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Apple Unveils M2

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Re: Apple Unveils M2

#31
post #2

I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.

I see Microsoft as a SaaS company now, heavy on cloud and Azure. Apple is still a products company.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#32
post #2

I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.

The question is who is Apple competing with with these new chips? Is it other PC/laptop makers (Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Dell etc) or is it solely Apple on Intel? Whether Microsoft (and everyone else) needs to react or not depends on whether Apple's overall market share in the segment is going up.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#34
post #2

I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.

Their answer is this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/microsoft-will-boost...

They will need to get developers up to speed porting their apps to ARM before they are even in a position to re-boot their Windows ARM strategy.

But this is a multi-year journey which is likely to give Intel/AMD time to produce something more competitive.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#35
post #10

Quoted post unavailable.

5 years from now people will grok more fundamentally that launching 2 process nodes ahead of Intel via TSMC was the big win. For now, we'll deal with marketing-ese about how "other CPU vendors have to choose between power and performance" from Apple's head of semiconductor engineering, and posts on this page like the one saying Microsoft doesn't care and Apple's about to take over computing.

They're only 1 process node ahead of Intel. Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent transistor density as TSMC 7nm. The M1 was TSMC 5nm.

And given that there's no way a single process node jump is going to give Intel a 75% uplift in instruction per clock (2 nodes wouldn't give them that either, for that matter), Intel is going to have to clock higher for comparable performance and that's still going to put them behind on power consumption (which is exponential in clock speed).

Which is to say, it's completely untrue that the only reason these chips look good for speed/power-consumption is the process node they're on. Apple came up with a super-wide architecture (way wider than anything we've ever seen in x86-64), and they made it pay off by getting good performance out of a much lower maximum clock, which bought them a ton of power efficiency.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#37
post #2

I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.

Simply getting functional Windows on ARM would be helpful. The last surface ARM attempt went poorly.

i use surface pro x on arm as a daily driver and it's excellent (on the beta release train anyway), and i use linux and osx too daily.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years from now people will grok more fundamentally that launching 2 process nodes ahead of Intel via TSMC was the big win. For now, we'll deal with marketing-ese about how "other CPU vendors have to choose between power and performance" from Apple's head of semiconductor engineering, and posts on this page like the one saying Microsoft doesn't care and Apple's about to take over computing.

How do you provide fanless laptop, and extended battery life if you don't care about maximizing performance while maintaining ultra low power usage? That is why nobody buys windows based laptops anymore and the macbook air is the best selling laptop you don't need apple marketing team to see how people are fed-up with hot windows laptops and their noisy fans (and blind btw, pun intended or maybe not lol)

Living in a bubble is always nice though. How many laptops are even used as laptops?

Most of the world is not using Apple laptops and is not going to. The Facebook community around you might, but that's not the entire world. The "nobody" in your list still accounts for what, 90% of the laptop buyers? Even more?

Most of the powerful laptops are neither Macs, as those go to the gaming laptops where - this is a big surprise - games and their performance counts. Apple has no answer there.

Re: Apple Unveils M2

#40
post #2

I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.

Microsoft is a company full of bureaucrats who don't care about their product. Apple is going to take over the computing world here shortly.

No chance unfortunately. Windows 11 has pop up "notifications" that are basically ads all over. Unnecessarily hard to cleanup / customize in a biz setting.

If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. But Microsoft just is better here currently on a lot of fronts - the last time I chased my tail here it didn't pay off.

If Apple wants to compete for the business market I think they should! We need first class user account management that INTEGRATES with other stuff (ie, google email etc etc). Right now you can federate from active directory to almost anything (SonicWall/VPN for remote users, WiFi for onprem user devices, vSphere for VM management etc etc). If you sync to google you can then use google one click sign-ons everywhere on the web SAAS side.

We then need office running perfectly.

Then we'd probably do our legacy apps on some VMs and chrome for SAAS apps.

We also need to be able to run MacOS virtually. We have remote users who talk to an on-prem VMs, separates their personal and work stuff, we can lock down and monitor the on-prem VMs and they can watch netflix with no worries using home machine. How does this work with Apple? It's easy with Windows.

I think there would be some demand from smaller co's to make the switch if there was a solution which allowed what folks are looking for -> migration to cloud as offices go virtual with controlled "desktops" delivered to users while still allowing in office / warehouse / factory deployments.

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