mdriftmeyer

Xed said:

linuxplatform said:

All right guys. I am officially going to eat crow. MacBooks running Apple Silicon are going to CRUSH Wintel/WinAMD machines.

https://wccftech.com/first-apple-silicon-featuring-12-cores/

The A13: 6 cores. The A14 is widely rumored to have 8. The MacBook chips won't be mobile chips like the A12/A13/A14. They are going to be desktop and server class chips with 12 cores. 

We don't know the core breakdown ... but I think that having 8 efficiency cores would be ridiculous for a device that is primarily going to be plugged in (not a smartphone or tablet that is going to rely primarily on a charged battery). I think that it will be 6 performance/6 efficiency at minimum. Possibly even - my own personal hope - 8 performance and 4 efficiency, although that configuration would not be possible in a fanless device. (You COULD use the A14 in a fanless MacBook Air however). 

OK, I was wrong. How wrong? Who knows. Ampere ARM server chips have 64-128 cores. But Apple is just getting started. Who knows how many cores their 3nm chips are going to have in 2022. 

That being said ... the last time Qualcomm - and MediaTek - went past 8 cores (5 years ago) things went badly and they haven't tried since. (Samsung hasn't even tried to surpass 8 cores.) So Lenovo, Dell and the rest are going to be stuck with Intel and AMD no matter how badly Apple is going to boatrace them.

And anyone who buys an Intel-based Mac instead of a 12 core Apple Silicon Mac is out of their mind. If they want to run with clearly inferior tech they should just go ahead and buy a Lenovo or Dell Windows machine. Sorry but facts are facts.

1) Why are you only NOW onboard with the both the industry changes to ARM and Apple’s progressions over the past decade? None of this was out of left field. We don’t have specific details but Apple has left us with more than enough clues to know that this is going to be a major boon for Apple’s Mac business. What I don’t get us how anyone could ever think Apple was just going to put an iPhone SoC in a Mac and call it a day.

2) WinPC makers will also follow suit as MS ramps up support for Windows on ARM. While you can claim (in many other of your posts) how ineffectual Apple is in the market, the facts show that they light fires in the industry. Apple’s announcement will speed up the transition and adoption for Windows support and their vendor adoption… and this is a good thing.

3) This won’t be good for Intel, but it’s also not the end for Intel. There are many, many more years before anything Intel is doing now becomes truly obsolete. Even if they had no significant advantage for another decade they’d still be here. Transitions aren’t going to be as smooth as it will be with Apple. Just look at Windows poor shift to 64-bit. I worry more about AMD’s CPU market in the long term over Intel as AMD simply doesn’t have the revenue compared to Intel to stay competitive once the shift is in full effect.

blastdoor said:

sflocal said:

Intel is blowing it, but AMD is making x86 relevant again.  AMD might be the next Intel at the pace they’re going.

Intel is preparing to strike back. Right now Intel is stuck on an old process (14nm) and an old core design (Skylake) across many product lines. But they are slowly clawing their way back. Tiger Lake in laptops and Rocket Lake on the desktop could be a turning point in Intel's competition with AMD. Both products use the long-delayed Willow Cove core, which should make Intel much more competitive with AMD. I don't expect AMD to be wiped out the way they were when Intel came out with Core, but AMD is going to find some very still competition. It's not going to be a cakewalk. It is going to be great for consumers, though -- we might see some real, prolonged competition between Intel and AMD. 

But I doubt either will be competitive with Apple Silicon. Apple would have known that their first Apple Silicon MacBooks would be competing against Tiger Lake, and so I'll bet Apple know that they can beat Tiger Lake. And really, they should be able to --- Apple Silicon will be on TSMC 5nm (analogous to Intel's non-existent 7nm process) while Tiger Lake will be on Intel's 10nm process (analogous to TSMC 7nm). And we already know from analysis by Anandtech that Apple's core design is far wider than Intel's, with higher IPC.