jdb8167

mjtomlin said:

I have a feeling the current M1 systems were a stop-gap solution using current designs to get them on the market and in users' hands as soon as possible. And that we have yet to see what is truly possible until Apple designs chassis specifically optimized for these new SoCs as far as thermals (and battery) are concerned.

Having two models of the MacBook Air makes sense, just as it does for every other Mac model. A newly designed higher end 14" model makes sense now (with stronger GPU performance) and then later in the year, possibly replacing the current 13" model with a smaller 12" model.

Also hoping that every new M1 variant is made available as upgrade options in the mini.

sdw2001 said:

larryjw said:

sdw2001 said:

This may only be a temporary state, as there is some incentive on Apple's side to reinstate the blocks and to force users to download Mac App Store-sanctioned versions instead of the mobile-designed editions. 

Such as?  And I don't know....I find Apple's approach unsettling here.  If you have a machine capable of running mobile apps, and those apps are already approved for the mobile device (they are), why the need to control their distribution through the Mac App store?  Could there be some legitimate security or technical/performance concerns?  Or, is what I think it is...Apple demanding total authority to decide what runs on Macs?  Even that doesn't make much sense, as users can install Mac software outside the App store constraints.  The only legitimate reason I can think of is Apple is concerned about jailbroken phones (difficult to do these days, I hear) side-loading apps.  

I can think of one overriding reason not to allow iPhone and iPad apps to run on Silicon Macs -- the app developer did not give Apple and the user the license to do so. Period. 

My first reaction to that is.....who cares what the developers want in this case?  If an app will run on my Mac and I want to do so, who are they to restrict me.  What is Apple's interest in it?  

cloudguy said:

jdb8167 said:

winston2010 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.