It’s a chicken and egg problem.

Nobody supports the new ISA because there is no SoC and nobody makes the new SoC because there is no support. But in this case, that’s not really true because Linux support was ready.

More than forcing volumes, Apple proved it was worth it because the efficiency gains were huge. If AMD had release a SoC with numbers close to the M1 before Apple targeting the server market, they had a very good shot at it being a success and leveraging that to success in the laptop markets where Microsoft would have loved to have a partner ready to fight Apple and had to wait for Qualcomm for ages.

Anyway, I stand that looking at how the stock moved tells us nothing about if the cancellation was a good or a bad decision.

>More than forcing volumes, Apple proved it was worth it because the efficiency gains were huge. If AMD had release a SoC with numbers close to the M1 before Apple targeting the server market, they had a very good shot at it being a success and leveraging that to success in the laptop markets where Microsoft would have loved to have a partner ready to fight Apple and had to wait for Qualcomm for ages.

Apple proved that creating your own high end consumer SoC was doable and viable idea due to TSMC and could result in better chips due to designing them around your needs.

And which ISA they could use? X86? Hard to say, probably no. So they had RISCV and ARM

Also about Windows...

If PantherLake on 18A actually performs as good as expected, then why would anyone move to ARM on Windows when viable energy eff. cpus like lnl and ptl are available

> If PantherLake on 18A actually performs as good as expected, then why would anyone move to ARM on Windows when viable energy eff. cpus like lnl and ptl are available

Well yes, exactly, that’s the issue with arriving 10 years later instead of being first mover. The rest of the world doesn’t remain unmoving.

RISC-V wasn’t a thing when Apple started designing their own chips. It was always going to be ARM. Look who founded ARM after all…

> Apple proved it was worth it because the efficiency gains were huge

Thing is, those efficiency gains are both in hardware and software.

Will a Linux laptop running the new AMD SoC use 5 W while browsing HN like this M3 pro does?

Steam Deck does about 8w.

Isn't the Deck x86 though?

5W while browsing is already less efficiënt than my old laptop with a Zen 2 CPU (and most of the power is consumed by the display). Newer CPU's or SoC's should do quite a bit better than that.

During "light" browsing pretty much any laptop's power use is massively dominated by things that aren't the CPU, assuming there's been any attempt at enabling that use case (which doesn't always seem to be the case for many SKUs, certainly on the cheaper end).

A huge amount of Apple's competitive edge is in the "other 90%", but they don't seem to get the headlines.

It's good that x86 is coming close.

Does Windows have working sleep now? I hear it's dangerous to throw a wintelmd laptop in a backpack without shutting it down.

did your laptop display have the same brightness and pixel density

> Their customers would run to Intel.

Data centers and hosting companies are probably the biggest customers buying AMD CPUs, no?

If those companies could lower their energy and cooling costs that could be a strong incentive to offer ARM servers.

What kind of difference we are talking about?

1% 3% 6% 10% 30%?

No idea but it should be significant. AFAIK cooling and energy are the biggest data center costs.

AMD servers are already below 3 watts per core. ARM doesn't actually confer any power advantage. Most ARM processors use less power because they're slower. Apple has a slight advantage because they use TSMC's latest process nodes, but it isn't very large and it isn't because of the ISA.

I was looking at EPYC chips from 2-3 years ago and those do consume more like 8-10W per core but you're right. The latest EPYC 9005 are actually quite efficient.

EPYC 7702(P) is only slightly more than 3W/core (it's 3.125) and that's from 2019.

But the newer ones use even less and they're faster.

Except they literally did exactly that with x86-64 so I’m confused by your comment.

Isn't x86 64 backward compatible, so that's fine?