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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#281

Post by philistine »

simonh wrote: post #18

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…

Maybe commoditizing and refusing to differentiate your products, merely being content to shove the pablum OS everyone uses is a mistake?

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#282

Post by mike_hearn »

rowanG077 wrote: post #270
spoonjim wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong, the majority of Apple’s thermal efficiency comes from superior design which in turn comes from the fact that they were able to design it from the ground up with no backwards compatibility requirements (since they don’t have any customers of the chip besides themselves).

This is false. Apples arm chips are compatible with the normal arm instruction set. Evidenced by Linux trivially running on it.

With AArch64 yes, but that's a relatively recent 'clean break' ISA. It's not an extension of Arm32.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#283

Post by philistine »

pjmlp wrote: post #184

Given that whatever Apple has is not going into 80% of the desktop market, 60% of the mobile market, 100% of game consoles, or 100% of the server market, it matters much less than some Apple afficionados make out of it.

When Apple can make a game console for half the price with the same GPU power as the competition, which is something that could happen in ten years, Microsoft and PlayStation are going to sweat and pay very close attention to what Apple is doing.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#284

Post by dclusin »

Apples hardware is proprietary and they don’t offer or probably plan to offer server chips. I think what would make these stats more interesting is if we saw a shift in the thin client vs. fat client debate back to fat clients. Perhaps these changes will bring us into that era?

Amazons arm-based offerings are pretty interesting as are the other non-x86 initiatives. But I don’t see x86 going away in my day job any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#285

Post by jodrellblank »

jaytaylor wrote: post #242
n7pdx wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol this will age well. i remember designing CPUs at intel when they had like a ~2.5 gen process lead (literally 4-5 years) and the result was still barely better than competition. what outsiders don’t realize is intel management never had to deal with competition. they spent their entire careers fighting each other in petty internecine political battles. if you think intel vs amd is a feud, you haven’t seen intel ar…

I didn't know the word internecine, it's actually really useful and relevant in many situations, thank you! > internecine, adj.: > destructive to both sides in a conflict.

I find myself googling "etymology {word}" a lot recently; here inter is between like in intercontinental, and necine is death like in necrosis.

And inter is apparently the origin of intel, which is topical, and suggests Intelnecine, adj: destructive to all factions within Intel, or any company with a destructive amount of in-fighting.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/internecine

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#286

Post by n7pdx »

SilverBirch wrote: post #277
n7pdx wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol this will age well. i remember designing CPUs at intel when they had like a ~2.5 gen process lead (literally 4-5 years) and the result was still barely better than competition. what outsiders don’t realize is intel management never had to deal with competition. they spent their entire careers fighting each other in petty internecine political battles. if you think intel vs amd is a feud, you haven’t seen intel ar…

(Ex-Intel, agree) What do you think of the new management? Too difficult to turn the tanker?

Looks bad. I have two examples to go with:

- The Sapphire Rapids validation catastrophe proves they haven’t learned a damn thing about high quality first silicon even after all these years of getting their asses handed to them by AMD/Apple on fast cadence updates.

- Arc, enough said.

Pat Gelsinger made some big moves on his direct reports but he doesn’t have the time to perform the necessary mass purge of the mid/mid-high level management (i.e. the baby VP tier). When you run a company with 100k staff you have to delegate a lot of things, but the problem is a huge amount of the toxic management are still there, hiding in nooks and crannies and surviving.

Intel is currently throwing a lot of money around to hire people from the companies thrashing them (got a text message from a VP a couple months back), I get the feeling the Intel immune system will spit them back out upon detecting deviance from “the Intel way”.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#287

Post by grecy »

pella wrote: post #21

"Qualcomm Confirms Nuvia Arm Chips Will Be in PCs by Late 2023" https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-confirms-nuvia-ar... "Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it pub…

> Late 2023

>could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1

If you're aiming to match something that was on shelves for sale in November 2020 in late 2023, you're not really competing are you?

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#288

Post by emidln »

UncleEntity wrote: post #149
emidln wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People bandying about "legacy x86" instructions miss this often. This isn't much different, conceptually, from Apple's Rosetta, except it's provided in microcode automatically rather than a discrete transform you need to run once and cache. This is very convenient for broad x86 backwards compatibility (e.g. I can run a Java 1.4 JVM and StarOffice or a libc.so.5 to play Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine on my 5900…

Do you really target the Java 1.4 JVM?

No, but I used the Java 1.4 JVM to run StarOffice for compatibility with an old document that had no other reader within the last three months. I did this from my AMD Ryzen 9 5900x running Linux.

For work, I still have some third-party toolchains that were originally compiled on x86_64 linux in 2012. They are dockerized these days to make running these legacy toolchains easy. There is no possibility to recompile these on ARM to provide parallel containers that are compatible with Docker for Mac.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#289

Post by saagarjha »

hajile wrote: post #232
saagarjha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to support x86 is definitely not a "major" disadvantage.

The X2 cores in 8cx gen3 get similar performance to Zen 2 U-series chips while using 7-10w instead of 15-50w. How many more ARM chips have to get equivalent performance at a tiny fraction of the power before people will finally start considering that either AMD and Intel hire the most incompetent people out there or that ISA actually matters?

The competent people say that ISA doesn’t matter, so there’s that.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#290

Post by vr46 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #269
freemint wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To continue the tree of suppliers. Zeiss SMT would be nothing without: HAP GmbH Dresden, MBFZ Toolcraft GmbH, Corning Advanced Optics, AGC Inc, RUAG Space, Schmolz + Bickenbach, RORZE CORPORATION and GEWO Feinmechanik GmbH

And those depend on dozens of more companies, and those on dozen more. That is until suddenly a one man specialist retires his company and the entire chains grinds to a halt for months.

“What do you mean that Mathias is on holiday?”
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