Intel have to contend with: “this Apple chip over here is more efficient, why can’t you do the same?”. Apple blew a hole in the side of the age old x86 armour by proving the arch isn’t untouchable.
Then other companies like Qualcomm can finally capitalize on that damage to the x86 armour.
Though perhaps the opposite direction is more interesting and what you were getting at: what if the off the shelf arm cores had NVIDIA’s engineering behind it.
If they pulled that off, that Nvidia would have been very powerful. CUDA + ARM + leading node would have put them in a similar position that Intel had with x86 back in the day.
The competition would have struggled there - nobody has CUDA equivalent, only AMD has GPU equivalent, nobody has install base of software like ARM. RISC-V (or intel) even executing super fast would have been years away from being competitive across the board like this.
It might have also wrecked AMD, since the weak point of their GPU strategy is reliance on x86. If Nvidia+ARM came on strong, that'd weaken x86's stranglehold on PCs, which would ultimately weaken AMD since they don't have a leading position in other markets to fall back on.
Nvidia would have a lock on mobile devices, the increasingly AI-based datacenters, as well as some degree of PC side including gamers. Microsoft would pick up on the software side and we'd have Winvidia instead of Wintel.
> The main concern among regulators was that Nvidia, after the transaction, would have the ability and incentives to restrict access to its rivals to Arm´s technology, which would eventually lead to higher prices, less choice and reduced innovation. [2]
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2...
[2]: https://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2022/collapse-of-nvid...
That wouldn't work since many companies already had been licensing the ARM architecture, not just cores.
1. Even x86(_64) can’t run every line of code ever written flawlessly. It can only run the code that is on a compatible architecture, where compatibility largely breaks based on intrinsics used or how old the arch is. You already cannot run everything on a modern x86 processor, only a subset and that’ll get worse when Intel drops support for 16 bit soon.
2. That leaves translation or emulation for the arches that are non-native. Which is exactly what arm does today on all three of the big OSs. macOS, windows and Linux all have translation/emulation layers now so can run most x86 code with varying levels of performance penalty.
3. Many Linux distros support arm. I’m not sure where you’re coming from on this. It’s been multiple decades of support at this point, and even the raspberry pi is a decade old itself now as the poster child for consumer arm64 Linux . They may not support every flavor of it, but that’s also true for x86 systems.
That's a pretty good example actually, the various Pi versions are probably the best supported ARM in existence, and even they are incredibly limited in what they can run.
For some reason the way OS support works on ARM is that every OS needs to explicitly support the exact underlying hardware or it doesn't run. For example the recently released Pi 5 can only really run two OSes right now: Pi OS 12 and Ubuntu 23.10. How is that possible, I ask? Why the fuck isn't the required firmware shipped with the SoC and made compliant to run any aarch64 build of anything? It's not like it's new hardware either, it uses a dated 5 year old Cortex A72.
Meanwhile x64 has apparently done the opposite and standardized hardware to a level where software support is completely irrelevant. Pick any new or old version of Windows or Linux or FreeBSD or whatever, pick any motherboard, CPU, GPU, disk combo and it'll install and just work (with a few exceptions). It baffles me that this standardization that's been a blessing on x64 is impossible to achieve with ARM. I don't need a specific release of Debian with firmware from Gigabyte to work with their motherboard, it doesn't give a shit if it's an Intel or AMD CPU or something third entirely, but for ARM this level of support is apparently like asking for cold fusion.
> that’s also true for x86 systems.
Really? I mean I suppose there must be some very specific OSes out there that aren't compatible, but I've yet to hear of any. Hell, you can even run Android.
That’s largely where the holdup is. Most arm devices use a variety of more unique supplementary hardware that often only distribute their support in binary blobs. So due to lack of ubiquity, the support in distros varies.
If you could skip the rest of the device and focus on the processor itself, the distros would largely all run as long as they didn’t remove support explicitly.
This is the same process as on x86. It’s just that the hardware vendors are also interested in selling the components by themselves, and therefore have a vested interest in adding support to the Linux kernel.
It’s very much the case that when new hardware comes out that you need a new kernel version to support it properly. That is true of processors, GPus and even motherboards. They don’t just magically function, a lot of work goes into submitting the patches into the kernel prior to their availability.
Since arm manufacturers right now have no interest in that market, they don’t do the same legwork. They could. If Intel or AMD entered the fray it would definitely change the makeup.
The one other big issue is there’s no standard BIOS system for arm. But again, it’s just down to the hardware manufacturers having no interest as you’re not going to be switching out cores on their devices.
It is one of those "devil in the details" kinds. In theory, DT would be okay, but it's not. The issue starts with HW vendors failing to create 100% (backwards) compatible hardware. For example, if they need a uart, they fail to hook up the standard baud rate divisor and instead use a clock controller somewhere else in the machine because its already there. So now DT describes this relationship, and someone needs to go hack up the uart driver to understand it needs to twiddle a clock controller rather than use the standard registers. Then, of course, it needs to be powered up/down, but DT doesn't have a standard way to provide an ACPI-like method for that functionality. So now it either ends up describing part of the voltage regulation/distribution network, or it needs a custom mailbox driver to talk to the firmware to power the device on/off. Again, this requires kernel changes. And that is just an example of a uart, it gets worse the more complex the device is.
On x86, step one is hardware compatibility, so nothing usually needs to be changed in the kernel for the machine to understand how to setup an interrupt controller/uart/whatever. The PC also went through the plug and play (PnP) revolution in the 1990's and generally continues to utilize self-describing busses (pci, usb) or at least make things that aren't inherently self-describing look that way. Ex: intel making the memory controller look like a pci root complex integrated endpoint, which is crazy but solves many software detection/configuration issues.
Second, the UEFI specification effectively mandates that all the hardware is released to the OS in a configured/working manner. This avoids problems where Linux needs to install device-specific firmware for things like USB controllers/whatever because there is already working firmware, and unless Linux wants to replace it, all the HW will generally work as is. Arm UEFIs frequently fail at this, particularly uboot ones, which only configure enough hardware to load grub/etc, then the kernel shows up and has to reset/load firmware/etc as though the device were just cold powered on.
Thirdly, ACPI provides a standard power management abstraction that scales from old pentium from the 1990s where it is just traping to SMM, to the latest servers and laptops with dedicated power management microcontrollers, removing all the clock/regulator/phy/GPIO/I2C/SPI/etc logic from the kernel, which are the kinds of things that change not only from SoC to Soc but board to board or board revision to board revision. So, it cuts out loads and loads of cruft that need kernel drivers just to boot. Nothing stops amd/intel from adding drivers for this stuff, but it is simply unnecessary to boot and utilize the platform. While on arm, its pretty much mandated with DT because the firmware->OS layers are all over the place and are different with every single arm machine that isn't a server.
So, the fact that someone can hack a DT and some drivers allows the hardware vendors to shrug and continue as usual. If they were told, "Sorry, your HW isn't Linux compatible," they would quickly clean up their act. And why put in any effort, random people will fund ashai like efforts to reverse engineer it and make it work. Zero effort on apples part, and they get Linux support.
x64 servers and PCs are compatible because all of them adhere to an architectural standard backed by a suite of a suite of compatibility tests defined by Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/co... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/ . The ARM world has no similar agreed on standard.
Took them long enough.
Intel only sold CPUs at one point. They needed compatibility with all sorts of hardware. ARM manufacturers, on the other hand, sell SOCs, so they don't want any sort of compatibility.
Back in the day people liked tech and wanted to use it everywhere and have everything just work every time. Now it seems like everyone just wants to tinker with small projects.
Like, look at all the stuff Bluetooth 5 can do. If that existed in 1997, I think there would be about 5x the excitement. But there are probably more people working on customizing their window manager than doing anything with the big name standards.
The only issue I see compatibility-wise is that ARM doesn't have a standard method for an OS kernel to auto-discover peripherals. x86_64 has UEFI and ACPI. ARM manufacturers could adopt that if they wanted to, but apparently they (mostly) don't want to.
Otherwise, non-assembly code written for x86_64 tends to run just fine on ARM, when compiled for it.
ARM manufacturers don't want compatibility.
Traditionally the Linux-on-ARM market has sucked because every single board computer and phone and tablet has needed its own specially compiled kernel with its own set of kernel patches, and probably its own half-assed Linux distro that never gets any updates.
You can't even buy a USB wifi or bluetooth stick and expect it to work without checking the chipset - let alone use a single distro across the BeagleBone Black, the Xilinx Zinq, the iMX6 and the RPi.
Who is they? X86 had IBM to establish a standard. And when IBM wasn't interested anymore, it was Intel who stepped in.
If Apple’s opened the gateway on them finally cracking into the desktop/laptop market by removing the stigma of their previous arm offerings, then I’d argue they’re very serious competition to Intel.
The only market I don’t see them tackling is consumer sales of just the chips, but that’s honestly such a small percent of sales to begin with for these companies.
And in the cloud, custom arm seems to be the path that was chosen
Doesn't the cloud run on x86?
Microsoft And Google have had Ampere-based CPUs available for over a year. They're still very x86 heavy though.
And don't forget, if you're really craving PowerPC in the cloud you can get LPARs on IBM's cloud for another flavor of non-x86 cloud compute.
Do either of them have the volume to supply the server market? At the end of the day that's why Intel is still relevant.
I figured intel is still "relevant" because of past momentum, not because of actual specs or production capacity.
So while AMD is relevant. Intel is only "relevant" with quotations.
There is enough demand for both TSMC and Intels capacity.
In terms of potential for future success and raw ranking, yeah intel is still relevant in this area. But given that most people on HN are consumers I would think "relevant" applies to my first statement. They aren't currently a rational choice when you are making a purchase decision. But I guess I'm wrong. People will buy a shittier product just out of patriotism I guess? Nothing wrong with that.
Yes. Having a lot of cash buys you exclusivity for TSMC 3nm and then for TSMC 2nm.
the fact that they had to create an emulation/virtualization layer (rosetta) says other wise. The x86 instruction set is such an entrenched one that i dont think intel has any fear of it being rooted any time in this half-century.
That is a nonsensical and ahistorical take.
Apple created an emulation layer because they were migrating ISA and thus had a backlog of legacy which they needed to support for users to switch over.
They did the same from PPC to x86, and from 68k to PPC, and nobody would have accused those of being entrenched.
Office, Youtube and WWW.
Apple is getting amazing performance at far lower power consumption.
People have been waiting for Intel’s response. If they flub this and it isn’t good enough, that’s a huge tell of weakness. AMD, Qualcomm, and everyone else will be chomping at the bit to take advantage.
Even if the others can’t beat Intel in performance per watt, performance per dollar may sway things.
As soon as Intel or AMD say fuck it and shoot the moon on memory Apples distinction evaporates.
I assume Intel is the most likely to do this by 2025.
Intel says this is built on their Intel 4 process, which is, as I understand, their own 7nm process: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/c...
nm are meaningless marketing numbers. In terms of performance/density Intel 4 should be in same ballpark as '4nm' of Samsung/TSMC.
Any proofs to back that up?
That’s a bold claim conspicuously missing data. Can you cite a source?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core
from other designs in the industry is just the
sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring
an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by
far the current widest commercialized design in
the industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
By the way, I'm not knocking what Apple has achieved. I recently upgraded from an 2018 Intel MBP to a 2021 M1 Max MBP. And, holy smokes. This thing is fast and it is effortlessly fast. I have been running all 10 cores pretty hard for the job I'm currently doing. I am absolutely beyond impressed.
But, from an engineering standpoint, it's definitely worth wrapping our heads around what Apple has and has not achieved here. I don't think they have any magic fairy dust or special sauce.
The underlying challenge here is vertical integration: Apple can invest more in chip design not just on the CPU but also balancing with accelerators for things like AI or media processing, security, etc. because they work closely across the OS and app teams to see what they need & make sure it’s actually used (if they add a new coprocessor to reduce need for certain CPU features, it’s priority 1 for the next OS release). Microsoft and Intel or Samsung/Qualcomm and Google work together, of course, but they have different goals and budgets, they need to support multiple companies worth of corporate overhead on the same sale, and they can’t focus too much on any one deal because they need to hedge their bets.
This cuts the other way, of course: Apple’s stuff is best at the mobile and up to mid-range, but beyond that if you need more than a certain amount of RAM or features like advanced virtualization, they don’t have an alternative the way Google can choose between AMD and Intel for GCP with no concern about affecting the Pixel lineup. We’ll see whether Apple stumbles badly enough for this to matter.
More importantly, Apple doesn't fab its own chips. TSMC does. Everyone has access to the same vendor. Similarly everyone has access to ARM cores. Yet somehow Apple managed to build an Intel/AMD competitor and others didn't? What am I missing?
"Apple Bought All of TSMC's 3nm Capacity for an Entire Year"
Being the first to buy 3nm doesn't prove what was initially claimed.
Unlikely.
Who can pay as much as Apple - likely in advance and for exclusivity.
My guess is that Apple is financing some of the equipment (TSMC is a high capital business, and Apple has overseas retained profits it doesn't want to repatriate) and there will be contracts for the exclusive use of the new equipment nodes. With everything designed for taxation efficiency.
Using the latest process certainly helps but look at the older ones as well - it’s not like the performance gap disappeared when competing AMD processors were launched on the TSMC 5nm process, but that really highlighted the different trade offs those teams make: Zen4 CPUs certainly dusted the Apple chips, but the ones which did were desktop / server designs using far more power, too, since that’s where the money is in the PC side.
But for similar performance, like in the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pros, Intel was embarrassed. The M1s were so much faster and cooler than the Intel chips they replaced it was hilarious.
The Mac Pro is absolutely the weak spot. Apple doesn’t sell enough so it seems unlikely they will spend the money to try and keep up with Intel there. The first Apple Silicon Mac Pro is not what people wanted. And I don’t know if that machine will be coming.
M series gains aren't just to do with the node. It's also because of the unified memory architecture and most importantly the fact that custom silicon e.g. Neural Engine is taken advantage of through the OS and SDKs.
They do that also for iOS. But people still buy Android devices with weaker Qualcomm CPUs. Because not every person in this world is rich enough to pay $2000 on an iPhone. For some people, even $200 is a big effort.
And there's other reasons, too. I can afford an iPhone, but I don't think it's worth that kind of money. And the camera on my current phone is better. As I love photography, having a better camera is more important to me than crunching better scores in Geekbench 6.
On the laptop side, I finally gave up and bought a Macbook Pro for movie watching and couch browsing, because I dislike having the device plugged in. But for work I still use x86 laptops and desktops. Performance is higher than on Apple devices, for lower price, it's just the consumption that is higher. And I don't care about that aspect since I always keep my work device plugged in, hooked to external displays and docking stations.
Luckily the cheapest iPhone starts at $429 then.
The iPhone SE performs basically the same as the most expensive model you can buy. And it's not about gaming, it's about basic tasks - moving around the OS, cold starting apps, editing photos/videos, etc.
Apple made Intel look bad, Intel needs to respond. If they can’t do that by now it’s going to be a real big tell of how they’re doing.
Noting I wrote said people had to buy $2000 laptops or $1200 phones.
Apple makes consumer electronics.
Actually, Apple is being used in the enterprise more and more. Its a developer darling and because for a few good years now there's real Office for Mac and combined with very good MDM capabilities it stopped being a consumer device quite a while back.
Industry applications are calling for general purpose computing. Yet Apple only delivers products and services aimed at end consumers.
> Apple only delivers products and services aimed at end consumers.
That is categorically untrue
I mean, they're certainly not the price leaders, but you seem to be saying that Macs are downright unsuited to things "businesses" do.
Replace car manufacturer by medical equipment manufacturer, etc.
You are confusing computer parts with devices. Yes, it is true Apple won't sell you a CPU to put it on the motherboard of your choosing, but it is also true they don't operate in this market.
80% of worldwide desktop users are business users.
general purpose computing
Now you've focused on a subset of general purpose computing: embedded computing options.
Well, you are correct. Apple, like many computer manufacturers and chip makers, does not compete in the embedded space. Seems like a curious thing to point out since nobody was talking about it and nobody was under any illusions that competes there but hey, you're right.
Can I play too? Apple does not compete in the toaster oven market. Apple does not compete in the inertial guidance systems market for cruise missiles. Apple does not manufacture sneakers. Look at me, being correct over here.
which sucks balls, if I may say so, as a self-appointed Office expert
While this is undoubtedly true, I still don't comprehend why.
The development workflow on linux is an order of magnitude better than on OSX. Package management is built into the distro, the directory structure is sane, LUKS is (probably) less likely to be backdoored by the NSA than FileVault, you can use keyboard-centric window managers, tiling window managers, etc, far more of the system is available/configurable via scripting or terminal, you don't get grey screens of death regularly, it doesn't send tons of telemetry back to the mothership, and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
OSX is probably only a "good" comparative developer experience if you're forced to use XCode for something. Otherwise, it's a disaster.
If you want to make ios apps you need an Apple computer. Then people get used to it and like most people they will say they prefer whatever they are used to.
Is this a thing that happens to people? I haven't seen one in a decade.
> and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
The last time I did that was maybe 5 years ago.
If one develops apps for Apple ecosystem then it is must have. If not - I'd say it is a darling of some specific categories of users. Not your general developer.
Personally except couple of encounters I do not need to develop for Mac, hence I do not have it and could not care less if the brand disappears tomorrow. You can't really generalize here
I guess your workflow doesn’t include getting Linux to work.
As in, if you run into an issue, you’re somewhat on your own because of your unique Linux setup. Maybe except if you’re on Ubuntu or something.
On Mac, you can more easily Google search for people with similar environment settings who failed building dependencies in the same way
But uhh, I do just use Ubuntu? I haven't even changed the wallpaper. Everything works, nothing has broken in years.
Surely Linux doesn't have to mean some kind of special snowflake Gentoo setup.
> you don't get grey screens of death regularly, it doesn't send tons of telemetry back to the mothership, and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
I’ve been using Macs only for 5 years straight and have no idea what you’re talking about.
Also, shortcuts on Mac just make sense, unlike Windows and Linux.
And friend, this is nonsense right here:
you don't get grey screens of death regularly, [...]
and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every
goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
Brew can be installed with one command and a couple minutes of waiting time.
> you don't get grey screens of death regularly [...] and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
I've been using a Mac for a year now and I have no idea what you're talking about. So far it hasn't crashed once or had any other problems except for a few bugs in preinstalled applications.
I'm not saying it's better than Linux but everything is preconfigured well enough so I don't constantly get annoyed by about everything that comes out of the box. The terminal and browser work pretty much exactly the same on both operating systems. OSX isn't great but at least it's not Windows and the hardware is amazing.
For developers, MacOS brings the UI friendliness of Windows with full capability of a *NIX machine. Basically you get the best of best worlds and with MDM capabilities on top which companies actually like and need very much.
MacBook Air.
I am a developer. And for the last three workplaces we used Windows laptops, even if we targeted Kubernetes\Linux.
Some business people had Macs, though.
I've seen this at companies that started in the 90s or earlier. Newer ones are mostly Macs.
Apple targets the premium consumer, SMB, and enterprise markets.
But it's directly related. If you save money on salaries, you'll save money on IT equipment, office rent, perks, as well.
I've been working in central Europe for a decade and never worked at a compony offering Macs to its workforce. If you move to the super expensive cities, Munich, London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc, where wages are much higher, you'll start seeing more Macbooks being offered by emplyers because when you pay a single worker 100k/year and spend millions on your office building, what's another 3k/employee for a laptop? Peanuts. Similarly it's rare to see jobs paid 2k Euros/month but get a 3k Macbook from your employer.
what's another 3k/employee for a laptop
For mundane business use we're talking about more like $1K (USD) for a Macbook Air versus roughly $700 for a halfway decent Dell.
Or then again... maybe $200 for a Chromebook is a better comparison, for companies that just want to give their employees a way to run web apps and check email.
8GB RAM and 256 SSD? Even my phone has double of that.
Is $200 a good deal for that extra 8GB? Oh hell no. But we're still an extremely long way away from $3K as initially claimed and the idea of "basic" business users needing >8GB is pretty debatable.
This discussion is ridiculous. If somebody is going to claim that Product XYZ is overpriced but obviously had no idea what they're talking about and are objectively off by a factor of greater than 2x -- 130%! -- that's worth pointing out.
By the way. Looking at Dell's mainline 13" Latitude laptops with 16GB, guess what? They start at $1,065 and most of them are more than that.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/sr/laptops/latitude-lapt...
I certainly do know you can certainly get a new Dell with 16GB for less, or even just buy a carload of old laptops from a local e-cycler for like $100 each and slap some DIMMs in them. I've done it. I mean I get it. I'm not saying everybody should roll out a fleet of Macs, I'm pointing out that it's not some totally outlandish thing that costs "$3K" per user.
My first job (small dev agency) after moving to Amsterdam was all Macs despite peanuts salary.
They regularly offered decommissioned Macs on a big discount, so that brings some return.
Anything to back that?
It's really no big secret but of course HNers will love to think that technical merit plays a large role in their selection. The average Apple consumer does not care about the underlying hardware.
Most people who buy Apple for their personal use buy it for the status.
Or someone that saw me getting coffee and were like “woooow, that guys rich! He has an iPhone!”
Who the hell thinks like that?
Then again, there are those people who claim to be repulsed by non-Apple products, which I assume is some kind of social status proxy: https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-...
Compared to 10 or 15 years ago, mac laptop adoption is increasing. It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.
Dell, HP and Lenovo all ship massive amounts more laptops, but make a fraction of the margin that apple does on their hardware. IIRC apple made more profit than all 3 combined. And each one of those has software arms of their companies that help their bottom line.
This is a very US-centric perspective. I honestly don't know a single software engineer who uses a mac as their primary machine (except where a mac is necessary or very useful, such as writing apps for macOS or iOS). The typical machine that people who do software development use privately is rather some high-quality ThinkPad model with either GNU/Linux or Windows on it.
Apple is tolerated because some users demand them, but for the vast majority of mid and lower level employees? You’re getting a dell.
I know, hard to grok for SV crowd who often worship Apple unlike any other company, but I would fight very hard to not have anything like that.
CPU power alone is almost meaningless to me, bottlenecks are always elsewhere and Apple brings absolutely nothing on top of cheaper competition with much better corporate support package in that area.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...
those contracts will come only when the laptops are sold. Companies aren't giving Dell contract to support Mac/HP. So, you should see the profit from both as profit of PC sale. Though, agree Apple has higher profit margin.
unpopular take around here, but here goes: after 15+ years of developing on Windows targeting Linux deployments, ~3 of which were spent on WSL2 as soon as it shipped, switched to macOS. It sucks for backend development; currently on my second year and I'm only getting more confused as to why it's so popular. I guess it's everything except actual development.
I have a theory that there are a lot of users in places like the public sector and behemoth corporations who get issued with the cheapest laptop on the market, by default.
And because Apple's laptops start at $1500 that means for people in those organisations, if you ask for Windows you get a $500 laptop with a 1080p screen and a 1-hour battery life, but if you ask for a Mac you get a $1500 laptop with a retina screen and an 8 hour battery life.
Unfortunately my section is one of those that hasn't been clear to use a Mac which means I could never do something like that.
At last few workplaces we targeted Kubernetes\Linux but we used Windows laptops. I don't know how using Macs would help us do a better job.