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

571–580 of 942 posts

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

#571

Post by zucker42 »

zerkten wrote: post #549
oblio wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This makes M1 type chips really interesting for any manufacturer who want to make devices that span a huge scale of performance requirements, from slow kiosks performance range to the decent laptop range. This is purely theoretical. Apple will > sell its chips to other companies. So if you were expecting Apple Silicon on its own to start a revolution, that's never going to happen.

The poster stated "M1 type chips". That is not setting an expectation that Apple will sell their chips. Microsoft already have a Surface product with an ARM chip that didn't get updated in this round AFAIK. It already has solid ARM performance, but it's not as good as M1. It was let down with how well x86 emulation worked, but there seem to have been improvements including x64 support. If they focused on improvements…

No other company has the volume to economically build on TSMC's leading node.

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

#573

Post by ironman1478 »

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

Looking at core count and ram size isn't how to measure performance. You test and measure. But, the cores are just better on the m1 as has been shown through tons of benchmarking. Also, if the interconnects and busses are smarter (better cache coherency impl) then you'll be better in multithreading cases. Also because it's an SoC it has a way better implementation for the ddr interface (that's what they claim at least). I wouldn't be surprised if the latency hit for accessing RAM was way better than on x86 where you have to cross a long bus. For the workloads that people run on iMacs, light photoshop, some video editing, etc. We already know the new macbooks are amazing at it and this machine will have the same hardware, but with a dope screen (and cool colors. I want yellow >.>).

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

#574

Post by fireattack »

enragedcacti wrote: post #554
nnadams wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that CISC processors (like x86) have more capabilities, i.e. more instructions. You as the programmer get to take advantage of the "extra" very specific instructions, so overall you write less instructions. Less instructions sounds great, but with CISC you do not know how long those instructions will take to execute. RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining).…

> RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining). This isn't really the case with modern ARM. Fundamentally modern ARM and x86 CPUs are designed very similarly once you get past the instruction decoder. Both 'compile' instructions down to micro-ops that are then executed rather than executing the instruction set directly so the distinctions between the instruction sets themselv…

So ARM nowadays is just straightly better than x86?

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

#575

Post by yalogin »

The difference is the advantage Apple has with their HW+SW vertical integration. Its as simple as that.

Intel sells CPUs, so it creates the ranges of CPUs to make money. They advertise clock speed and put the higher ones on a pedestal, that is how they can charge more money. The OEMs just used that playbook and developed their own marketing stories on top of Intel's marketing. Either no one tried to differentiate or they just didn't have the power to fight it.

Apple has a lot going for it in that scenario. They never had proliferation of models and always kept the number of options to a minimum. They also don't deal with volume, so they didn't have to do 20 variations of mac mini or the iMac. They kind of did their own thing even with the intel macs. Now with their own processor they were in a position to double down and make the whole product line even more efficient.

Like the article said, they couldn't have done if the M1 is not clearly better than the competition.

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

#576

Post by nemacol »

kevstev wrote: post #466
hutrdvnj wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.

I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I w…

I built my own gaming pc back in Nov 2010 with an i7-970 24g ram. While I have upgraded the GPU twice and upgraded to larger SSD's as prices have come down, I am still using the same machine for gaming. Not that what I am doing is very intense or hardcore intense graphics. I can comfortably play all the Blizzard titles, modern FPS like whatever COD is newest, etc. Maybe not on max settings anymore.

Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.

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

#577

Post by onli »

klelatti wrote: post #565
onli wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I'm surprised by that statement. The Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs were a lot faster than the Intel competition and I am pretty sure Apple does not have them in any laptop. And the very fast SSD is a new addition, isn't it? Did I miss something?

You implied that they only saw a difference because Apple wasn't using "modern processors". You can't exclude everything but Zen 3 from any sensible definition of "modern processor".

The parent comment talked about the implications he thought this had about the architecture. Like half of the thread seemingly ignoring that a) there are x86 processors that are more than competitive and b) that the big leap he described is more likely coming from the faster storage and from comparing it with the very much older and weaker processors most people that bought an upgrade now had in their old laptops.

Heck, he might have used an old dual core with an HDD from all we know. Of course the new M1 models would make a big difference then. So would all other modern laptops.

But in that context of x86 and ARM Zen3 is absolutely the only sound comparison.

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

#578

Post by pdimitar »

tazjin wrote: post #375
maigret wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D

You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.

It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.

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

#580

Post by _ea1k »

klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

That's a good point. I think this will finally be the thing that makes Intel move away from that marketing approach too. Its outlived its usefulness.
Post reply on HN