251–260 of 344 posts
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Well, now they are losing to AMD, so what does that tell you about it being a sound busineas decision?
They aren't losing to AMD because of market segmentation, they are losing because their fabs are way behind TSMC.
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Look at the Apple A12x. They disabled a GPU core in it for the iPad, and then in the A12z they enabled that core. This was likely to help with yields. Then with the M1 chips they decided to sell a 7 core version of the chip with the base level Macbook Air and save the 8 core version for the higher trims. Even Apple is susceptible to it. But Apple doesn't sell chips, they sell devices and they can eat the cost for som…
The M1 (ok, in the 7 and 8 GPU core configurations) is in the Macbook air, Macbook pro, Ipad, Imac, and Mac mini...
That could make sense for Apple; the M1 is already ~1 generation ahead of competitors, so axing a bit of performance in favor of higher yields doesn't lose you any customers, but does cut your costs.
Plus, they definitely do some binning already, as mentioned with the 7 vs 8 core GPUs.
I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…
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I think the parent meant an anecdote I've heard many times, in slightly different ways. It goes like this: a major toothpaste company was having a meeting, trying to increase sales. Many solutions were tried: new flavors, advertising, none had much effect. On a whim, a director asks the guy serving coffee: - Jack, what would you do to increase sales? - Have you tried increasing the hole on the toothpaste? There might…
> toothpaste tubes used to be metal in the 60s and you were supposed to punch a hole on the front of it with the back of the cover cap I'm definitely too young to remember anything from the 1960s, but you can still buy tomato paste in tubes like that. Neat.
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That's not really an Apple tax though, that's a cost of doing business tax. It's not like Intel and AMD and everyone else aren't effectively doing the same exact thing.
Intel and AMD __literally__ sell those broken chips to the open marketplace, recouping at least some of the costs (or possibly getting a profit from them). Apple probably does the same strategy PS3 did: create a 1-PPE + 8-SPE chip, but sell it as a 1-PPE + 7-SPE chip (assume one breaks). This increases yields, and it means that all 7-SPE + 8-SPE chips can be sold. 6-SPE-chips (and below) are thrown away, which is a s…
Have been with Intel for almost two decades, I finally moved to AMD for the very first time recently and I'm glad I did. Intel is being called "Toothpaste Company" for a reason. It has deliberately slowed down its innovation since gained performance advantage over AMD with CORE, for over a decade now. Between each iteration, there was not many changes but kept adding fancy instruction sets such as AVX512 useless to m…
I'm not a microprocessor expert, but this seems like one of the reasons RISC has so much potential in the future. It seems like x86 is just weighed down with so much cruft.
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After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.
Depending on the next iteration of Apple silicons, I am seriously considering a Mac Mini farm for compute heavy tasks.
It is kind of a wild state of affairs that as good a chip as M1 isn't available as commodity hardware.
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Yeah, Custom ARM / RISC-V chips or even ASIC/FPGAs could start threatening x86/AMD64 for datacenters and "clouds" sooner than we think.
ARM maybe. But I'm not convinced that the ARM-alliance (Fujitsu, Apple, Ampere, Neoverse) is quite as unified as you might think. Apple has no apparent goals for cloud/servers, Fujitsu seems entirely focused on the Japanese market, and Ampere Altra isn't reaching critical mass (Amazon prefers a Neoverse rather than joining forces with Ampere / using Altra). As long as the ARM-community is fragmented, their research/i…
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After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.
I think we should look at one step further - RISC-V. Open source is the best way to ensure consumers don't get shafted by someone doing the Intel model again or Apple keeping M1 limited to their devices.
I agree a truly open-source option would be desirable.
I've never had time for Intel creating 400 different CPUs just to create artificial market segmentation and force people into a more expensive CPU. Why is there an i3, i5, i7, i9 - ahh, right, because then you can try to justify charging incrementally more for each additional feature. Oh you want turbo boost? Sorry that's an i5! Oh you want hyperthreading/SMT? Nope, next model up. Oh you want ECC? That's a "workstati…