I have heard a theory that ARM Servers have a difficult time because there aren't really many developer machines that run ARM. With Apple changing that, there is a chance that the next round of ARM server chips will have better success.
Most software that can run on x86_64 can run on ARM after recompilation. Some software does require changes (anything using vector intrinsics for e.g.). But in general, the biggest barrier is the dependencies.
But my point stands - 3 years ago Microsoft was talking about deploying arm64 to Azure, and those plans were cancelled with Zen 2. Given that GCP will be gone by 2023, that leaves half of the cloud titans with arm64, and the other half without. Will AMZN sell Annapurna chips to other services? My guess is they won't.
Someone has to make arm64 chips for other data centers and cloud providers, and Cavium/Marvell and Ampere have failed trying. It's a huge investment for an uncertain payoff. Annapurna had buy-in from the rest of Amazon.
What I’m really curious about is how the ISA for the M1 is different from the CPUs Windows for ARM already supports. And as others have mentioned — I think GPU support will be more difficult, but I don’t have any data to support that.
But, it’s not like alternative (and mainstream) OSs don’t exist for ARM64. Maybe with some faster ARM64 CPUs, this could be the push to really make ARM a viable architecture for more than just Macs.
You do know that there's no software available for it, right? Without software, arm64 Windows is not a viable operating system for an arm64 laptop. ARM Windows is as relevant as MIPS Windows or Itanium Windows without the huge ecosystem of software you get on x86.
And who goes bankrupt first to build this platform? Is it the laptops makers who lose millions investing in laptops that almost no one will buy because there's no software for them (actually, they already did that). Or is it the software devs who lose millions porting their software to laptops that no one owns? When Apple says the future is ARM, everyone knows the hardware will be coming and they'd better fire up their IDEs. There's no such confidence in ARM Windows.
Pretty critically, Apple was able to modify their chips so that they can efficiently emulate x86 code. Microsoft will not be able to do the same.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
As you say, Qualcomm is probably the closest to being competitive, but there is a lot of work to do to catch up. Nvidia is trying to acquire ARM, so they seem to be interested in moving into the space. Samsung and AMD are now working together in ARM processors, so they are another player. Intel used to have an ARM presence via their DEC acquisition, but that was sold to Marvell about 10 years ago. Marvell might move into the space. There are also some ARM startups, some of which were founded by Apple engineers. Lots of activity. Intel is probably the biggest loser in all of this. Sad to see that. They will respond, but it will take time.
At any rate, in terms of desktop market size, Windows is the biggest (76%) and getting a chunk of that processor revenue is a big enough payoff to warrant the required investment. Doubling or even tripling Linux desktop share is comparatively small potatoes. Microsoft is mostly agnostic so they will encourage cannibalizing X86 Windows in favor or ARM Windows rather than lose market share. I think we are going to see a big uptick in ARM Windows investment and product announcements.
Perhaps - if it makes sense, cost/performance/power-wise to put a core like that in an Android mobile phone. I guess it would? But in the next 5 years?
Remember that anything Qualcomm makes will be optimized for mobile phones and only mobile phones. They won't waste any die-area at all on anything that isn't required by the Android phone market. The Android phone market is the only market for these chips that sells enough units to pay for their design, and it's fiercely competitive.
Especially with ARM's own designs improving so much and Samsung abandoning their own under-performing designs in favour of ARM's, Qualcomm is going to get a lot more competition in the next few years.
Anything they put on those chips that makes them more expensive or use more power than competitive chips is going to cost them design wins. No way will they sacrifice 10% of their mobile market for some pie-in-the-sky, maybe-maybe-not ARM laptop market that doesn't exist and will depend on lots of theoretical buy-in from Microsoft/Redhat/Canonical/Adobe/Lenovo/Dell/etc.
The legacy support of closed source software windows has is working against them atm.
That's pretty outlandish. Try saying that to someone who uses Excel or After Effects or Photoshop for their work. A performance linux-based arm64 laptop has everything working against it that a windows arm64 laptop does, and arguably even more.
There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with mainstream software available for it), I don't see it happening in the next 5 years. Its a chicken-and-egg problem that Apple is uniquely suited to address with their vertical control over the Mac ecosystem (hardware/dev tools/OS/competitive software).
Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service.
But this:
- Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?);
This is huge. We could all contribute to getting Linux ported to M1, and then Apple could shut us down with little or no effort. And ... maybe they won't? They probably won't? But who knows? Why build an ecosystem around a hostile hardware vendor?