anonymouse said:

KITA said:

canukstorm said:

Rayz2016 said:

At the moment, this is little more than a loss of prestige for Intel. 

The problem will come if Microsoft decides to put some effort into its own ARM strategy.

Apple doesn't have close to the silicon team that Apple has to pull this off.  What we saw yesterday was how central Apple's silicon team is to Apple's competitive advantage.  MS would have to buy a major silicon company to pull this off.  Who knows, maybe they'll buy AMD (*sarcasm*).

Microsoft can participate in ARM's Cortex X program, or work with a company that is...

Apple's A series processors aren't just about energy efficiency and flops. In large part it's about integrating all these other things,



into the processor and being able to customize it precisely to meet your needs. The graphic above represents years of R&D, customizing everything for exactly what Apple wants it to do. You can't have this overnight.

Of course it's more than that. You've just posted their image of what makes up their SoC. These components already exist, not only as ARM reference designs, but as components that have been worked on for years by various manufacturers.

Here's a block diagram from Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 for example:



Even Microsoft has done custom silicon work alongside Qualcomm to fit their needs. In the HoloLens 2, Microsoft created a custom multiprocessor the HPU (Holographic Processing Unit) to accompany the Snapdragon 850. In the Surface Pro X, they branded the Microsoft SQ1 - going even further to take a Snapdragon 8cx and build onto it with a higher CPU clock, faster GPU (2.1 TFLOPS) and custom AI engine (9 TOPS).

canukstorm said:

Rayz2016 said:

At the moment, this is little more than a loss of prestige for Intel. 

The problem will come if Microsoft decides to put some effort into its own ARM strategy.

Apple doesn't have close to the silicon team that Apple has to pull this off.  What we saw yesterday was how central Apple's silicon team is to Apple's competitive advantage.  MS would have to buy a major silicon company to pull this off.  Who knows, maybe they'll buy AMD (*sarcasm*).

Microsoft can participate in ARM's Cortex X program, or work with a company that is.



The Cortex X1 and next year's ARMv9 Matterhorn core (Cortex X2?) are being designed without previous constraints that are on cores like the Cortex A78.

The Cortex-X1 here is projected to use 1.5x the power of an A78. This might end up slightly lower but I’m being overly cautious here and prefer to be on the more pessimistic side. Here’s the real kicker though: the X1 could very well use up to 2x the power of a Cortex-A77/A78 and it would still be able to compete with Apple’s cores in terms of energy efficiency – the core’s increased performance largely makes up for its increased power draw, meaning its energy efficiency at the projected power would roughly only be 23% worse than an A78, and only 11-14% worse than say a current generation Snapdragon 865. Arm has such a big leeway in power efficiency at the moment that I just don’t see any scenario where the X1 would end up disappointing.

...

Meanwhile the Cortex-X1 is a big change for Arm. And that change has less to do with the technology of the cores, and more with the business decisions that it now opens up for the company, although both are intertwined. For years many people were wondering why the company didn't design a core that could more closely compete with what Apple had built. In my view, one of the reasons for that was that Arm has always been constrained by the need to create a “one core fits all” design that could fit all of their customers’ needs – and not just the few flagship SoC designs.

The Cortex-X program here effectively unshackles Arm from these business limitations, and it allows the company to provide the best of both worlds. As a result, the A78 continues the company’s bread & butter design philosophy of power-performance-area leadership, whilst the X1 and its successors can now aim for the stars in terms of performance, without such strict area usage or power consumption limitations.

In this regard, the X1 seems really, really impressive. The 30% IPC improvement over the A77 is astounding and not something I had expected from the company this generation. The company has been incessantly beating the drum of their annual projected 20-25% improvements in performance – a pace which is currently well beyond what the competition has been able to achieve. These most recent projected performance figures are getting crazy close to the best that what we’ve seeing from the x86 players out there right now. That’s exciting for Arm, and should be worrying for the competition.

No mention on if the first ARM macOS computers will be ARMv9. Hopefully they are, otherwise it would be a bit odd when the transition is so soon.

flydog said:

dk49 said:

They didn't mention how much this kit will cost to the developers. Or is it just free for developers..😅

The headlne states:

Apple Developer Transition Kits with Apple Silicon sports a A12Z chip in a $500 Mac mini

lkrupp said:

dk49 said:

They didn't mention how much this kit will cost to the developers. Or is it just free for developers..😅

Read the article... $500 and it looks like it will be a rental

Geez, you both need to put your claws away. The article was edited after dk49's post with the pricing.

dysamoria said:

capnjack said:

Article states that windows doesn’t run on ARM. This is incorrect, I agree bootcamp is unlikely because Apple will have custom silicon, but there are versions of Windows for ARM. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/

And any software written for Intel x86 Windows isn’t going to work on ARM Windows Bootcamp setups... unless there’s an x86 layer I haven’t heard about in ARM Windows. The article acts like being able to boot an ARM Windows installation will solve game availability. It won’t, unless an x86 emulation is available for it, and then the performance will likely be poor.

This is x86 emulation gaming for Windows 10 on ARM running on the Microsoft SQ1 in the Surface Pro X



x64 emulation hasn't come yet. As well, the SQ1 uses older lower power ARM cores. Once Cortex X1 comes to market (ARM's new performance focused large core), there will be a large performance boost available. The GPU in the SQ1 has a bit of kick though.