Intel 'Alder Lake' chips take same approach as Apple's ARM designs

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 52
    Is the chip wafer bigger than a Christmas ham?
    Alex1Nwatto_cobra
  • Reply 22 of 52
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    “Emulate” is a bad choice of words in the context of CPUs where emulation has a distinctly different meaning, “are inspired by”, “take a similar approach”, etc. would be better.

    Also, unless you try to accuse intel of industrial espionage, there’s no way intel would be able to bring to market new chips that quickly after the M1 introduction, so to imply intel is trying to knock off Apple’s approach, is a bit thick.

    SoC isn’t a novel approach, even RasPis are doing it for years, and ARM had long hybrid CPU designs with low-power and high-performance cores. That’s not unique to the M1, nor is it in particular what makes the M1 a great design, i.e. integrated, unified memory design, integrated graphics, signal, and neural processing. None of those things which are hallmark features of the M1 seem to be present, except likely an intel on-chip GPU.
    edited January 2021 avon b7watto_cobraargonaut
  • Reply 23 of 52
    jdb8167jdb8167 Posts: 626member
    borps said:
    So they have a CISC architecture that requires more transistors than a RISC design like the M1 and they are using a 10nm process while Apple is already at 5nm. Sounds like a plan. 
    If I remembered correctly, Intel had a RISC-like core with CICS translation in "micro-code" to translate x86 instructions.  That was how Intel was able to increase frequencies so quickly back in the 90's
    This is true. They translate x86 instructions into macro-ops that are closer to RISC than the original x86 opcodes. This is fine as far as it goes and served Intel and AMD well for the last 10-15 years. The problem is that Apple has shown that a true RISC architecture with a fixed length instruction length and a massive buffer to reorder instructions can now bring a substantial increase in instructions per cycle that wasn't feasible before. Apple is taking advantage of a huge transistor budget and a consistent ISA to create a very wide instruction decode step and an out of order architecture that is much more efficient than anything else in the industry.

    This unique architecture allows Apple's M1 to have the fastest single thread execution while also sipping power. Where Intel and AMD need to clock up to 5 GHz to get good performance, the M1 clocks at just 3.2 GHz and is faster than the top of the line x86_64 (AMD64)  CPUs. This is relatively new and is enabled by using TSMC's fabrication to supply a very large number of transistors relatively inexpensively. Intel is going to have a very hard time replicating Apple's approach because the x86_64 architecture is not amenable to it.

    I don't count Intel or AMD out of the race though. They both have very good engineers and Intel's semiconductor process engineers were the world's best until just recently when TSMC eclipsed them. It seems possible that Intel will rally. But they are going to have to do something very clever to get around the limitations of their preferred ISA. Going wide like Apple has in the A14/M1 is probably not a viable solution.
    edited January 2021 watto_cobraargonaut
  • Reply 24 of 52
    OK. Say Intel goes belly up in 5 years.

    1. Apple had 8% market share last quarter. Presume that they maintain it - it has dropped to as little as 5% in the past - or even increases to 10%. Good for Apple. Now, what operating system will the other 90% use?
    2. Apple's Mx chips are only going to be used in Apple products. What CPUs will the other 90% use?

    Until you answer these questions, please stop talking about Intel's decline. And don't start yapping about AMD. This site used to love trashing AMD. It was only when Apple announced that they were leaving Intel that Apple fans became these huge AMD boosters. Reality: only AMD's best chips - their desktop and better gaming laptop chips - are comparable to/better than Intel's. Otherwise, the AMD chips that compete with the Intel Pentium, Celeron, Core i3 and Core i5 are clearly worse. And though AMD caught up to Intel market share in desktop, Intel's lead in workstation/server chips - Xeon vs Threadripper - is massive. 

    The funny thing - even if Apple goes above and beyond their wildest dreams and gets 50% market share and into the enterprise and performance gaming markets that they have never been a factor in - Intel is still fine. They will still make money on the other 50% and still continue to make most of their money on noncommercial - meaning workstation, cloud, IoT - CPUs and APUs that Apple, being a strictly consumer company, will never compete in. 

    In order for Intel to be threatened in any serious way, you guys need your BIGGER enemies Qualcomm, Samsung, Google and Microsoft to come out with vastly better products. And please, no nonsense comparisons between the iPhone and Blackberry. Blackberry was only around for a few years and never had anything but a tiny market share of exclusively professional users back in the 2G/beginning of the 3G era. Wintel has been dominant since 1995 - with Windows 3.X and DOS similarly dominant before then - and Windows 10 alone right now has an install base of over 1 billion. 
  • Reply 25 of 52
    jdb8167 said:
    borps said:
    So they have a CISC architecture that requires more transistors than a RISC design like the M1 and they are using a 10nm process while Apple is already at 5nm. Sounds like a plan. 
    If I remembered correctly, Intel had a RISC-like core with CICS translation in "micro-code" to translate x86 instructions.  That was how Intel was able to increase frequencies so quickly back in the 90's
    This is true. They translate x86 instructions into macro-ops that are closer to RISC than the original x86 opcodes. This is fine as far as it goes and served Intel and AMD well for the last 10-15 years. The problem is that Apple has shown that a true RISC architecture with a fixed length instruction length and a massive buffer to reorder instructions can now bring a substantial increase in instructions per cycle that wasn't feasible before. Apple is taking advantage of a huge transistor budget and a consistent ISA to create a very wide instruction decode step and an out of order architecture that is much more efficient than anything else in the industry.

    This unique architecture allows Apple's M1 to have the fastest single thread execution while also sipping power. Where Intel and AMD need to clock up to 5 GHz to get good performance, the M1 clocks at just 3.2 GHz and is faster than the top of the line x86_64 (AMD64)  CPUs. This is relatively new and is enabled by using TSMC's fabrication to supply a very large number of transistors relatively inexpensively. Intel is going to have a very hard time replicating Apple's approach because the x86_64 architecture is not amenable to it.

    I don't count Intel or AMD out of the race though. They both have very good engineers and Intel's semiconductor process engineers were the world's best until just recently when TSMC eclipsed them. It seems possible that Intel will rally. But they are going to have to do something very clever to get around the limitations of their preferred ISA. Going wide like Apple has in the A14/M1 is probably not a viable solution.
    Intel's inability to get past 10nm has nothing to do with the limitations of their ISA. Good grief, AMD is at 7nm already and will join Apple at 5nm by the end of this year. Intel also has released several dual and quad core 10nm chips incidentally. Intel also 7nm dual and quad core chip designs ready to go, although I am not certain about hexacore and decacore designs. Intel's problems are solely about manufacturing. Which is why it is hilarious to see Apple fans take credit for "being ahead of Intel": Apple doesn't manufacture their own chips either. So it isn't Apple that is ahead of Intel but TSMC. Were TSMC's foundries to start having the same issues that Intel is, Apple would be equally impacted. 

    Here is the actual factual reality here: if Intel had a competitive business need to, they could buy tons of 10nm and 7nm capacity from TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries etc. for chips that would go on sale by the end of this year and do the same for 6nm and 4nm chips that would go on sale by 2023. But here is the deal: Intel has no competitive business need. Apple fans believing that M1 Macs pose a threat to Intel are merely folks with an inflated idea of Apple's actual importance, which is boosted by Apple's cheerleaders in the media writing columns on their MacBooks and iPads. The reality is that the 15-25 million Macs that Apple sells each year - the vast majority of which use Intel's less expensive Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs - only account for a tiny fraction of Intel's business.

    Intel has no competition. It isn't Apple because Apple's market share has never risen beyond 15% ever. It isn't AMD because TSMC cannot manufacture enough chips to make AMD a viable competitor. And it isn't Qualcomm/Samsung because Microsoft has yet to take Windows on ARM seriously (because they have no reason to). ARM is a bigger threat to Intel's server business - especially since in the server arena you can do data science work on GPUs and AI work on TPUs - than it is to Intel's PC business. And again, were Apple or Qualcomm to somehow become a threat before Intel's foundries can catch up, Intel can quickly pivot by having Samsung manufacture 100 million 5nm CPUs in less than 18 months anyway.

    People do realize this right? The problem has never been Intel's inability to design 10nm, 7nm and 5nm chips. It has been their inability to make them. Even if TSMC can't - or won't - make them, they can just get Samsung and GlobalFoundries to. (And either can actually make MORE 7nm and 5nm chips for Intel than TSMC can make for AMD). I know that a lot of folks would just rather believe "Apple is going to do to Intel what they did to Zune, the Walkman, Blackberry and Windows CE" but a much more accurate comparison would be what Apple DIDN'T do to not only Android but to ChromeOS (30 million Chromebooks sold last year against 23 million Macs).
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 26 of 52
    rcfa said:
    So intel’s 10nm is like TSMC’s 7nm
    Yes, that's partially true.  Intel's 10nm process has a transistor density of 100.76 (MTr/mm2) which is roughly equivalent to TSMC's 1st generation 7NFF process (96.5) but significantly less than TSMC's 2nd generation 7nm N7FF+ process (113.9).  Even still, Intel is having major yield problems with their 10nm process and they are struggling to get where TSMC was in 2018.  I think we can all agree Intel is a long way away from TSMC's 5nm process (173) in terms of transistor density.  Intel's attempt at 7nm has been delayed and is at least 2 years way.  TSMC will have moved on considerably by that time as well.

    Eventually they may just have to do a new RISC architecture, but one designed to run a Rosetta-like software layer for x86 emulation particularly efficiently, i.e. quasi exposing microcode as RISC instruction set...
    Intel already has a RISC core that executes RISC like micro-ops. The have since the P6 (Pentium Pro).  One of their fundamental problems is their legacy ISA with CISC instructions.  This is problematic in that it limits the optimizations possible for their decoder due to the unpredictable instruction sizes.  They'll never solve that problem without abandoning their current ISA.
    roundaboutnowargonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 27 of 52
    They’ve had a true ARM version of Windows for two years now but so far it’s hardly gained any traction with users or developers. I can assure you that Apple has sold more M1 Macs in the last two months than the combined total of ARM-based Windows devices sold in the last two years. 
    The difference is this... previously, if you wanted performance you have to stay with x86.   ARM chips available for Windows have been anemic and Microsoft's emulation layer was neither good at emulation nor did it perform well.  Likewise, ARM wasn't a real choice so far. 

    What the M1 chip did is wake people up to the fact that you can in fact have the best of both worlds.   That being highest performance and great efficiency.  The bar has been raised.   Microsoft will have to respond if they wish to remain competitive with Apple's devices after their transition is complete.  Intel doing big / little cores and even moving to a better process node will help a bit, but it will not solve the underlying problem.  Microsoft will either need to develop their own custom ARM cores or they will have to commission someone like Qualcomm to step up and do it for them in order to remain competitive with Apple.
    jdb8167roundaboutnowargonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 28 of 52
    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac Posts: 11,421member
    Xed said:
    Catfish29 said:
    Too little too late. With all their resources, wtf, why are they so fucking far behind the curve?

    This is merely the dying last gasp from a cash cow that became so fat from it’s monopolistic position that it couldn’t move out of its own way.

    Now go, you serpent, go tongue kiss and embrace Microsoft goodnight and we’ll all enjoy a double pyrotechnic display unparalleled in the tech world since its Big Bang creation those mere decades ago.

    The world will suffer neither of your demises.

    And what exactly is going to kill them? Apple? Not a chance. The commercial/enterprise market buys that majority of Intel's chips. They are not going to switch over to OS X simply because the M1 is superior. They are way too dependent on Microsoft's tightly integrated product offerings to change over to something else for a performance gain that won't make a real impact on productivity or efficiency. Similarly, Apple has no interest in entering the data center market. Intel's market is pretty safe.
    Just like the iPhone with the 1% Jobs wanted to take was never going to effect Blackberry or Palm? Or… Apple shows how something can be fundamentally better which causes a rapid shift in the market. If you don't expect data centers to push even more heavily toward fast and efficient ARM-based systems and for MS to continue to build out Windows for ARM-based system with more cross-compatibility then I have a bright to sell you.

    The CPU is only one component of a computer.  And they have become so powerful that they have exceeded the needs of the vast majority of users.  It's like everybody has a 350 horsepower V8 in their car.   The M1 will not significantly change things for Macs -- except to enable them to seamlessly fold into the rest of Apple's ecosystem (which is no small thing!)
  • Reply 29 of 52
    cloudguy said:
    OK. Say Intel goes belly up in 5 years.

    1. Apple had 8% market share last quarter. Presume that they maintain it - it has dropped to as little as 5% in the past - or even increases to 10%. Good for Apple. Now, what operating system will the other 90% use?
    2. Apple's Mx chips are only going to be used in Apple products. What CPUs will the other 90% use?
    I don't think anyone is suggesting any majority marketshare will shift from PC OEMs to Apple.  The concern is that Apple has raised the bar that PC OEMs will likely not be able to match or remain competitive with based on Intel's chips.  The threat is if Microsoft / Qualcomm / ARM actually address the PC market with a chip similar to what Apple has started doing with the M1.  The cloud servers are itching to switch to ARM but they basically have to follow the PC market.  Software is developed on PCs and then hosted in the cloud.  However, there is a significant threat that this dynamic can change.  Honestly, they could even make a go of it by producing a SoC based on ARM's existing X1 cores that the upcoming SD888 will use.  Make a higher wattage variant with more cores and you have a legitimate competitor rather than the anemic ARM attempts to date for PC.

    cloudguy said:
    Intel's inability to get past 10nm has nothing to do with the limitations of their ISA.

    You're right.  These are two distinct problems that Intel is facing.  One has nothing to do with the other, however, both are holding Intel back and responsible for Intel's current predicament. 

    Apple doesn't manufacture their own chips either. So it isn't Apple that is ahead of Intel but TSMC. Were TSMC's foundries to start having the same issues that Intel is, Apple would be equally impacted. 
    Your comment assumes the only reason Intel is behind is because of their lag in manufacturing process. That's not the case. Intel's chip designs were never the best. They were mediocre at best. They remained competitive by always being on the cutting edge manufacturing process. That is, their manufacturing process ability masked their deficiencies with their chip designs. They had a few notable exceptions such as their Core design, etc. but this is largely true throughout their history. Today Intel is faced with a chip design that is held back because of their legacy CISC ISA coupled with continued failures to improve their manufacturing process. Similarly, AMD can indeed benefit from TSMC's manufacturing process, but they also cannot escape the handicaps of the x64 ISA.

    Here is the actual factual reality here: if Intel had a competitive business need to, they could buy tons of 10nm and 7nm capacity from TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries etc. for chips that would go on sale by the end of this year and do the same for 6nm and 4nm chips that would go on sale by 2023. But here is the deal: Intel has no competitive business need. 
    Incorrect.  Intel most certainly does have a competitive business need to address their current predicament and they are scrambling to address it. They've tucked their tail between their legs and are essentially begging other manufacturers for capacity.  They wouldn't be doing this if they had confidence in their own plans to get manufacturing back on track.  Even still, other companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, etc. are way ahead of Intel and will have first access to new process nodes.  Intel is fighting for the leftover scraps with older nodes.

    http://https//www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-08/intel-talks-with-tsmc-samsung-to-outsource-some-chip-production

    Apple fans believing that M1 Macs pose a threat to Intel are merely folks with an inflated idea of Apple's actual importance, which is boosted by Apple's cheerleaders in the media writing columns on their MacBooks and iPads.
    No, Apple fans don't expect everyone to switch over to the Apple platform.  However, they do understand the wakeup call their M1 based Macs are having on the industry and that Microsoft and the PC OEMs will need to react.  The solution to their problem isn't coming from Intel or AMD either. 
    Intel has no competition.
    LOL... I'm sure companies like Kodak, Blockbuster, Blackberry, etc. all thought that as well.
    The problem has never been Intel's inability to design 10nm, 7nm and 5nm chips. It has been their inability to make them.
    Designing a chip for any given process node isn't the challenge.  Anyone can do that.  Intel's problem is that even if they were to achieve process node parity from a manufacturing perspective, they still won't catch up on performance or efficiency.  Intel's process node failures have simply magnified their processor design deficiencies.  Their only hope of even achieving some level of parity is to somehow not only catchup, but massively leapfrog the competition in manufacturing.  Either that or dump their legacy ISA which they can't do.  Neither of those things are going to happen. 
    jdb8167williamlondonroundaboutnowargonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 30 of 52
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    cloudguy said:
    And please, no nonsense comparisons between the iPhone and Blackberry. Blackberry was only around for a few years and never had anything but a tiny market share of exclusively professional users back in the 2G/beginning of the 3G era. Wintel has been dominant since 1995 - with Windows 3.X and DOS similarly dominant before then - and Windows 10 alone right now has an install base of over 1 billion. 
    So basically what you're saying is that momentum is the only thing carrying Wintel at this point.  I'd argue that momentum can be a fickle thing.  Sure they've had it for 25 years, but that's only because computers are complex and people don't like to learn new things as long as something works.  Kinda like people sticking with one car manufacturer because their known car brand gets them from point A to B.  And computers are far more complex than cars, so people certainly don't want to give up what they've spent time learning.

    That all being said, there's the next generation, and they've grown up on phones, not computers.  Which is why Apple is leveraging their experience with phones into tablets and now computers.  Microsoft has no such leverage with that generation other than Xbox.  Android has leverage, but Chromebooks have a long way to go before they could be used in the variety of ways Macs can be.

    As an example, I used to be one of only a handful of people at my company who chose to work on a Mac.  Over the last 10 years, as people from my era left and new people joined, the number of people using Macs has grown to outnumber the people using PCs.
    edited January 2021 watto_cobra
  • Reply 31 of 52
    larryjwlarryjw Posts: 1,031member
    Is this real, or just clickbait advertising using Apple's advanced tech to make it look like Intel is relevant. 


  • Reply 32 of 52
    larryjwlarryjw Posts: 1,031member
    cloudguy said:
    jdb8167 said:
    borps said:
    So they have a CISC architecture that requires more transistors than a RISC design like the M1 and they are using a 10nm process while Apple is already at 5nm. Sounds like a plan. 
    If I remembered correctly, Intel had a RISC-like core with CICS translation in "micro-code" to translate x86 instructions.  That was how Intel was able to increase frequencies so quickly back in the 90's
    This is true. They translate x86 instructions into macro-ops that are closer to RISC than the original x86 opcodes. This is fine as far as it goes and served Intel and AMD well for the last 10-15 years. The problem is that Apple has shown that a true RISC architecture with a fixed length instruction length and a massive buffer to reorder instructions can now bring a substantial increase in instructions per cycle that wasn't feasible before. Apple is taking advantage of a huge transistor budget and a consistent ISA to create a very wide instruction decode step and an out of order architecture that is much more efficient than anything else in the industry.

    This unique architecture allows Apple's M1 to have the fastest single thread execution while also sipping power. Where Intel and AMD need to clock up to 5 GHz to get good performance, the M1 clocks at just 3.2 GHz and is faster than the top of the line x86_64 (AMD64)  CPUs. This is relatively new and is enabled by using TSMC's fabrication to supply a very large number of transistors relatively inexpensively. Intel is going to have a very hard time replicating Apple's approach because the x86_64 architecture is not amenable to it.

    I don't count Intel or AMD out of the race though. They both have very good engineers and Intel's semiconductor process engineers were the world's best until just recently when TSMC eclipsed them. It seems possible that Intel will rally. But they are going to have to do something very clever to get around the limitations of their preferred ISA. Going wide like Apple has in the A14/M1 is probably not a viable solution.
    Intel's inability to get past 10nm has nothing to do with the limitations of their ISA. Good grief, AMD is at 7nm already and will join Apple at 5nm by the end of this year. Intel also has released several dual and quad core 10nm chips incidentally. Intel also 7nm dual and quad core chip designs ready to go, although I am not certain about hexacore and decacore designs. Intel's problems are solely about manufacturing. Which is why it is hilarious to see Apple fans take credit for "being ahead of Intel": Apple doesn't manufacture their own chips either. So it isn't Apple that is ahead of Intel but TSMC. Were TSMC's foundries to start having the same issues that Intel is, Apple would be equally impacted. 

    Here is the actual factual reality here: if Intel had a competitive business need to, they could buy tons of 10nm and 7nm capacity from TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries etc. for chips that would go on sale by the end of this year and do the same for 6nm and 4nm chips that would go on sale by 2023. But here is the deal: Intel has no competitive business need. Apple fans believing that M1 Macs pose a threat to Intel are merely folks with an inflated idea of Apple's actual importance, which is boosted by Apple's cheerleaders in the media writing columns on their MacBooks and iPads. The reality is that the 15-25 million Macs that Apple sells each year - the vast majority of which use Intel's less expensive Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs - only account for a tiny fraction of Intel's business.

    Intel has no competition. It isn't Apple because Apple's market share has never risen beyond 15% ever. It isn't AMD because TSMC cannot manufacture enough chips to make AMD a viable competitor. And it isn't Qualcomm/Samsung because Microsoft has yet to take Windows on ARM seriously (because they have no reason to). ARM is a bigger threat to Intel's server business - especially since in the server arena you can do data science work on GPUs and AI work on TPUs - than it is to Intel's PC business. And again, were Apple or Qualcomm to somehow become a threat before Intel's foundries can catch up, Intel can quickly pivot by having Samsung manufacture 100 million 5nm CPUs in less than 18 months anyway.

    People do realize this right? The problem has never been Intel's inability to design 10nm, 7nm and 5nm chips. It has been their inability to make them. Even if TSMC can't - or won't - make them, they can just get Samsung and GlobalFoundries to. (And either can actually make MORE 7nm and 5nm chips for Intel than TSMC can make for AMD). I know that a lot of folks would just rather believe "Apple is going to do to Intel what they did to Zune, the Walkman, Blackberry and Windows CE" but a much more accurate comparison would be what Apple DIDN'T do to not only Android but to ChromeOS (30 million Chromebooks sold last year against 23 million Macs).
    Intel was a company founded to build chips. They were a manufacturer. They've failed in their primary purpose. 

    Apple was founded to build easy to use computers. They design and integrate hardware devices in addition to typical computers, build OSes, software, offer services and in the process have established expertise on logistics, run physical stores (when all other physical stores are in trouble), created a working financing system, seems to be getting into healthcare systems, and also design chips. 
    williamlondonargonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 33 of 52
    Apple: M1
    Intel
    Intel:
    Intel: Oh, hay guys, I just found these chips we make that are totally like the M1. You should stay with us. We cool, then? K. Bye. 
    williamlondonargonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 34 of 52
    jimh2jimh2 Posts: 611member
    Too little too late. With all their resources, wtf, why are they so fucking far behind the curve?

    Just like the auto manufacturers who sat by and watched Tesla deliver multiple fully electric cars all of which are great. Where is Toyota, GM, Chrysler, Dodge, Nissan, Subaru, and all of the German manufacturers. All have nothing that can even remotely compete. Just like Intel they had a decade to get their act together, but neither took Tesla/ARM processors seriously.
    williamlondonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 35 of 52
    jdb8167jdb8167 Posts: 626member
    cloudguy said:
    jdb8167 said:
    borps said:
    So they have a CISC architecture that requires more transistors than a RISC design like the M1 and they are using a 10nm process while Apple is already at 5nm. Sounds like a plan. 
    If I remembered correctly, Intel had a RISC-like core with CICS translation in "micro-code" to translate x86 instructions.  That was how Intel was able to increase frequencies so quickly back in the 90's
    This is true. They translate x86 instructions into macro-ops that are closer to RISC than the original x86 opcodes. This is fine as far as it goes and served Intel and AMD well for the last 10-15 years. The problem is that Apple has shown that a true RISC architecture with a fixed length instruction length and a massive buffer to reorder instructions can now bring a substantial increase in instructions per cycle that wasn't feasible before. Apple is taking advantage of a huge transistor budget and a consistent ISA to create a very wide instruction decode step and an out of order architecture that is much more efficient than anything else in the industry.

    This unique architecture allows Apple's M1 to have the fastest single thread execution while also sipping power. Where Intel and AMD need to clock up to 5 GHz to get good performance, the M1 clocks at just 3.2 GHz and is faster than the top of the line x86_64 (AMD64)  CPUs. This is relatively new and is enabled by using TSMC's fabrication to supply a very large number of transistors relatively inexpensively. Intel is going to have a very hard time replicating Apple's approach because the x86_64 architecture is not amenable to it.

    I don't count Intel or AMD out of the race though. They both have very good engineers and Intel's semiconductor process engineers were the world's best until just recently when TSMC eclipsed them. It seems possible that Intel will rally. But they are going to have to do something very clever to get around the limitations of their preferred ISA. Going wide like Apple has in the A14/M1 is probably not a viable solution.
    Intel's inability to get past 10nm has nothing to do with the limitations of their ISA. Good grief, AMD is at 7nm already and will join Apple at 5nm by the end of this year. Intel also has released several dual and quad core 10nm chips incidentally. Intel also 7nm dual and quad core chip designs ready to go, although I am not certain about hexacore and decacore designs. Intel's problems are solely about manufacturing. Which is why it is hilarious to see Apple fans take credit for "being ahead of Intel": Apple doesn't manufacture their own chips either. So it isn't Apple that is ahead of Intel but TSMC. Were TSMC's foundries to start having the same issues that Intel is, Apple would be equally impacted. 
    What does any of this have to do with what I posted? Was my post just the latest that you could quote? I gave very good reasons why Apple's design is better than what can be done with the x86 ISA. You didn't refute any of it. If you think Apple's advantage is purely from TSMC process then there is little point in debate.
    williamlondonroundaboutnowwatto_cobra
  • Reply 36 of 52
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    jimh2 said:
    Too little too late. With all their resources, wtf, why are they so fucking far behind the curve?

    Just like the auto manufacturers who sat by and watched Tesla deliver multiple fully electric cars all of which are great. Where is Toyota, GM, Chrysler, Dodge, Nissan, Subaru, and all of the German manufacturers. All have nothing that can even remotely compete. Just like Intel they had a decade to get their act together, but neither took Tesla/ARM processors seriously.
    Based in what I have seen, the Porsche Taycan is a far better car than what Tesla offers.  But still, I get your point.  
  • Reply 37 of 52
    entropysentropys Posts: 4,152member
    Yeah Tesla example isn’t a good one.
    cool cars and all but the -what do Tesla fans call them?-  legacy car manufacturers will end up out competing it eventually. 
    just like Tesla and the rest of the car industry, Apple isnt a threat to intel. 
    williamlondonargonaut
  • Reply 38 of 52
    BeatsBeats Posts: 3,073member
    Too little too late. With all their resources, wtf, why are they so fucking far behind the curve?

    This is merely the dying last gasp from a cash cow that became so fat from it’s monopolistic position that it couldn’t move out of its own way.

    Now go, you serpent, go tongue kiss and embrace Microsoft goodnight and we’ll all enjoy a double pyrotechnic display unparalleled in the tech world since its Big Bang creation those mere decades ago.

    The world will suffer neither of your demises.
    “ Too little too late”

    Don’t agree. 99% of the laptop / desktop is powered by x86. If there is anything Intel has, it’s time. Apple is literally the only company making an ARM SoC that is a threat to Intel & that’s only going to be available for Macs. There’s nothing Qualcomm has right now that comes remotely close to challenging x86. 

    This comment reminds me when Steve Ballmer said Apple was selling ZERO iPhones a year.

    Do you guys not have a slight vision of the future? At all?
    williamlondontechconc
  • Reply 39 of 52
    mjtomlinmjtomlin Posts: 2,673member
    jimh2 said:
    Too little too late. With all their resources, wtf, why are they so fucking far behind the curve?

    Just like the auto manufacturers who sat by and watched Tesla deliver multiple fully electric cars all of which are great. Where is Toyota, GM, Chrysler, Dodge, Nissan, Subaru, and all of the German manufacturers. All have nothing that can even remotely compete. Just like Intel they had a decade to get their act together, but neither took Tesla/ARM processors seriously.

    A better automotive based analogy would be... All the US car manufacturers in 70's that refused to make more fuel efficient cars, and watched Japanese and German manufacturers flood the US market and take a huge chunk of it, sending the US auto makers into a catastrophic downward spiral that required the US government to step in and dump billions into.
    williamlondonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 40 of 52
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    auxio said:
    cloudguy said:
    And please, no nonsense comparisons between the iPhone and Blackberry. Blackberry was only around for a few years and never had anything but a tiny market share of exclusively professional users back in the 2G/beginning of the 3G era. Wintel has been dominant since 1995 - with Windows 3.X and DOS similarly dominant before then - and Windows 10 alone right now has an install base of over 1 billion. 
    So basically what you're saying is that momentum is the only thing carrying Wintel at this point.  I'd argue that momentum can be a fickle thing.  Sure they've had it for 25 years, but that's only because computers are complex and people don't like to learn new things as long as something works.  Kinda like people sticking with one car manufacturer because their known car brand gets them from point A to B.  And computers are far more complex than cars, so people certainly don't want to give up what they've spent time learning.

    That all being said, there's the next generation, and they've grown up on phones, not computers.  Which is why Apple is leveraging their experience with phones into tablets and now computers.  Microsoft has no such leverage with that generation other than Xbox.  Android has leverage, but Chromebooks have a long way to go before they could be used in the variety of ways Macs can be.

    As an example, I used to be one of only a handful of people at my company who chose to work on a Mac.  Over the last 10 years, as people from my era left and new people joined, the number of people using Macs has grown to outnumber the people using PCs.
    The generation that you mention grew with phones, will be using PC's / notebooks in schools and at home, specially when you consider the latest sales numbers.  Also gaming PC's are growing quickly in the pandemic.  I think MS is in a good position with young people, same as Google.  Maybe in your workplace Mac are growing, but after seeing the latest sales numbers, the same can be said Windows PC / notebooks and Chromebooks.  
    muthuk_vanalingamGeorgeBMac
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