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Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#541

Post by prewett »

AlexandrB wrote: post #327
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't see myself ever leaving Macbooks at this point. It's the whole package: the battery life is insane, I've literally never had a dead laptop when I needed it no matter what I'm doing or where I'm at; it runs circles around every other computer I own, save for my beastly gaming PC; the stability and consistency of MacOS, and the underlying unix arch for a lot of tooling, all the way down to the build qu…

> Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. Modern MacBook pros have 2/3 (card reader and HDMI port), and they brought back my beloved MagSafe charging.

I was all for MagSafe, but after buying an M2, I realized that the USB-C charging was better. I found the cables came out almost as well as the MagSafe if I stepped on them, but you can plug them in to either side. I seem to always be on the wrong side, so the MagSafe cable has to snake around to the other side.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#542

Post by kimixa »

aidenn0 wrote: post #373
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember Intel tried to get into the low power / smartphone / table space at the time with their Atom line [0] in the late 00's, but due to core architecture issues they could never reach the efficiency of ARM based chips. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

I don't think it was core architecture issues. My impression is that over the years their efforts to get into low-power devices never got the full force of their engineering prowess.

I worked for an IP vendor that was in some Atom SoCs (over a decade ago now though) - from what I remember the perf/w was actually pretty competitive for contemporary ARM devices when we supplied the IP, but then took so long to actually end up in products it ended up behind others - other customers were already on the next generation by that point, even if the initial projects started at about the same time. And the atoms were buggy as hell, never had more problems with dumb cache/fabric/memory controller issues.

To me the Atom team always felt like a dead-end inside intel - everyone seemed to be trying to get in to a different higher-status team ASAP - our engineering contacts often changed monthly, if we even knew who our "contacts" were meant to be at any time. I think any product developed like that would struggle.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#543

Post by prewett »

chvid wrote: post #182
chvid wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs today are not designed to be easily repairably but instead to be lighter and otherwise better integrated - I believe that is consequence of consumer preferences and not shady business practices. As for the services - it is a bit off topic as I believe Apple makes a profit on their macs alone ignoring their services business. But in general I have less of a problem with a subscription / fee-driven services busine…

I am pretty sure it is a consequence of consumer preference. I can see it from my own behaviour - I am a power user of all things computing and it has been decades since I upgraded a harddisk.

Regarding storage, part of the advantage of their soldered storage is higher access speeds. Combined with the fact that, as you note, people rarely need to upgrade their storage, might as well use the faster storage. This is probably particularly a benefit for the 8 GB machines, which I assume use swap regularly.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#544

Post by ksec »

aurareturn wrote: post #419
jandrewrogers wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. This is not true. For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. Apple Silicon optimizes for idle states and x86 optimizes for throughput, which assumes very different use cases. One of the challenges for using x86 in laptops is that the microarchitectures are…

For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. In the server space, x86 has the highest performance right now. Yes. That's true. That's also because Apple does not make server parts. Look for Qualcomm to try to win the server performance crown in the next few years with their Oryon cores. That said, Graviton is at least 50% of all AWS deployments now. So it's winning vs x8…

I dont think the point Amazon uses ARM was about performance but purely cost optimisation. At one point, nearly 40% of Intel's server revenue was coming from Amazon. They just figure it out at their scale it would be cheaper to do it themselves.

But I am purely guessing ARM has risen their price per core so it makes less financial sense to do a yearly update on CPU. They are also going into Server CPU business meaning they now have some incentives to keep it all to themselves. Which makes the Nvidia moves really smart as they decided to go for the ISA licences and do it by themselves.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#545

Post by scarface_74 »

fluoridation wrote: post #528
JustExAWS wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing 32 bit hardware support frees up die space and it frees up storage space and RAM since 32 bit and 64 bit libraries had to be on disk and in memory.

They don't use memory if they're not used, but you do save storage. Neither one has any effect on power efficiency, though. None of these savings require the hardware to lose useful features. Microsoft could at any time decide to drop WOW64. Saving die space also has no effect on power efficiency, beyond reducing the total transistor count. I'd be very surprised the x86-specific decoding logic makes up a significant…

If any 32 bit app is launched the shared libraries will be loaded. It’s not a big deal on Macs. But it is a big deal on iPhones.

I’m not sure how it works in the modern era. But back in the day there was also a performance cost when you had a mix of 16 bit code and 32 bit code in memory. I don’t know how it would be in 32 bit vs 64 bit.

And being able to get away with less RAM also improves battery life because keeping RAM refreshed uses energy - again a bigger factor on mobile.

The smaller the die, the less energy it uses. You can also use that space for efficiency cores.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#546

Post by dr_kiszonka »

shermantanktop wrote: post #404
alt227 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays I need to point this out all the time these days it seems, but this opinion is only valid if all you use is a laptop and all you care about is single core perfomance. The computing world is far bigger than just laptops. Big music/3d design/video editing production suites etc still benefit much more from having workstation PCs with higher PCI bandwidth, more lanes for multip…

Doesn’t Apple have significant market share for pro music and video editing? For studio movies, render farms are usually Linux but I think many workstation tasks are done on Apple machines. Or is that no longer true?

> Doesn't Apple have significant market share for pro music and video editing?

I thought so too, but I see a lot more people using non-Apple systems for music production than I expected. I don't know whether I was too influenced by Apple's marketing (computers for creators) or something has changed.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#547

Post by umbra07 »

john01dav wrote: post #141
qcnguy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system deve…

Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.

I assumed the same thing, until I tested my hypothesis. KDE Plasma 6 uses less power on idle than just `Hyprland` (tiling WM) without anything like a notification daemon, idler, status bar, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#548

Post by fluoridation »

scarface_74 wrote: post #545
fluoridation wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't use memory if they're not used, but you do save storage. Neither one has any effect on power efficiency, though. None of these savings require the hardware to lose useful features. Microsoft could at any time decide to drop WOW64. Saving die space also has no effect on power efficiency, beyond reducing the total transistor count. I'd be very surprised the x86-specific decoding logic makes up a significant…

If any 32 bit app is launched the shared libraries will be loaded. It’s not a big deal on Macs. But it is a big deal on iPhones. I’m not sure how it works in the modern era. But back in the day there was also a performance cost when you had a mix of 16 bit code and 32 bit code in memory. I don’t know how it would be in 32 bit vs 64 bit. And being able to get away with less RAM also improves battery life because keepi…

> If any 32 bit app is launched the shared libraries will be loaded.

Like I said, if the 32-bit stuff is getting used, that's an argument not remove the support.

> And being able to get away with less RAM also improves battery life because keeping RAM refreshed uses energy - again a bigger factor on mobile.

Memory allocation exists purely at the software level. The hardware doesn't understand whether a particular region has been allocated or not; the only difference between an allocated page and an unallocated one is that the former appears in the OS's VMM data structure as allocated (i.e. it's just more bits in memory). The power consumption of RAM scales with the total cells installed, not with how much the OS has decided is "in use".

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#549

Post by zikduruqe »

elzbardico wrote: post #436
zikduruqe wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. Same here. My personal MBA M1/8GB just chugs along with whatever I need it to do. I have a T480 32GB linux machine at home that I love, but my M1 just does what I need it to do. And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new mac…

Man, it's absolutely trivial to migrate your configurations to a new machine.

Oh I know. Just lazy and have other things to do than to migrate a machine.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#550

Post by linotype »

simonh wrote: post #457
twilo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple purchased Palo Alto Semi which made the biggest difference. One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion… not that they make all that many of those anyway.

> One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion… NeXT? But yes, I completely get what you’re saying, I just couldn’t resist. It was an amazingly long sighted strategic move, for sure.

I almost feel like NeXT was a reverse acquisition, like Apple became NeXT with an Apple logo.
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