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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?

#611

Post by ljosifov »

giantrobot wrote: post #538
ljosifov wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they ARM investors at the time they needed CPU for Newton? Was that before or after e.g. iPaq PDA-s? And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way? I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sle…

IIRC Apple originally invested in ARM during the development of the Newton. The original Newtons used ARM 610 CPUs. I don't know exactly when they sold their ARM stake but they kept their architecture license. The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.

On selling of the ARM stake - asked ChatGPT:

Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).

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

#612

Post by badc0ffee »

aurareturn wrote: post #71
PaulKeeble wrote: post #60

I tend to think its putting the memory on the package. Putting the memory on the package has given the M1 over 400GB/s which is a good 4x that on a usual dual channel x64 CPU and the latency is half that of going out to a DRAM slot. That is drastic and I remember when the northbrige was first folded into the CPU by AMD with the Athlon and it had a similarly big improvements in performance. It also reduces power consu…

Memory bandwidth is not what makes the CPU fast and efficiency. The CPU doesn’t even have access to the full Apple Silicon bandwidth. On package memory increases efficiency, not speed. However, most of the speed and efficiency advantages are in the design.

> On package memory increases efficiency, not speed.

All the same, the M series chips still have significantly better memory bandwidth. Where is that coming from?

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

#613

Post by badc0ffee »

cyberpunk wrote: post #535
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, it's kind of a silly name, sure, but it's one of the few distros backed by an actual vendor (System76) who isn't just trying to sucker you into buying something. As a result it has a nice level of polish and function. I like macOS fine, I have been using Macs since 1984 (though things like SIP grate).

Why does SIP grate? For my work machines I really want features like SIP to prevent fuckups and malware (especially considering how much code a random rust or node application pulls in). For tinkering machines and servers and stuff of course that’s a different story..

You can always disable it on your tinkering machines.

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

#614

Post by simne »

Read history of Bugatti Veyron for answer. In short, VW have made extraordinary machine, but so expensive, they fear to sell it for real cost.

So literally, VW partially donate Veyron to their clients, selling it under-priced.

I think, same happen with Apple M architecture - it is extraordinary and different from anything on market, but Apple sell it under-priced, so to limit losses, they decided to limit it to very few models.

How such things happen? Well, hardware is hard - usually so sophisticated SoC need 7..8 iterations to achieve production, and this could cost million or even more. And mostly happen problem, just low output, mean, for example you make 100 cores on one die, but only 5..6 working.

How AMD/Intel deal with such things? It's hard, mean complex.

First, they just have huge experience and very wide portfolio of different SoCs, but used some tricks, so could for example downgrade Xeon to Core-i7 with jumpers.

Second, for large patterns like RAM/Cache, could disable broken parts of die with jumpers, or even could disable cores. That's why there are so many DRAM PCB designs - they usually made as 6 RAM fields with one controller, and with jumpers could sell chips with literally 1, 2, 3,4,5 or 6 fields enabled; some AMD SoCs exists with odd number of cores because of this (for example 3-cores), and other tricks, which could made some averaged profits from wide line of SoCs.

Third, for some designs, Intel/AMD use already proven technologies, like Atom was basically just first Pentium on new semiconductor process, or for long time, I7 series was basically Xeons previous generations.

Unfortunately for Apple, they have not such luxury to make wide product line, and don't have significant place to dump low grade chips, so they limited M line to one which as I think just appear to have largest output.

From my experience, I could speculate, Apple tops consider to make wider product line, when achieve better output, but for now without much success.

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

#615

Post by munchlax »

snovymgodym wrote: post #558
munchlax wrote: post #212

I can build myself a new amd64 box for just under €200. Under €100 with used parts. Some older Dell and Lenovo laptops even work with coreboot. An Airbook sets me back €1000, enough to buy a used car, and AFAICT is much more difficult to get fully working Linux on than my €200 amd64 build. Why hasn't apple caught up?

> I can build myself a new amd64 box for just under €200. pcpartpicker link?

Oof. From what I've glanced, a CPU there costs nearly $70 and less performant models are actually costlier. Not sure what to do about that, so here's some general advice:

An AMD APU paired with a microATX motherboard is the cheapest way to get reasonable computing performance. The best thing I ever did was to buy only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. For €90, I was blown away.

See if you can salvage any parts, there's no need for a case, SSD, and PSU every time. AMD has a nice upgrade path for this. A motherboard with AM2+ socket will fit an AM3 CPU. You can then later upgrade to an AM3+ motherboard and wait for a reasonably priced AM4 CPU, and so on. My gripe with this, however, is that it used to be possible to have different (scavenged) DDR RAM parts as long as it was the same number of pins. A quick glance at the notches would tell you if it fits and that was that. Nowadays you often have to have either just one bank or a few of exactly the same part.

Sometimes it's possible to get lucky, like buying a cheaper model CPU and succesfully unlocking an extra core. And a boxed CPU may be more expensive than a loose tray, but comes with an adequate cooler that'll fit just fine.

Neither of us have any contact details in the profile, although I'm not sure if I can be of much help to you anyway.

One more tip. If you see your box increasingly use swap during normal workload, adding RAM can significantly improve performance. Even if it's lower spec RAM.

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

#617

Post by mahmoud-khaled »

I think u just didn't pick right chip Intels new coure ultra 2 series they redone everything from scratch to focus on efficiency and also the x elite laptops or tablets u could chose lie surface pro with arm chip find how well it does combining what mac and i pad can't do you could get similar battery performance experience, but one question did u consider remote developing on tablet and have dedicated server in home with all specs u could build wanted to know ur opinion how much relevant u think it would because it makes sense if laptop is heavy battery hungry but what about efficient laptops which do u think is more pleasing Remote ssh very efficient tablets good screen Or efficient m1 pro laptop

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

#618

Post by redwall_hp »

creshal wrote: post #172
pzo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.

Intel stipulated the same under the name HUGI (Hurry Up and Go Idle) about 15 years ago when ultrabooks were the new hot thing. But when Apple says it, software devs actually listen.

Apple was talking about batching tasks for battery life back when they shipped Grand Central Dispatch back in 2009. It was a major part of that year's WWDC keynote. Race to Zero was also a major part of how they designed networking for iOS.

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

#619

Post by icedchai »

ch_sm wrote: post #604
danielbarla wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a 2019 MacBook Pro for quite a while, and it was my first (and so far only) dip into Apple-land. While I appreciated the really solid build quality, great screen, etc, the battery life was pretty abysmal. We're talking easily under 2 hours if I had to be in a video call, which basically meant taking a charger to any meeting of decent length. The 2nd biggest disappointment was when I ran my team's compute-heavy…

Yeah I had that same i9 16 inch from 2019. Easily the worst Mac I‘ve ever owned (in 20 years!). Now I‘m on an M2 16 inch an it is night and day.

Heh. I had one of those MacBook Pro i9's as a work machine. It was absolutely awful. I remember running an npm / node build and the thing would sound like an airplane was taking off.

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

#620

Post by redwall_hp »

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?

The MacBook Pro and Mac Studio are incredibly popular for people who do music stuff. A DAW running native Apple Silicon VSTs runs circles around PC alternatives, allowing you to stack tons of synths/samplers and effects without worrying about the system being able to keep up. And usually it'll do it without fan noise that gets picked up by microphones.

Another bonus is that the MBP can drive high impedance headphones on the go, without needing an external audio interface.

It also helps that Logic was popular for awhile, and Pro Tools (the OG DAW) was a Mac thing, though Ableton overall is more popular these days.

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