Re:Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Develop...
by masklinn on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:41PM
(#25422975)
I'm not a specialist either but my understanding is that Apple has thrown a lot of resources (and hardware) at the problem (and have been doing so for a while, the M1 is simply the apotheosis), and it has paid off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
Nothing stops other ARM manufacturers from doing that, but it's expensive, and most manufacturers don't really have a reason to work this hard at it, they have a fairly low-margin biz and their clients aren't going to pay big bucks. For Apple however, these chips are completely structural, they already underlie huge amounts of their business and with the switch of Macs to ARM are slated to do so even more.
It may not be possible for x86 though, because of the architecture's complexity limits e.g. how wide you can decode, and more generally how much hardware you can keep fed concurrently.
Nothing stops other ARM manufacturers from doing that, but it's expensive, and most manufacturers don't really have a reason to work this hard at it, they have a fairly low-margin biz and their clients aren't going to pay big bucks. For Apple however, these chips are completely structural, they already underlie huge amounts of their business and with the switch of Macs to ARM are slated to do so even more.
It may not be possible for x86 though, because of the architecture's complexity limits e.g. how wide you can decode, and more generally how much hardware you can keep fed concurrently.