551–560 of 661 posts
I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.
Even their Mac mini doesn't offer a 32 gigs of ram. One of the reasons I had to go with Intel version instead of M1 because at least I could upgrade to 32gb ram myself (plus was cheaper). There is no reason why they can't offer 32 gigs ram on non-laptop lines.
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How far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?
TSMC advertises 5nm as +15% performance OR -30% power consumption. Either one of these won’t be enough to bridge the gap in mobile. Even throwing in another massive 20% IPC improvement wouldn’t do the trick. On the flip side, once you go bigger the game changes. If you increase the M1 power consumption to amount for interconnects, more memory lanes, more IO, etc the M1 seems to offer worse power to performance that s…
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Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…
> Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. > If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. They didn't even do anything special. People have been telling multiple ARM IP holders to build a wide, powerful chip for ages. Especially for the…
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RISC-V doesn't offer the same advantage over ARM that ARM has over x86, so that's unlikely to happen.
I work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.
RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.
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With all the respect in the world, I think the complete lack of that happening at all this century should make you pause and reflect on why you think it's even remotely possible. I'm happy to be wrong, but I think you're buying too much into the SV/media fearmongering on a handful of companies whose main business is actually just attention economics.
Indeed. It's interesting to see how people like to label Apple a monopoly - a company with a 19% market share in smartphones and an 8% share on the desktop.
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It logically makes sense for Windows to move to ARM as well at this point. They already ported it with Windows RT, and now all they have to do is provide a translation layer like Rosetta and release the full Windows experience (instead of the locked down version RT was).
But there's no M1 chip equivalent for PC's. It's fine to have an ARM version of Windows but there's no equivalently high-performance ARM chip to run it on. Unless you're talking about Bootcamp on Macs.
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Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines. There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks? After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.
Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.
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> the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD , to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"? > "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schille…
The multicore performance is good for a portable, because background threads can run on the efficiency cores without making the whole system thermal throttle. Intel can't do that.
AMD is the one left without an "efficiency core"… but I wouldn't be that surprised if they somehow manage to squeeze almost the same efficiency out of just low power modes on the same Zen core, which would leave them with better multi-core performance as usual.
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> Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.
Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over…