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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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

#101

Post by tonyedgecombe »

>Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation.

This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the transition but I have no doubt there will be M2, M3, etc options for most of the range.

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

#102

Post by dannyw »

speedplane wrote: post #76
nightowl_games wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

If you don't just look at the failing Intel, AMD has been doing 15-20% improvements year on year.

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

#103

Post by throwaway2048 »

TMWNN wrote: post #82
speedplane wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The 2012 MacBook Pro 15-inch I'm typing this on is about 700 on Geekbench single-core, while the 2019 16-inch is about 950. 35% "improvement" in seven years! M1 13-inch is 1700 on single-core, which is why I hope to upgrade once the 16-inch Apple Silicon version comes out. >The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are imp…

Apple's M1 is a good processor, but the only reason it "smashed past" previous macbook single core results is apple was using older Intel lower powered processors.

It is not twice as fast as even mobile x86 stuff, as much as people seem to want to think otherwise.

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

#104

Post by daniellarusso »

ulzeraj wrote: post #89
jareklupinski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are not using an apple phone, your smartphone likely uses an ARM-licensed chip, and chromebooks/windows RT devices ran ARM cores the only thing holding back wider adoption is legacy x86 software

Gaming is still x86 territory and that includes 2 of the 3 main competing gaming consoles isn't? Hard to think of a PS5 as legacy stuff.

Is not the majority of gaming occurring on mobile ARM devices, not dedicated consoles or rigs?

“Mobile gaming has fast become the largest gaming market in the world with industry revenue expected to hit $76.7 Billion by the end of 2020 and 2.2 million mobile gamers worldwide. It’s become so popular that 72.3% of mobile users in the US are also mobile phone gamers. To put this into perspective when compared with the wider video game market, by 2022 the global game market is set to reach $196 Billion, and the mobile gaming market will account for $95.4 Billion of that alone.”

https://www.wepc.com/statistics/mobile-gaming/

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

#105

Post by rubatuga »

londons_explore wrote: post #97
morpheuskafka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact. When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

GPU schedulers are much, much more advanced than you give credit.

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

#106

Post by slezyr »

selcuka wrote: post #35
smiley1437 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of Arm designs OTHER than the M1 which are suitable for consumers? Yes, the M1 is a remarkable product and it will certainly make inroads against x86 on the desktop but it is from a single company. Will Apple M1 (2, 3 etc) replace all x86 devices in a decade? That’s hard to swallow. Now, if we see another Arm product released that ALSO kicks x86 butt, from another player, then maybe I’d believe a c…

Qualcomm is also entering the laptop segment with its 8cx platform [1]. While not a serious contender to M1 yet, it is comparable to an Intel i5 [2]. Samsung is also planning to release an Exynos laptop [3]. [1] https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon-8cx-gen-2-5g-co... [2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/snapdragon-8cx-vs-co... [3] https://www.engadget.com/samsung-exynos-amd-2200-windows-10-...

So what? Microsoft SQ1 has been there for a while [1]. Without a software support they are just a fancy stones that can't run desktop software.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_X

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #97
morpheuskafka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact. When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by Toutouxc »

londons_explore wrote: post #97
morpheuskafka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact. When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

Nope, AFAIK the actual performance impact is < 10 % for most workloads.

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

#109

Post by tobyhinloopen »

speedplane wrote: post #69

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 com…

Death of moore’s law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7.

There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right?

Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of ARM CPUs wasn’t the wisest choice.

Or maybe it is, idk.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Toutouxc wrote: post #108
londons_explore wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact. When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

Nope, AFAIK the actual performance impact is < 10 % for most workloads.

[deleted]
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