31–40 of 323 posts
Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…
Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…
If your views on technological progress are informed by the 80s and 90s, and you think it is an exponential curve, then it seems unlikely that today’s leaders will ever be caught. If your views on technological progress are informed by the 00s and 10s, and you think it is an S-curve, then today’s leaders might never be caught in an absolute sense, but the competitors will get arbitrarily close eventually.
Past performance is not indicative of future results
Well if the initial M2 machines are anything to go by then x86 really has nothing to worry about. Apple will damage the reputation of their systems by themselves.
I think if x86 get rid of their legacy instructions, they could reduce their core size, and a few side effects will be performance per watt gains and maybe also performance (smaller cores), and if you need the legacy instructions you could just emulate, most consumer PCs don't need those. That's the biggest difference with x86 and ARM, ARM got a lot of breaking changes with their versions, while x86 don't (I'm not su…
Aren't those legacy instructions already emulated in microcode? I don't think they take up much physical footprint.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are absolutely out, because the M2 MBP is publicly available. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15482594
Oh so the M2 is a lot slower than Samsung phones? Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G = 2147483647 multi-core score https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15129294 But only 8928 multi-core for the new M2. Or maybe that page is kinda unreliable?
Sounds like someone managed to push their fake Geekbench score.
"Text compression: 22.8 TB/s". How long does the battery last though?
For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination. Also, I expect that the 5nm process is res…
If it’s proven that Apple can consistently provide better performance per watt per dollar and have enough chips available that people can actually buy, I think they can stand a chance to gain the AI market.
But this kind of question is not new. 10-20 years ago nobody would be thinking ARM could catch up to Intel. But also, is your question just about laptops and mobile devices? I don't see Apple taking on server markets, where the power per watt is perhaps less important. Finally, lots of people will be using non-Apple hardware for a long time (think anyone who isn't in Engineering at a company, they will probably be on a Windows system), which means there is guaranteed revenue for these other folks to compete, and possibly, catch up.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...