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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

For Apple it worked because they waited until they had a really, really good ARM ISA CPU (combined with arguably sandbagging their x86 offering for a few years prior but I digress).

Qualcomm is also working on a really good ARM ISA CPU with their acquisition of NuVia and subsequent Oryon architecture.

Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it. ARM's CPUs so far have been subpar for laptop-class chips. Hence why neither Apple nor Qualcomm are using them.

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> Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it

MediaTek is involved in the SoC but both the CPU & GPU from Nvidia are bolted on to it. I.e. it's not a standard MediaTek CPU with an Nvidia GPU added.

MediaTek's press release pretty clearly indicates the CPU came from MediaTek, and so far Nvidia doesn't have any custom CPU core they've called "Grace". Seeing as the DGX Spark has what seems to be the same core chip, it'd be really surprising if the RTX Spark swapped out the CPU cores without any fanfare announcing that

> arguably sandbagging their x86 offering

tbh, I always read this as Intel doing some sales magic here.

Apple: "Hey, we're making a product that has a 15w thermal envelope, do you have anything?"

Intel: "Yes!"

(Unspoken: their products will throttle down to fit, in fact, they will try to run always at 99ºC so you always get the best performance! FEATURE!)

Apple: "uhhhh..."

Consumers: "HEH IS IT EVEN A PRO DEVICE IF IT DOESN"T HAVE <INTEL MARKETING BRAND TERM>?"

Apple: "UHHHH... Guess we'll do it ourselves"

> tbh, I always read this as Intel doing some sales magic here.

Possibly, but Apple choosing a new, thicker chassis the same generation that they introduce their more power efficient replacement is certainly a thing. Even if Intel failed to achieve the TDP they told Apple, Apple also seems to no longer believe the thinness they were doing was viable for that TDP anyway.

Intel's product offering certainly wasn't as compelling towards the end there, but it also looked almost uniquely bad in Apple's chassis vs everyone else's

This narrative only really fits the pro line, and only if you squint hard enough. The story falls apart immediately with the MacBook Air. I remember the late Intel years: constant fans spinning, noticeable latency between mouseclick and UI response, 1-2h battery life in scenarios that now reliably get 8-10. Those were dark times.

"Sandbagging their x86 offering" is a new one. There's no winning.

The Intel chips of that time were fine but it was a problem from both sides. Apple refused to "compromise" their hardware design and Intel failed to deliver on their promises regarding power/heat budgets and kept telling Apple execs that they were just one cycle away from fixing all of the problems.

Ultimately, Apple won that fight when they decided to stop letting Intel control their hardware roadmap and it's been a great change for the entire industry. Intel is finally seeing some changes in their own products, largely in response to Apple dropping them. Now Nvidia is getting into the game which means more competition which is also good.

Apple had a similar run-in with AMD and Nvidia. Over design issues.

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