Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 942 posts

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#61

Post by morpheuskafka »

> Second, Intel and AMD both benefit from a decades-old narrative that places the CPU at the center of the consumer’s device experience and enjoyment and have designed and priced their products accordingly, even if that argument is somewhat less true today than it was in earlier eras.

I would have argued that memory was far more important than CPU in quickly judging the performance of a machine, once the 7th generation Intels made dual-core obsolete. But the M1 seems to buck this trend a bit as well, given that it only has an 8GB and 16GB variant and its new unified memory model makes traditional estimates of how much memory is needed less important. Some workloads such as an in-memory database won't change, but the memory usage for GUI rendering, graphics, etc. can take advantage of much faster accesses. And, with SSDs which are now considered a must-have for any serious machine, paging to disk is far less expensive than before in any case.

On another note, the M1 iPad Pro is the first time Apple has ever officially confirmed or marketed, let alone offered a choice in, the RAM for an iOS/iPadOS device.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#62

Post by isomorphic »

dehrmann wrote: post #50
kmeisthax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad Pro gets you an M1. This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business right now because they're just trying to get M1 silicon into as many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don't actually have an M2 (or even M1X)…

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

I believe that Apple is effectively doing some binning with the M1: The intro MacBook Air has one less GPU core than the higher-config version or the MacBook Pro.

It would make sense if those were identically-made M1s where one GPU core didn't test well and thus had its fuses blown. Between the CPU and GPU, the GPU cores are almost certainly larger anyway; the GPU cores would therefore have higher probability of defects.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#63

Post by snotrockets »

titzer wrote: post #56
dehrmann wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not go after the datacenter For certain applications, the migration will be challenging. It's also a slowly dying market. Amazon has an ARM instance, already. I'm sure they're already tearing the M1 apart to see what they can use. It's also no Apple's core competency; enterprise sales is a different beast. Edit: I wasn't quite clear: it's dying because businesses are migrating to the cloud, and cloud providers…

In what way is the datacenter market dying? Are Googles and Facebooks and Cloudfares and Microsofts and Amazons suddenly decommissioning huge racks of computers while their cloud businesses take off? What is that cloud made of?

Those all owns their datacenters (and some can afford to design their own CPUs for those). Renting racks isn't dying yet, but it is on a downward trajectory.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#64

Post by morpheuskafka »

DenseComet wrote: post #59
dehrmann wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

It seems like they do binning. For example, the M1 with 7 gpu cores vs 8 gpu cores.

That struck me as an extremely odd metric to differentiate products by, given its low relevance to non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs). Additionally, most people are going to think adding one more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its quite strange to see an odd number of cores.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#65

Post by buildbuildbuild »

Disrupt the hosting market, Apple. We're ready for your EC2.

Achieving a quantum power/performance leap without swinging for server market share is an massive wasted opportunity.

But Apple is Apple. I'll keep dreaming. Oh look, an AWS invoice.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#66

Post by pmontra »

titzer wrote: post #56
dehrmann wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not go after the datacenter For certain applications, the migration will be challenging. It's also a slowly dying market. Amazon has an ARM instance, already. I'm sure they're already tearing the M1 apart to see what they can use. It's also no Apple's core competency; enterprise sales is a different beast. Edit: I wasn't quite clear: it's dying because businesses are migrating to the cloud, and cloud providers…

In what way is the datacenter market dying? Are Googles and Facebooks and Cloudfares and Microsofts and Amazons suddenly decommissioning huge racks of computers while their cloud businesses take off? What is that cloud made of?

Maybe because every tier 1 cloud provider is starting to design its own CPU. If this is the trend there will be little left to sell them.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#67

Post by clairity »

trilinearnz wrote: post #58

Learning a bit about this in my MBA classes. Cost + Margin = Selling Price. Apple have the capacity to be more of a cost leader now, since they are not subject to the same bargaining power forces of CPU suppliers. As a result, they have the potential to push their costs down (if not now, then in the future once production scales) and increase their margins. A good time to invest, perhaps?

> "Cost + Margin = Selling Price."

that's cost-plus pricing, and should be viewed as a relatively naive model that is no longer typically used for pricing. sophisticated pricing decisions are based on price elasticities to find the profit-maximizing price. apple is a notable example of a company that exhibits this type of pricing decision-making.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#68

Post by titzer »

pmontra wrote: post #66
titzer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is the datacenter market dying? Are Googles and Facebooks and Cloudfares and Microsofts and Amazons suddenly decommissioning huge racks of computers while their cloud businesses take off? What is that cloud made of?

Maybe because every tier 1 cloud provider is starting to design its own CPU. If this is the trend there will be little left to sell them.

Can you name a cloud provider that has recently launched their own CPU?

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#69

Post by speedplane »

The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come.

The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and physics.

The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#70

Post by wmf »

titzer wrote: post #46
tyingq wrote: post #30

I remain interested in seeing how much of Apple's lead is the process size, and how much is engineering prowess. That is, would a more generic new ARM Neoverse on 5nm perform at roughly the same clip? I suppose AWS's Graviton 3 would be the first place to see that, or something close to it.

The CPU microarchitecture is truly a quantum leap ahead of x86 processors. The fixed-width nature of arm instructions means there's way more front-end bandwidth for decode, which can then feed a much larger out-of-order engine. Having memory so close is also a huge win. TBH, I don't know what wizardry they have managed to get power consumption so low, but wow. 15W TDP and trouncing desktop processors pulling 12x that…

Wait till you see AMD put 8 cores in 15W.
Post reply on HN