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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#121

Post by unix_fan »

pella wrote: post #21

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023" https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar... "Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it pub…

Their problem has never been technology or talent, just the fact they care a lot more about the margins they make on those chips.

The newest snapdragons have had gimped cashes for years now.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#122

Post by chrsig »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

I was under the impression that having it all as an SoC was a significant benefit by cutting down latency between components.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#123

Post by boringg »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

You think Intel can right their ship? That's a fairly large order given some of the internal problems that have spilled into the public limelight. Takes a lot of energy to change that momentum.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#124

Post by Joeri »

naillo wrote: post #79

Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it, I'm not even sure what it means that these are supposedly better. What are people even using the extra performance for? Keeping thousands of tabs open simultaneously?

Audio and video production, and web and app development.

I don’t think many people are switching from linux and windows (although I switched from a linux thinkpad to m1 air), but those upgrading from intel macs to m1 macs are seeing huge jumps.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#125

Post by [deleted] »

daneel_w wrote: post #89
uniqueuid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are absolutely out, because the M2 MBP is publicly available. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15482594

My point is that benchmarking as a whole need a bit of time to mature with the help of real and diverse usage. Not just two weeks of GeekBench.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#126

Post by paulmd »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

AMD is going to be on the same node as Apple as of this year - Apple is not moving onto N3, they're staying on N5P, and Zen4 will also be N5P, so we can make iso-node comparisons.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#127

Post by amelius »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

I agree. And part of the magic comes from ASML.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#129

Post by rbanffy »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

> Compare that to Microsoft's largely unsuccessful attempt of selling ARM-based Windows machines.

Microsoft failed at that multiple times in the past. Windows NT was initially available for multiple architectures, but that mostly ended with Windows 2000. Itanium got support until Server 2008 but non-server software support was very limited. Some Windows NT releases had a "workstation" label but application support, even from Microsoft, was between halfhearted and non-existent and the availability of some programs (such as Office) was almost a secret (I remember it existing for PPC, but never heard anything for MIPS or Alpha).

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#130

Post by amelius »

maccard wrote: post #88
naillo wrote: post #79

Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it, I'm not even sure what it means that these are supposedly better. What are people even using the extra performance for? Keeping thousands of tabs open simultaneously?

We use it for compilation. The M1 Mac Pro we use is about 50% quicker than the i7 we had before it for an end to end compile of our project.

Compilation is just fast for me. A 100% increase in speed won't make a real difference. (Except when I compile an entire project from scratch, which I almost never do.)
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