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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

#121

Post by rvz »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever. For heavy-duty workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.

> I think Apple will keep selling x86 Macs forever.

Apple immediately discontinued all Mac minis, almost all the Macbook Air and Pro line ups and the iMac's running Intel. The last form factor to transition is the Mac Pro.

> For heavy-duty workstation workloads, M1 just doesn't cut it.

Perhaps you are right on this one for now. The M1 doesn't cut it for 'Apple's standards' for now but when the time comes for the Mac Pro to transition, it won't use an M1 chip, but probably an M2 / M3 chip.

Apple Silicon is the start of it all and M1 is only the beginning and is certainly not the last. So its worth waiting to see how the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs improve over M1.

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

#122

Post by ben-schaaf »

akmarinov wrote: post #79
wmf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The 4800U came out in March 2020 with 8 cores, 16 threads.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

nightowl_games wrote: post #72
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by Mauricebranagh »

outside1234 wrote: post #13

x86 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…

"creative class" :-)

The m1 is cool but for heavy duty work its still got a number of issues memory multiple displays.

Rember there no such thing as to much Memory, IPC, Graphics performance - thee is sadly often a luck of budget.

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

#125

Post by CrLf »

outside1234 wrote: post #13

x86 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…

> People won't want to develop on x86 and deploy to ARM.

It's still too early to say if people want to develop on ARM to deploy on x86.

The 90's with all their "better than x86" chips couldn't beat the fact that people want to develop on the same architecture to which they deploy. Back then that meant displacing all these other chips from the server side because there was no option but x86 for us mortals to have as PCs.

This dearth of alternatives on the server side took out their respective offerings on the high-end/niche workstation market as well. The PowerPC was one of these casualties, lets not forget about that.

Things are even worse today. The x86 is dominant in both ends and has no real alternatives: ARM server chips are weak and the inertia of building on x86 and deploying on x86 is too strong, and ARM desktop chips are also weak, except for a single luxury brand (Apple, which incidentally cares very little for any developers besides the ones that develop for their own ecosystem).

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

#126

Post by Mauricebranagh »

cptskippy wrote: post #40
monkmartinez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creative class is a lot more than programmers. Look at boutique system integrators like Puget Systems... do you see Apple/ARM Hardware? Heck no you don't! These guys sell hardware to a LOT of the companies that comprise the credits in movie production, game production, laboratories, university science departments, ML researchers, big energy, and soooooo much more. These guys are not rewriting their software stack for…

> Creative class is a lot more than programmers. I'm not sure anyone thinks programmers when they think creative class. That's like saying the professional athlete class is a lot more than just Pokemon Go players...

Yes that's very much the more artistic side aka graphic designers, it smacks of doing an easy "olgy" degree or even a "PPE".

The sort who work in traditional professional jobs and who shudder at the thought of the "boffins" and greasy "engineers" .

Recall yesterdays conversation about European pay rates for developers.

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

#127

Post by solatic »

monkmartinez wrote: post #15

You 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?

Apple is iPhone-izing (for lack of a better word) the rest of their product lines. If for the last ten years, the market hasn't really cared about the speed of the phone's processor within the same generation, but rather about physical differentiators (e.g. screen size, number of camera lenses, adding facial recognition), and the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications, then why, pray tell, should laptops and desktops be so different?

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

#128

Post by Retric »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #109
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.

Mores Law as originally stated said transistor density doubled every 18-24 months. Using larger CPU’s for example let’s you have more transistors, but has nothing to do with Mores Law.

Clearly density has kept increasing, but the law refers to a rate of increase that we haven’t been able to meet. The original 386 released in 1985 had 275,000 transistors, using the slowest interpretation we would need to be at (2^18) = ~72+ Billion transistors today or (2^17) = 36+ Billion in 2019 which is close, but the chip would also need to be the size of a 386 which they aren’t.

AMD Epyc Rome is 1008 mm^2 vs a 386 at 104 mm^2. The M1 is 119 mm^2, but it’s only 16 Billion Transistors. As such it’s safe to say Mores Law is dead.

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

#130

Post by elcomet »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #101

> 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…

But the point is that people do not care about the cpu in their mac. They care about screen size, price and other stuff.

Apple is still selling intel versions, because either they are cheaper (older generations), or because the newest version does not have the M1 yet (like the 16" mac book pro).

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