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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I think more about the timing being incorrect - betting on software in an era of exponential hardware growth was unwise (software performance can’t scale that way). The problem is that you need to marry it with a significantly better CPU/architecture because the JIT is about not losing performance while retaining back compat.

However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.

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> However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.

I don't think Apple is a good example here. Arm was extremely well-established when Apple began its own phone/tablet CPU designs. By the time Macs began to transition, much of their developer ecosystem was already familiar.

Apple's CPUs are actually notably conservative when compared to the truly wild variety of Arm implementations; no special vector instructions (e.g. SVE), no online translation (e.g. Nvidia Denver), no crazy little/big/bigger core complexes.

> no special vector instructions (e.g. SVE)

Wut - SVE and SME are literally Apple designs (AMX) which have been "back ported".

> Wut - SVE and SME are literally Apple designs (AMX) which have been "back ported".

Literally no Apple CPUs meaningfully support SVE or SVE2. Apple adds what I would say is a relatively "conventional" matrix instructions (AMX) of their own, and now implements SME and SME2, but those are not equivalent to SVE (I call AMX "conventional" in the sense that a fixed-size grid of matrix compute elements is not a particularly new idea, versus variable-sized SIMD which is still quite rare. Really, the only arm64 design with "full fat" SVE support is Fujitsu's a64fx (512-bit vector size); everything else on the very short list of hardware supporting SVE is still stuck with 128-bit vectors.

I think if you go back far enough you’ll see that SVE was actually an Apple invention :)

I think your focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise.

Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success.

And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with (partially because Intel didn’t see a market). So they were already familiar with ARM before they even started building ARM CPUs. But also the developer ecosystem familiarity is only partially relevant - even in compat mode the M1 ran faster than equivalent contemporary Intel chips. So the familiarity was only needed to unlock the full potential (most of which was done by Apple porting 1p software). But even if they had never switched on ARM support in the M1 the JIT technique (compiled with a better CPU and better unified memory architecture) would still have been fast enough to slightly outcompete Intel chips on performance and battery life - native software just made it 0 competition.

> partially because Intel didn’t see a market

I saw some articles saying that Intel saw the market very well, they just could not deliver and rather than admit that, they claimed the CEO decided wrong.

Both were probably true to some extent but I doubt they wouldn’t have figured out a way to execute given the huge opportunity.

The mobile CPU market worth is a meaningful chunk of Intel’s overall current market cap and they’re not participating.

> I think you're focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise.

> Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success.

I think you are operating with a bit too much benefit from hindsight. In a very reductive sense, every time someone has tried to make dynamic ISA translation work, they have done so because they believe their ability to implement their "real" ISA will be superior in some way than their ability to implement the external ISA. Obviously many have failed at this, usually when trying more ambitious designs, but less ambitious designs (perhaps most famously the AMD K5 and its descendants) have succeeded.

Apple's case is really quite different, in that unlike Transmeta or Nvidia, they already had several generations of CPU implementations on which to base their decisions prior to the point of announcing the macOS x64->arm64 transition, just as they had several generations of Intel hardware to consider when making the PPC->x86 transition.

> And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with (partially because Intel didn’t see a market). So they were already familiar with ARM before they even started building ARM CPUs

As a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, Apple had a history with ARM dating back to 1990 at least:

> Arm was officially founded as a company in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, which was a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and VLSI Technology (now NXP Semiconductors N.V)

https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-official-history

Apple also shipped ARM-based Newton systems from 1993-98, and ARM-based iPods starting in 2001.

Yes I’m aware. But ARM from then vs the one that was in phones shares little in terms of useful experience. iPhone is where the partnership became strategically important for Apple.

> ARM from then vs the one that was in phones shares little in terms of useful experience

There seems to be a fair amount of continuity.

For example, Acorn's RISC OS (1987 onward) was ported to the modern Raspberry Pi, and you can still write ARM assembly language in your BBC BASIC programs on RISCOS for the Pi.

Exactly... I think that if you look at the accelerator paths that Apple's chips have for x86 emulation combined with software it's pretty nifty. I do wish these were somewhat standardized/licensed/upstreamed so that other arm vendors could use them in a normalized way.

Would TSMC be further along today, or not, if Transmeta had been thought up five, ten years later? Would Transmeta be farther along for having encountered a more mature TSMC?

TSMC seems to have made a lot of bones on Arm and Apple’s time.

No, Transmeta was never a big or significant player. ARM was started in 1985 and Apple was an early meaningful investor. By the turn of the millennium ARM was already well established in the microcontroller, PDA and cell phone space (smartphone and feature phone). Ten years later you already had the iPhone well established. It was just never going to happen for them. TSMC made bones on being a fabricator for all sorts of custom chip designs. It almost didn’t matter who it was as long as there was increasing volume.

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