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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage. Apple is more than one study case on competitive analysis.

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This is entirely Qualcomm's doing. If they supported Arm SBSA/UEFI+ACPI like some other Arm chip companies (e.g. Ampere) you could boot a generic Linux (or indeed BSD) Arm distro on their chips no problem. Controlling the entire platform is not necessary, just follow the standards.

AFAIk this has nothing to do with Qualcomm but with vendors and Microsoft.

I don't think that would help with GPU or NPU, which another comment states are the drivers that Qualcomm are upstreaming.

Qualcomm expects to be paid. a toll/fee by each one of the Linux Distro’s for the privilege of being on the hardware with their chips in the device that is their history and one of the reasons why Apple spent five years kicking them out, they very definitely don’t act as a charity, so in the end, it will be interesting because someone is gonna pay their fee. the end user maybe?

All they have to do is support Windows and get their stuff upstreamed in the Linux kernel, no need for specific distro support. I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.

>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings

So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.

> I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.

Because getting your stuff upstreamed in Linux is more work than releasing a custom kernel.

What advantage? I'm always a bit shocked to see people say this without qualifying it at all.

On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.

Is it more work to support a completely proprietary boot path or three different "standard" boot paths?

Hint: you would know the answer if you are familiar with the Windows, Linux and OSX boot process.

Advantage of commitment and integration. Apple doesn't need to worry about critical vendors not cooperating because sticking with x86 is less risky.

Apple didn't have to worry about that when they supported cross-industry standardization efforts. The only reason dGPUs are broken on macOS is because of Apple's software choices.

You sound very ridiculous. Why is Apple obligated? to follow Nvidia? or AMD? or Microsoft for that matter?

Intel said no to designing iPhone chips, IBM and Motorola couldn’t see a future of faster/better chips to meet the demands of future tech devices, Apple with that crazy CEO, Steve Jobs? Had to go it alone and the rest is history.

The Apple Silicon design group appears to be on a roll. What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will. Because that will be the only way they can build the devices they want to build at a reasonable price going forward.

Before you yell no what is it about the last 28 years have you missed? They seem to be able to execute long-range projects when it comes to hardware and software in comparison to their tech peers, looking forward to the M7 ultra, in-house memory and the C3 modem.

I didn't say they were obligated. I just said that they didn't have these problems when Apple was a cooperative member of industry-spanning consortium efforts.

> What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will.

It's okay to say that you don't know anything about chip fabrication, instead of making silly assumptions like this.

Apple’s advantage is being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s speaks for itself. having control of the hardware and the operating system software with the ability to create new ecosystems is their advantage in comparison to hardware or software only companies, Note: the tech world would be a better place if Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn, Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois had been able to survive the Microsoft/Intel onslaught.

Even Apple forfeit x86's onslaught. MIPS was a dog's dinner compared to early x86 chips, and Steve Jobs knew this well since he worked at Pixar when they were preparing to throw away SGI machines to replace them with Linux boxes. Digital Domain, Dreamworks and Industrial Light & Magic all all abandoned UNIX workstations because they sucked. All of those companies deserved to die.

The tech world is a better place without full-stack UNIX grifters demanding a pound of flesh. Eventually macOS will be buried alongside them, as Apple has clearly has no intention to develop a fully-featured OS for Apple Silicon.

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