Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
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Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#2> "Apple has been long hailed for having the best CPU cores for consumer workloads for years. They have by far the highest performance per clock and efficiency driven by performance in the same class as AMD and Intel’s best current CPUs. This was driven by breakneck gains with architectural changes every year for a decade."
I don't think this is event remotely correct to begin with (Apple advantage was in mips-per-watt. AMD wipes the floor with them in performance department, but also uses more power).
And the author doesn't seem to understand that the architecture was mostly created by ARM.
With a start like that, I am not sure if I should read the rest.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#3The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitations of Apple ARM cpus (non-upgradeable SoC that fully supports only one OS). (But I find it hard to believe that Apple doesn't have some contingency plan for this - like I said, Apple has bet their future on ARM processors, and the tightly closed systems that they can build with it is every Apple CEO's wet dream).
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#4The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…
This is exactly the kind of risk people warned about.
You cannot do everything in-house and think you can always be better than every other company in the world. One bad year in one department and your competitors will eat your market share.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#5Grinds to a halt? The M1 was quite possibly the best consumer ARM cpu in the past year and CPU development has just stopped? M1X/M2 is expected later this year, wait until then before we all decide Apple is "doomed." Could it be that the phone is getting more incremental boosts in a time where the Mac/iPad is getting the real improvements?
I think its much more likely that the effects of COVID measures are just now being felt by many corporations both in the supply chain as well as product development.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#6The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…
>this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus
I'm sure Qualcomm & Co. would happily help them out if they're in a bind with their own design.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#7Appears to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536048
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#8The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…
This is exactly the kind of risk people warned about. You cannot do everything in-house and think you can always be better than every other company in the world. One bad year in one department and your competitors will eat your market share.
No, this is exactly the opposite. If you lock in your users in an ecosystem that's compatible with exactly nothing outside, they will happily eat your marginal updates for years. Even if problems would endure, Apple can plan calmly, as the switch would be much more costly for its customers.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#9Grinds to a halt? The M1 was quite possibly the best consumer ARM cpu in the past year and CPU development has just stopped? M1X/M2 is expected later this year, wait until then before we all decide Apple is "doomed." Could it be that the phone is getting more incremental boosts in a time where the Mac/iPad is getting the real improvements? I think its much more likely that the effects of COVID measures are just now b…
The M1 is essentially a large version of the A14 chip and uses the same firestorm and icestorm cores. With such unsubstantial improvements in the A15, the M2 should theoretically also have unsubstantial gains because it will be a large version of A15. The article also mentions that some key technical staff jumped ship so that might somehow halt innovation.
Re: Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim
#10The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitatio…
> non-upgradeable SoC
That doesn't seem to be slowing down sales of laptops and minis, or phones. Memory is tightly packed, but that's for SoC size - the processor tile talks to the memory via a DDR4 bus on the SoC board and can easily talk to memory across the motherboard. I'd bet on that for future ARM-based MacPro's and upgradable iMacs.
Making a socketed M1/M1X/M2/M2X is a matter of packaging, IF Apple wants it: they are not in the general CPU market. There may be some market in upgrading CPUs in the MacPro's, but I doubt it'd justify the investment.
> that fully supports only one OS
That's not really a problem for Apple - they chose to base all their offerings on a portable OS for a reason. The current system we call MacOS was ported to run on 68K, x86 (under NeXT for 32-bit, under Apple 64-bit), HP-PA, SPARC, PPC, ARM (both 32 - as iOS - and 64-bit).
All in all, the roadmap for beefier M's is clear - a wider backend, ISA extensions for common workloads (one of the reasons the M1 performs so well), and a larger reorder buffer (another reason the M1 performs so well) to keep the wider backend well fed.