Can't they just stick a few dozen M1s in a box and call it a Mac Pro to scale up that way?
No, the M1 lacks any (usable) way to connect to other M1s.
Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
71–80 of 942 posts
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#72The 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 com…
On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Graviton's been out for a while.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own...
I haven't seen anything on this from GCP, but Google builds so much in-house, I'm sure they've at least considered it.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#74x86 is dead - first in consumer, then in cloud. It is hard to see to me how this ends any other way. The creative class (us) will quickly have largely all ARM computers within 4 years. Its not hard to see from there how software will be even more optimized for ARM variants than x86 and that the scale of both mobile and consumer computing will push x86 out of the datacenter slowly as old software that relies on x86 is…
You overestimate the size and relevance of your peer group and you underestimate the inertia that will impede this migration.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#75Disrupt 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.
Completely agree. I can't see them reviving the Xserve brand with their own silicon, but I could see them introducing cloud hosting services. Ideally with differentiation in something like environmental credentials (reduced, renewable power, etc.) to try and gain market share whilst maintaining margin.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#76The 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 com…
On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.
> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.
The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months.
Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are implemented out of desperation. They aren't enough to keep Moore's law alive (it's already dead), and their very existence is evidence of the death of Moore's law.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.
> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue. The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months. Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in tw…
Which is why Apple is moving revenue streams also to services.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#78You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back eithe…
> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?
I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen, lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this is the biggest shift in computers in quite a while and makes it much more akin to purchasing a phone or tablet than specing out a computer.
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s the thing, while we’re waiting on AMD, Apple is already half way through an M2/3
Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model
#80I 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.
Apple can afford to exclude some hardware that other manufacturers need to support legacy OSs and apps, leaving more space on their SoC for more CPUs and specialized hardware.
Want to ditch OpenGL? No problem for Apple.