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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#21

Post by modeless »

jeffbee wrote: post #12
voodootrucker wrote: post #5

Thank goodness. They haven't innovated in decades and x86 is a mess. I can't wait until RISC-V does the same to ARM. It's super frustrating to see America, which used to be innovative become the complacent corrupt incumbent.

Super, super weird take considering that Intel's main competitors are all within walking distance of their Santa Clara HQ.

Their only competitors that really matter are in Taiwan and South Korea. Fabs are harder than chip design.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#22

Post by grecy »

skohan wrote: post #9
jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

It would seem really out of character for Apple to make a move in the server space.

We know they have tens of thousands of linux boxes running iCloud and the App Store and whatever else... if they can use their own ARM servers and reduce electricity use by 50%[1], you've gotta think they're looking serious at that, purely for themselves.

Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them.

[1] https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#23

Post by reaperducer »

skohan wrote: post #9
jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

It would seem really out of character for Apple to make a move in the server space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

Apple’s Xserves were awesome. Not cheap. Only marginally competitive. But a joy to work with because of all the nice little details like a FireWire port on the front so you could boot it off of an iPod.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#25

Post by kitotik »

jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

Even if they developed the server tech, it seems they’d be more likely to just use it internally to power their services as opposed to trying to reach a whole new market that historically they aren’t very good at working in.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#26

Post by jeffbee »

dboreham wrote: post #2

What's the real reason Apple can design a higher performance device? Better fab process? ARM ISA is fundamentally faster? Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.

I'm still waiting for my M1 to show up but from studying the details that other people have commented on, it's clear that Apple is slathering on the microarchitectural resources that both Intel and AMD are stingy with. Their core has a gigantic L1 instruction cache, rather a lot of L1 TLB entries (4x more than Intel), large(r) pages by default, and many other aspects. L1 TLB entries in particular are a well-known problem for x86 performance so it's a real mystery why Intel doesn't simply add more of them. x86 is probably married to 4K pages forever, because of god-damned DOS, whereas Apple can make the default page size be whatever they want it to be. People with high requirements can jump through a million hoops to get their x86 program loaded into hugepages, but on Apple's platform you're getting it for free.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#27

Post by usrusr »

jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

That's one of the many bad effects of vertical integration success: if all the most profitable use cases are harvested by a vertically integrated dominator, very little development budget will be available for less closed hardware that can be integrated in niche use case solutions.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#28

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

voodootrucker wrote: post #5

Thank goodness. They haven't innovated in decades and x86 is a mess. I can't wait until RISC-V does the same to ARM. It's super frustrating to see America, which used to be innovative become the complacent corrupt incumbent.

I guess you didn't read about their Xeon Phi bi-directional ring architecture that achieved dozens of terrabytes/sec of bandwidth, their 512b vector-processor ISA, or, heck, just for giggles, the industry's first FinFet (and high-k dielectric) on p1270, p1272, and p1274. But, please, do go on.
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