Cough cough Itanium is an Intel-HP collaboration cough cough
https://www.zhihu.com/question/414069789 (needs Google Translate)
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 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.
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.
And sure, there's pipelining but than your limited by latency.
http://www.apothetech.com/amd-zen-3-vs-zen-2-amd-zen-3-is-39...
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.
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.
At same clock frequency t he Zen3 would have been destroyed by the M1
It would be more accurate to describe Apple was the only customer willing to pay and has enough volume.
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.
In addition, I think Nvidia's tendency toward extreme secrecy would quickly become an obstacle.
Let's at least compare apples to apples. Pun intended.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except Apple generally delivers subpar services. I say this as an iPhone/Mac user.
https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...
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.