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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.

I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC.

There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets.

The model for US based fabbing has to include selling large portions of capacity to third party ASIC manufacturers, otherwise I see it as doomed to failure.

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> There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets.

I know anecdotes aren't data, but I was talking with a colleague about chips recently and he noticed that converting all of his cloud JVM deployments to ARM machines both improved performance and lowered costs. The costs might not even be the chips themselves, but less power and thermal requirements that lowers the OpEx spend.

Yeah, my company is gearing up to do the same. We primarily use the JVM so doing the arm switcharoo only makes sense.

They would have at least 5 years to figure it out before ARM becomes viable on desktop assuming there continues to be movement in that direction. There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now. The latest Intel mobile processors address the efficiency issues and prove that x86 can be efficient enough for laptops.

IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to. Gamers are not going to switch unless performance is actually better. There just isn't the incentive to switch.

> There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now.

> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to.

IT departments are buying arm laptops, Apple's.

And there is an incentive to switch, cost. If you are in AWS, you can save a pretty penny by adopting graviton processors.

Further, the only thing stopping handhelds from being arm machines is poor x86 emulation. A solvable problem with a small bit of hardware. (Only non-existent because current ARM vendors can't be bothered to add it and ARM hasn't standardized it).

Really the only reason arm is lagging is because the likes of Qualcomm have tunnel vision on what markets they want to address.

Looks like your post is talking about two things -- corporate purchased laptops and AWS instances, which are quite different.

About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show that companies are switching to Macbooks from HP/Dell/ThinkPads?

> corporate purchased laptops and AWS instances, which are quite different.

They are similar. Particularly because developing on a corporate hardware with an ARM processor is a surefire way to figure out if the software you write will have issues with ARM in AWS.

That's pretty much the entire reason x86 took off in the server market in the first place.

> About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show that companies are switching to Macbooks from HP/Dell/ThinkPads?

Nope. Mostly just anecdotal. My company offers devs the option of either an x86 machine or a mac.

Lots of companies do that, and I wouldn't call it an x86/ARM choice but rather the same old Windows/Mac choice. For Windows, only x86 makes sense for companies with lots of legacy software, and the only choice for Mac is ARM.

> handhelds from being arm machines is poor x86 emulation

Also Qualcomm's GPUs are pretty shit (compared to Intel's and AMDs or Apple's)

> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to.

Plenty of them are buying Macbooks. It's definitely a small percentage of the worldwide market, but not entirely insignificant either.

Yes, but that is because users demand it. And they do so begrudgingly. Users are not going to demand an ARM Windows laptop.

But will IT departments buy them if they are 100, 200, or $400 cheaper than a competing x86 machine?

That's the question that remains to be seen.

Can those users get all the software they need? Many users who want a mac are told no because some weird software they need doesn't run on it. Others only get a mac because some executive demanded IT port that software to mac. So long as companies have any x86 only software they won't let people switch. Often "art" departments get a specific exception and they get to avoid all the jobs that require x86 only software just to run their mac.

Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

> Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

This was the point I was going to make. While not completely dead, the days of desktop applications are quickly coming to a close. Almost everything is SAAS now or just electron apps which are highly portable.

Even if it's not saas or electron, the only two languages I'd do a desktop app in now-a-days is C# or Java. Both of which are fairly portable.

The big problem is Excel. Microsoft will make sure never to give that one up. Browser version isn't enough. I'm sure Apple has their reasons for not financing a full-fledged, compatible version, but if they would it would massively increase market share. I'm guessing it's strategic - e.g. not incurring the wrath of Microsoft or a different non-technical, non-marketshare reason.

The world outside of the SV tech bubble runs on Excel.

2 things.

1. Excel now-a-days is mostly just an electron app. That's what the office 365 conversion was effectively.

2. MS has supported ARM platforms for quite some time now. [1]

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/office-windows-11-arm-starts-...

[2] http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm

If Microsoft insists on treating them like phones with locked-down software stacks, still no.

Back when I worked for an F500 company, my development workstation was every bit as locked-down as a phone. Complete with having to select any software I wanted to use from the company's internal "app store" rather than installing it directly.

If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo buy / subscribe to windows too).

And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..

I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.

I work in a large enterprise company, have both windows and mac machines, and excel works equally great in both, but more and more excel runs in a browser.

We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud. So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a modern browser you are good.

From what I've seen your company is an exception. Yes, for 95% of users, browser/Mac Excel is more than enough. But the non-tech companies I've seen still don't want to get Macs because of that 5%, they just don't want to bother with having to support two platforms. And leadership obviously doesn't care/have no idea.

Excel in browser is unreaponsive, laggy and unproductive for power users.

It is like a toy version of the standalone app.

Also it sucks with lists, pivot tables...

95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this today, and so is Word. There are many alternatives that are just as good (and much cheaper) for 99% of users, but people still want to stick with "the standard" instead of taking a small risk on something different.

Maybe in the coming Great Depression of 2025, people will think differently and start looking at cheaper alternatives.

I was disputing this claim:

> If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy

The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows.

Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.

I agree, and I think my post supports that, in a way. I'm just saying 95% of people probably could work just fine with GSheets or LibreOffice or whatever, but the very same is true for MacExcel (even more true, in fact, because it's closer to WinExcel than the alternatives).

> They would have at least 5 years to figure it out before ARM becomes viable on desktop assuming there continues to be movement in that direction.

What's this based on? Surely the proportion of desktops that need to be more powerful than anything Apple is doing on ARM is very small. And surely Apple isn't 5 years ahead?

It is less about the development of ARM on desktop and more about software support. Most apps on Windows are still emulated. Some will not work at all. Games are kind of a mess on ARM. A ton of security software that IT departments require are only going to work x86. Businesses run legacy custom applications designed for x86. Some major applications still run on emulation only and are therefore slower on ARM.

Apple can force the transition. It is not so straightforward on Windows/Linux.

> There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now

Massively lower power consumption and way less waste heat to dispose of.

Literally the two biggest concerns of every data centre on earth.

ARM does not inherently have "massively lower power consumption and waste heat", though.

Market forces have traditionally pushed Intel and AMD to design their chips for a less efficient part of the frequency/power curve than ARM vendors. That changed a few years ago, and you can already see the results in x86 chips becoming more efficient.

Honestly, I wouldn't put it behind IBM to turn it around with POWER revival. They'd been doing some cool stuff recently with their NorthPole accelerator[1], and using 12nm process while at it, indicating there's much room for improvement. It could eventually become a relatively open, if not super affordable platform. There's precedent with OpenPOWER! And not to mention RISC-V, of course, championed by Jim Keller et al (Tenstorrent) but it's yet to blossom, all the while pppc64el is already there where it matters.

I say, diversity rules!

[1]: https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-llm-inference-result...

PPC’s likely last hope died when Google didn’t go ahead with OpenPower.

Talos is the exception that proves the rule, sadly.

IBM did lay an egg with Power10, though. They cut corners and used proprietary IP and as a result there are few (are there any?) non-IBM Power10 systems because the other vendors stayed away. Raptor workstations and servers are a small-ish part of the market but they're comparatively highly visible - and they're still on POWER9 (no S1 yet).

They did realize the tactical error, so I'm hoping Power11 will reverse the damage.

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