ARM Mac Impact on Intel

Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by m463 on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:31AM (#23598268)

I think when a threat comes along, intel steps up.

they WILL compete, and they've been playing leapfrog with AMD for years.

I'm waiting to see the intel response for the new 32 and 64 core chips from amd.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by matwood on Monday June 22, 2020 @07:53AM (#23599203)

Maybe. The problem is that I'm guessing Apple wants to move to their own ARM not for more compute, but more power efficiency. Intel has never been able to deliver on the low power side.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by kllrnohj on Monday June 22, 2020 @12:52PM (#23602462)

> Intel has never been able to deliver on the low power side.

Yes they have. It's why we have 10+ hour thin & light laptops. The quad-core i5 in a macbook air runs at 10W, that's comparable per-core power draw to an A13.

Controlling the CPU will give Apple more controls to tune total-package power, particularly on the GPU / display side of things, but CPU compute efficiency isn't going to be radically different, and that's not going to translate into significant battery life differences, either, since the display, radios, etc... all vastly drown out low-utilization CPU power draw numbers.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by slantyyz on Monday June 22, 2020 @09:19AM (#23599831)

> The problem is that I'm guessing Apple wants to move to their own ARM not for more compute, but more power efficiency.

I'm guessing the switch is for those reasons, plus a more important one (my opinion only), control.

If they use their own chips, they're not stuck waiting on Intel (or any other x86 CPU manufacturer) to build CPUs that have the attributes that matter to them the most.

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