond. The Apple Silicon switch cost a large amount of developer effort for optimisation, and in the process a lot of software compatibility was lost, it took a long time to get even the most popular softwares to get properly optimized and some software house even gave up on supporting macOS because it just wasn't worth the man hour investment considering the tiny market.

This is why I am very skeptical about the Qualcomm ARM stuff, it needs to be priced extremely well to have a chance, if consumers do not pick it up in droves, no software port is going to happen in a timely manner and it will stay irrelevant. Considering the only thing much better than the current x86 offering is the performance per watt, I do not have a lot of hope, but I may be pleasantly surprised.

Apple aficionados keep raving about battery life but it's not really something a lot of people care about (appart for smartphones, where Apple isn't doing any better than the rest of industry).

> Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years now

Launching at Computex in 2 weeks, https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/next-gen-ai-...

Good to know that it's finally seeing the light. I thought they're still in legal dispute with ARM about Nuvia's design?

Not privy to details, but some legal disputes can be resolved by licensing price negotiations, motivated by customer launch deadlines.

speaking of which, whatever happened to qualcomm's bizarre assertion that ARM was pulling a sneak move in all its new licensing deals to outlaw third-party IP entirely and force ARM-IP-only?

there was one quiet "we haven't got anything like that in the contract we're signing with ARM" from someone else, and then radio silence. And you'd really think that would be major news, because it's massively impactful on pretty much everyone, since one of the major use-cases of ARM is as a base SOC to bolt your custom proprietary accelerators onto...

seemed like obvious bullshit at the time from a company trying to "publicly renegotiate" a licensing agreement they probably broke...

Again, not saying that they are easy (or cheap!) problems to solve, but that there are more relatively easy problems in the ARM space than the x86 space.

That’s why Apple can release a meaningfully new chip every year where it takes several for x86 manufacturers

> We'll see about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years now, but you still can't buy one to actually test.

That's more bound by legal than technical reasons...

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