> Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close.

Don't count on the Mediateks of the world to spend any time on this market. Most of the licensees are focusing on high volume embedded cases where they an try to drag themselves above the commodity pricing floor by providing a package of SoC and (in my experience crappy) drivers and an android port. In fact "package" is the key word: they typically won't sell you the chip in a useful way (i.e. no data sheets) but instead want to sell you a reference board with ported software running on top.

Apple is unusual in that they have two value add products that matter and have managed to, over time, build the capability to handle it. The economic calculus for them is quite different from that of the merchant chip vendors.

There are a few possible alternatives like Qualcomm and Nvidia (!!) but the market dynamics aren't the same for them.

It is possible that an Nvidia/microsoft relationship could develop somewhat similar to the Intel/Mcrosoft partnership, but unlikely. The market is different and the regulatory environment may become different. Terminal devices (laptops, desktops, phones) aren't really where the money is any more (except for Apple, an exception on several dimensions) so the push for such a partnership is diminished.

More likely is a partnership addressing cloud datacenters between say MS or Amazon and Nvidia, but nobody is going to be willing to allow one chip vendor to have any say over their destiny. It would make sense for one of the top cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, IBM) to buy Nvidia but that would never be allowed.

Another option is AMD. Originally they were going to have a Zen variant that ran ARM. They shelved that plan once the x86 version of Zen showed promise, but there are rumours that the plan continues on the back burner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

Dual ISA would be pretty cool. The more I learn about the differences between ARM and x86, the more it starts to seem like it really is not that much of a stretch. Just need the market for it.

At this point it seems more and more that x86 is still around purely due to legacy reasons and path-dependency. Intel's failure to execute on mobile really opened the door for ARM to have tons of resources over a decade thrown into it's development as a platform, and now the M1 is and extremely solid proof of concept that tentative forways into ARM on desktops/laptops/servers will absolutely warrant the shift in platforms. A few years for software ports and an extra 2 generations of chip improvements, and I think Intel's failure to execute on it's fab processes will just become a moot point. I have more confidence in AMD to pivot, and they have their GPU business as well. Intel may be relegated to aging obsolescence the same way HP and IBM did with their "big iron".

> Intel may be relegated to aging obsolescence the same way HP and IBM did with their "big iron".

Cough cough Itanium is an Intel-HP collaboration cough cough

Hah, true. That was absolutely the wrong chip at the wrong time, poorly implemented and lacking the software base of other platforms. I have no idea why they built the thing rather than put more resources behind Xeon, which was basically the end result anyway.

Multi-ISA chips have been announced from a couple of vendors (Loongson and Tachyum). The Loongson one does a MIPSish native ISA, MIPS, ARM, x86 and RISC-V, with the last three being slower.

https://www.zhihu.com/question/414069789 (needs Google Translate)

In the server market that could actually work, there are virtually no constraints on power or die size there.

There are plenty of constraints in the server markets. The primary ones are economic.

AMD, Nvidia, and Marvell after the Cavium acquisition could do it. Intel could too but wouldn’t unless the x86 market tanked badly.

> unless the x86 market tanked badly

That has always been a question of when, not if. And M1 shows that it is quickly approaching. In a market where physical limits have slowed down miniaturization, with just 5-10 years away from a standstill, a low efficiency instruction set focused on backwards binary compatibility is going to get washed out of most usecases very quickly. It's going the way of the IBM mainframe - still sold decades after its heyday, but marginalized to a niche (bunch of enterprise cloud instances for software that is too expensive to recompile/port).

M1's awesomeness has almost nothing to do with the instruction set. AMD64 and ARM64 are very similar in terms of complexity.

M1's awesomeness has to do with:

- assembling a killer team - 5nm process - high speed, low latency DRAM - big-little

The only substantive difference between the AMD64 and ARM64 instruction sets is that ARM64 has a more relaxed memory model.

Not true from what I’ve read. The problem with x86 is not complexity but variable instruction lengths. This makes it hard to determine instruction boundaries, complicating decoders and making more than 4-way decode hard. M1 has 8 decoders for comparison, and it would be easy to have 100 with ARM if there were a benefit to that many.

1. AMD64 is a lot easier to decode than the legacy i86 8/16/32 bit instruction set.

2. Decoding took a significant portion of the chip when they were a million transistors. The m1 has 16 billion resistors, decoding is a much less significant fraction of the chip.

Complexity isn't only about transistors, but also about delay.

And sure, there's pipelining but than your limited by latency.

> The limitation of the x86 decoder is that each clock cycle can only process up to 4 instructions, but if it is a familiar instruction, it can be placed in the operation cache, and 8 instructions can be processed per cycle.

http://www.apothetech.com/amd-zen-3-vs-zen-2-amd-zen-3-is-39...

Back in the Andy Grove era Intel exited its original business (memory) while it was profitable, foreseeing its rapid commoditization. The Intel of today sold off its excellent ARM business (acquired from DEC) and is incapable of doing anything but ride a sinking ship to doom.

At the time, StrongARM and PXA dominated PDAs and smartphones, while the higher-end parts were used in storage devices.

It's a little confusing still why they sold the whole thing while the market was growing.

Marvell seemingly abandoned portable devices and rolled IXP(?) into their own lines for a time.

Eh, Intel was so scared of itself it even stopped Atom getting properly powerful, and that was x86. No way they will get into the ARM team, the instant what they build starts being powerful they will get scared of it too and kill it.

A good part of why they take such a beating in x86 too, Intel has no backup plan because they're scared of their own backup up, while being oblivious to the fact that it was their backup plan that saved them during the post-P4 era.

At least AMD is not scared of throwing away their arch every few years and restart, they've pretty much been doing that like clockwork every five years for the past two decades.

It’s not the ISA that matters. But the execution of the project. Apple just showed it can make fast ARM. Is M1 faster than the latest zen?

No, it isn't. It's toe-to-toe on single core performance, sometimes faster, but slower in multicore.

Yeah but zen3 only pulls off matching M1 Firestorm by using 60% higher clock frequency and thus running a lot hotter.

At same clock frequency t he Zen3 would have been destroyed by the M1

Yes, but Apple also used their financial muscle to secure all of the 5nm capacity from TSMC. We're not comparing apples with apples here.

>Apple also used their financial muscle to secure all of the 5nm capacity from TSMC

It would be more accurate to describe Apple was the only customer willing to pay and has enough volume.

If you mean AMD couldn't match what Apple was willing to pay when you say "Apple was the only customer willing to pay", then absolutely. Otherwise, when push comes to shove in a bidding war with Apple, I don't think AMD really has a chance.

That's grossly mis-characterising the relationship between clock speed, performance and power consumption/heat dissipation in chip design.

And yet at the same power in multicore tasks Zen 2 outperforms the M1.

> Originally they were going to have a Zen variant that ran ARM.

Was AMD's K12 related to Zen in any way? AMD's predecessor to that, the Opteron A1100 series, was bog standard Cortex A57 cores. I figured K12 would be at best an evolution of a standard ARM design, but if it was more that would be very interesting. Would love to know more about this.

It wasn't a Zen variant; but the K12 was intended to be AMD's custom ARM uArch aimed at the server space. So there's a good chance it would have been focused on performance over power efficiency.

Power efficiency is an issue in the datacenter as well as you have to get that heat out, which also takes power.

I said over, as in relative to other ARM uArchs. Clearly, the power efficiency was the main draw of the proposal in the first place.

Does MediaTek still send out Excel files full of register names/offsets instead of data sheets? Man..

> It is possible that an Nvidia/microsoft relationship could develop somewhat similar to the Intel/Mcrosoft partnership, but unlikely. The market is different and the regulatory environment may become different.

In addition, I think Nvidia's tendency toward extreme secrecy would quickly become an obstacle.

OK, how is that different from Apple? They replaced all the protocols for keyboard/trackpad communication with their own at some point and it took forever for people to reverse engineer it. Same with the SSD and other components. M1 was shrouded in secrecy and apple tried to ditch all GPL software so that they wouldn't have to upstream anything if they don't want to.

Let's at least compare apples to apples. Pun intended.

> ... apple tried to ditch all GPL software so that they wouldn't have to upstream anything if they don't want to.

A side point: it was the patent clause of the GPL v3 that frightened them off. The GPL doesn’t require “upstreaming” of anything — you merely have to release the source code you used; any use of that code by another person is that person’s responsibility.

More generally on Apple: they just treat open / proprietary as another tactical tool. When they were on the ropes (e.g. late 90s) they happily embraced open standards like mp3 and jpeg, yet also happily purchased a license to .rtf. They quickly realized the ipod needed Windows support. Then as (and where) they became stronger they stoped caring.

MP3 wasn’t an open standard. They paid licensing fees to the Fraunhofer institute like every other commercial vendor.

I seem to recall a wide variety of people objected to the patent clause during discussions on the GPLv3. Quite a few companies won't touch GPLv3 software which is unfortunate because it was gaining a lot of momentum at the time.

The difference is that Apple is a single company, so secrecy doesn't interfere with product development. Communication happens between the involved internal teams and the magic happens.

In the case of collaborations between separate companies, secrecy becomes a problem because inevitably, details that are held close and not communicated turn into stumbling blocks. For a collaboration between Nvidia and Microsoft for instance, the teams at Microsoft involved with the project would need the same level of access to Nvidia's half as Nvidia's employees do in order to be as effective as Apple's internal teams have been. This isn't impossible of course, but historically Nvidia is not inclined to do things like this.

Firm is NOT market. In fact fir property right economics why firm exist is a big study area. Why such contractual transaction is efficient compared with free market. (May be it is not as open source “economy” has organised transaction that is not possible with firms. And firms does cooperate.)

The question further is this model extended to say china. Many things happened in china was closed to outside. Not much as a secret but more like a big firm operate cheaply in a world economy. Would others compete or like apple others have to follow inline to get the supply. One wonder.

All major tech has a new existential threat. Once Apple begins replacing its data centers with Apple Silicon chips it will create unbeatable economies in services.

The rest of faang must find a way to catch up. They will already pay huge amounts in the meantime giving Apple even greater latitude to win coming new markets.

There’s also clear opportunity for Apple to enable developers with cheaper services than other providers. This is a major issue for Amazon and Microsoft.

I get the sense that hyperscalers don’t give Intel a ton of margin in negotiations, so they already have access to great server chips at competitive prices. And they’re bringing in AMD now to compete. Where M1 really shines is client-side applications like video handling, ML inference, and crazy branchy nearly single-threaded code. Servers can afford to run much lower clock speeds (see GCP n1 family, for example) because web serving is an embarrassingly parallel problem. Sure, some ARM might help lower costs of internal things like S3, but Graviton2 isn’t that incredible compared to the M1-vs-Coffee Lake comparisons going on in the laptop world.

> Apple Silicon chips it will create unbeatable economies in services.

Except Apple generally delivers subpar services. I say this as an iPhone/Mac user.

>Some of the world's best cloud talent is assembling in an unlikely place: Apple

https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...

This seems like a PR piece. Plus, it takes time for hired people to be productive.

I know some of the people who have ended up there, they are some of the very best people.

Amazon already has ARM processors with better than Intel price/performance.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

If the ARM chipmakers haven’t bothered to invest to catch up to Apple’s A series in order to compete better in the large phone and tablet market, they’re not likely to invest to catch up to the harder to reach M series in the smaller PC market.

There is a fair chance the M1 will be remarkable in how little impact it has on the rest of the industry.

I am pretty sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX beats the stuff out of M1 and has the numbers to prove it. The question if there will be a good deal for Fujitsu to even consider consumer segment. And of course how much work would it take to scale it down from 48 cores to 8 cores and keep the power efficiency (Fugaku has the first place in Green500 list).

A64FX will only beat M1 when using SVE. For desktop workloads it's probably no contest. But at least it has 32GB RAM!

The OP was criticizing all vendors for dropping the ball on "gigantic memory bandwidth, 8-way decode, re-order buffers twice as deep, specialized instructions for x86 translation and reference counting". A64FX has all that (incl. assistant cores in addition to the regular ones and on-chip RAM with HBM interface) AND SVE, not just bare SVE as your comment seems to imply. And of course a big redesign would be necessary, I never implied it's ready to be put in the next MS Surface. But screaming that all processor vendors are 100 years behind Apple is a bit questionable.

So my thoughts were: cool, Apple is bringing some of the processor developments to mass market that I didn't think would hit the market for another 5 years. I am just a bit sad to see everyone (esp on HN) saying it was never seen before.

The Fujitsu chip is amazing too! But I am only familiar with common desktop and laptop CPUs, not HPC specialty hardware.

Sounds like part of the special sauce in the M1 is bringing supercomputer architecture to laptops. That seems like an amazing feat too.

Also, I don't think I was "screaming" about "100 years". Maybe you are thinking of someone else's comment?

AMD Ryzen 7 5800U is, according to leaked benchmarks, not too far from M1.

Makes sense. The real story with M1 isn't so much about how amazingly innovative Apple's CPU design is (although it is pretty good), as much as how Intel has rested on their laurels for 5 years.

Now, if only AMD could bring back that ARM Zen design that they cancelled a few months before Ryzen 1st Gen...

The M1 is great because it's fanless. AMD Ryzen is superb on workstations, but let's see if they can deliver a nice fanless or low power option. I hope they do.

The Ryzen mobile chips, including the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800U mentioned above, have a low 10W (configurable up to 25W) TDP. That's in the ballpark of Apple's chip.

That number isn't very meaningful - because it applies to the base clocks only... which is a big catch.

Go beyond that and the power usage balloons quickly (won't repeat myself, see my other comment on this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25231798).

On laptops, more power efficiency maps directly to increased performance (turbo clocks provide higher performance in bursts or at the expense of your laptop's fans sounding like a jet turbine).

My laptop with a Ryzen 5 4500U is only fan-free at idle. OEMs would need to do some serious work on cooling to make that work.

Only the MacBook Air is fanless, and of course it throttles after a while, that's why there's the Pro with a fan on the M1

if 7nm Zen3 is close, then 5nm can probably match without a fan.

It’s almost like power efficiency is all about the process node. M1 is 5nm. It’s a great core but it’s power profile would not be so impressive at a larger node.

Its not enough of a jump to close the gap. the a14 did not bring major improvements in power efficiency, despite being on 5nm.

Dennard called and would like to have his scaling back.

>Now, if only AMD could bring back that ARM Zen design that they cancelled

Oh yes that would rock and open up a whole new level of fault tolerance as could run real-time upon two different CPU cores in parallel, which for some workloads would add value.

Certainly adding an ARM chiplet would be cool and technically doable, though so would a RISC V core and if Nvidia buy ARM then that choice may become political.

> if Nvidia buy ARM then that choice may become political.

If? Was that a typo? They have indeed [https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...]

Unless changed in the past couple of days - It still needs approval. So be UK, China and USA approval needed of varying degree's. That said, I don't foresee any hurdles, but the ink not been signed yet.

It is super exciting, but when do you think 5800 powered laptops will be widely available? April or May of next year? Close to 6 months after M1 powered machines.

Lately Lenovo has been quite quick releasing AMD variants of Thinkpads. I'd say March or April.

That’s pretty close then. Great.

Hilarious... the M1 isn't innovative because AMD might ship a half-competitive chip in six months of nothing slips (and ignoring base vs turbo power consumption).

Truly the goal posts are always moving.

Isn't that the whole point of innovation?

Interesting - what’s the power consumption on it?

Previous gen (4800U) was 15W TDP by default (configurable between 10W and 25W).

This new one (5800U) was not yet officially announced.

Sadly, TDP is far from held on those. What you get at 15W is the base clock present at: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-a...

For the Ryzen 7 4800U, that's just 1.8GHz. 4.2GHz which is the turbo clock blows through that limit by a lot. (of course that's for multi-core workloads)

For Ryzen 5th generation, we have this for per-core only power draw, without the I/O: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

We can see from the graph at https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575p... that to reach 6.6W per core, the clock has to fall to 3.8GHz. At such a clock, Zen 3 is way behind the Apple M1 performance wise.

Power consumption is the key factor here.

> In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are.

How well is this chip suited for development? E.g. how fast can it do a full parallel compile of (say) gcc, compared to an Intel/AMD machine?

The battery life is just as impressive as the performance.

>After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery. In comparison, I could have gotten through about 3 on the 16” and the 13” 2020 model only had one go in it.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

A few days ago, there was a story showing that it was twice as fast to compile Rust compared to the 2019 Macbook Pro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25126394

Since Rust is LLVM-based, there should be a substantial performance improvement for Clang as well.

Was that a full parallel build (using all available cores)?

Because that's what counts for me, as a developer.

I believe so, as cargo defaults to the number of cores, as per this issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2805

For what it's worth, this guy noticed a nearly 2x speedup in compiling OpenSSL, which is C code, so I assume GCC or Clang: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1331732592958214145

This suggests, though it does not prove, that the performance improvement for code compilation is likely not exclusive to a single language.

For my purposes it's nearly twice as fast as my maxed out 2018 MBP for development (6-core i9). This is for projects which are mostly C++ / C / Swift

https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1331932956642852864

Now that Nvidia owns ARM and presumably has an eye on the data center market, maybe they’ll invest in desktop grade core designs?

Slow down, Nvidia doesn't own Arm yet

> specialized instructions for x86 translation

That sounds absolutely fascinating. Do you have any references I could read further on that?

They have a special mode for strongly-ordered memory accesses (IBM did something similar on POWER, also for the sake of porting x86 applications).

I'm still not sure that M1 is much of a quantum leap, and I haven't been able to get my hands on one to try it. I went to an Apple Store on Wednesday, but they were unwilling to let me see the device without a shopping appointment (store was empty of customers except for me and one other person). They only let me in the door because I was picking up an online order.

I'm not willing to describe M1 as "untouched" without actually using it in the real world for a couple of weeks.

My question to you is, have you used M1 in the real world for a couple of weeks, or are you basing your comments on the benchmarks that have been published by tech journalists?

I don’t have one, but the benchmarks, both synthetic and reports of real world usage, along with the architectural differences, are quite compelling. I don’t think humans are capable of a conspiracy on the scale required to generate this much positive coverage across the board. Even the contrarian takes admit the performance advantages.

What you’re describing at the store is standard procedure for a retail location during the pandemic. Easy enough for you to make a shopping appointment if you’re actually interested.

Personally, I’m holding out for Parallels. I have some Windows-only software that’s required for work; even after Parallels with Windows on ARM64 is available, I’ll have to see about having that software recompiled for ARM64 or if it will run under Microsoft’s x64 emulation in Parallels.

My other Mac is a 2013 Mac Pro that still works fine, but I am curious to compare compiling benchmarks with the new Mini. Maybe by the 2nd gen with more RAM is released, it will be qualified for corp use.

When Apple, Google, and all ARM based things actually run something other than Angry Birds, Chinese Adware Strange Rope Hero and Pokemon ripoff games for babies with video and malware app adds and closed "walled garden" "app store" ecosystems where you have to pay $10 or more for even an mp3 or video player, let me know. Otherwise all this mysterious "performance" is even more useless than a 75mhz Pentium from 1996. When anyone can actually program for ARM without "licensing fees" also let me know.

Wow what a gross mischaracterization of macOS to say nothing of Android and iOS. If that’s all you think is on the app stores (which is not required on any of these OSes!), then you need to broaden your horizons and look around.

There are lots of great apps on all these platforms that do all kinds of excellent useful stuff.

Regarding programming for ARM, last I checked you can just specify the target architecture in Go or Rust and off it goes. For C and C++, it’s as easy as sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf

If you’re waiting for systems like this that can run FreeBSD, well, you’re in for a wait. How long is the actual point of my post - who knows when hardware of this caliber with open drivers will be available or common.

Many macOS users don't have a single App Store app installed, or a few free default Apple ones. Don't talk out of your ass please.