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Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, so it was easy for Apple to actually innovate and create an incredible processor, also controlling the en

Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, so it was easy for Apple to actually innovate and create an incredible processor, also controlling the entire stack and being able to switch from x86 helps. But on the GPU side NVIDIA and AMD have been battling it out for a while, competition is tight, and thinking Apple could come, compete and actually beat the fastest GPU currently available for consumers is a bit of a pipe dream, in hindsight. The GPU market hasn't been sitting on laurels for as long as Intel has been. That said, I am still positively surprised at how close they managed to reach the 3090, but alas, no cigar.

Sporktacular 5y ago
They've been trying to move into other non-x86 architectures. Had they taken off they would have been in a more competitive position now.
q-big 5y ago
> Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, What evidence do you have for that? Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). They even back-ported some of their planned CPU architectures to their working 14 nm process "just to get something out". Since these processors were not developed with 14 nm in mind, they of course were not as good as they could have been.
- ColonelPhantom 5y ago
  Intel did have any major advances from 2nd gen all the way until the 7th. The advancements were generally small (single-digit often) IPC or clock speed improvements. Only after AMD released Ryzen, Intel had to respond at their 8th gen by cranking up core counts. And IPC did not have any increases, until 11th gen(the backported arch you mentioned). In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small.
  - morganvachon 5y ago
    > In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small. Two of my Linux workstations are Sandy Bridge and Kaby Lake, and my real world experience bears this out. I can't distinguish between the two for everyday use cases; only synthetic benchmarks show any real advantage in the newer system. I can't speak for Windows performance differences, as my only Windows system is my gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 3600, which of course trounces both of the workstations no matter the OS.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gigaflop 5y ago
      Are there still software features exclusive to Intel's chips? I remember my dabble in Android Studio was painful, since the 'simulated device' functionality was only available on Intel, while I had some FX-8??? AMD chip. I'm not in the market for a new gaming PC quite yet, but it's also going to be a personal workstation, so I don't want to deal with anything like above if it can be helped.
      - scns 5y ago
        Get a Ryzen. Intel is restricting many features like ECC, overclocking or virtualization (important for emulators/android development) to certain processors/chipsets. If you want to save money, get a used workstation. ECC -> Xeon/C OC -> K/Z Virtualization -> Xeon&non-K/C&H
        sliken 5y ago
        Intel caved a little, alder lake consumer chips have ECC ... if you use the right chipset: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-enables-ecc-on-12th-gen-core-cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-enables-ecc-on-12th-...
        gigaflop 5y ago
        Looks like it's time to update the fantasy roster on pc part picker. A shame, since it had such a nice aesthetic! The Vision D looks so clean and well-featured By the time I get around to actually building it, there may be some similarly-styled mini-ITX AM4 motherboards, so not all hope is lost.
- matthewmacleod 5y ago
  Yeah, I've always been pretty skeptical of the "Intel just sat doing nothing" narrative. The impression I got back in the day is that they went quite hard on their 10nm process with a reasonably ambitious set of changes, then failed to scale it to production. That had substantial knock-on effects including delays to the associated microarchitectures as well as subsequent nodes and backports. Regardless of the reasons I hope they recover; multiple providers of cutting-edge fabrication technology will be essential.
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    Intel has absolutely been lazy and literally just gave 5% performance increase per year for quite some time. When AMD was making shitty processors, Intel was just trying to squeeze as much money as possible from marginal upgrades. You can run Windows on a Intel cpu that is 10 years old and notice hardly any difference in performance. And on the other hand, they changed everything. Their cpus are actually innovative and really fast, and brought the entire multi core thing into consumer hands in a real way.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Closi 5y ago
  > Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). Intel was just doing what they have been doing for the last 40 years - building faster x86 CPU's. They weren't even considering something as grand for desktop/laptops as Apple was with the M1 (i.e. a fully integrated SOC). I don't think they were twiddling their thumbs to be fair - they were probably pushing hard in the same direction they have been pushing in for the last 40 years, but failed to see the industry change under their feet.
  - tallanvor 5y ago
    It's expected that they're trying to build chips that are faster on x86 rather than switch to an entirely new architecture - they can't switch without the full support of Microsoft and at least some major Linux distributions, not to mention the OEMs they sell their chips to.
    - Closi 4y ago
      They absolutely could have built an ARM chip. The fact that Microsoft has released several ARM laptops but selected Qualcomm to provide the processors suggests that Intel at least had an opportunity to play the game, they just never came to the table. It’s hardly Microsoft slowing them down when Microsoft is ahead of Intel on this, but their reluctance to push forwards means that they are now behind. It’s not Microsoft’s job to push intel anyway, it’s intels job to create a product so compelling that their partners adopt it. If they want the support of major Linux distros, they just have to write it themselves rather than wait for volunteers to do their work for them.
  - q-big 5y ago
    > They weren't even considering something as grand for desktop/laptops as Apple was with the M1 (i.e. a fully integrated SOC). Perhaps I misinterpret your argument, but it is my impression that Intel (and also AMD!) did huge steps into that direction, just in a more incremental way than what Apple did: - integrated GPU: check - integrated memory controller: check - integrated northbridge: check: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Northbridge_(computing)&oldid=1070541069#Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Northbridge_(comp... - developing a smartphone SoC: Intel did invest serious money into it and developed SoFIA and Broxton. Intel even strongly subsidized smartphone producers to use them. This all turned out to be a huge commercial failure and thus Intel left the smartphone SoC business. It is also not the case that a fully-integrated SoC is "better". Rather having not everything in one SoC enabled much more flexibility for OEMs. Fully integrated SoC versus more chips is rather a trade-off between various goals.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  > Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors... No. Intel just wanted to show some little improvements to keep performance gap constant, hide their neat tricks until competition catch up, and use them when clients or the market really demanded it. The only notable efforts I've seen were reducing performance penalty of SpeedStep performance switching, making better memory controllers to "Catch" AMD, and other power-gating and independent throttling capabilities to address density issues in systems. When fab/power/thermal issues became apparent, they started to hide AVX/AVX2 frequencies, created frankenprocessors for some applications, etc. However, I've seen no real effort to make groundbreaking innovations in x86 space rather than protecting what they already had. Performance counters, and other underlying piping to make processor observable was nice though. As a result, I can still use a 3rd generation i7 as a daily driver for almost all tasks at hand, including development. The only definitive performance difference shows itself when I run my scientific code after compiling it with platform platform specific optimizations on newer systems. On that regards, an M1 MacBook air can be 25% faster than a 7th gen 7700K processor, and I find it ironic.
  - q-big 5y ago
    > However, I've seen no real effort to make groundbreaking innovations in x86 space rather than protecting what they already had. I consider what AVX-512 has to offer to be highly innovative. Unluckily, just when they planned to introduce AVX-512 into most desktop/laptop CPUs (not just server CPUs or special-purpose accelerators), the problems with 10 nm occured. So this was delayed a lot and even today, many desktop/laptop CPUs of Intel have no support for this feature. Also Intel TSX was in my opinion really innovative (even though this feature was to my knowledge mostly used in (business) databases; what a pity).
    - duped 5y ago
      I wouldn't call wider SIMD lanes terribly innovative. Particularly when they suffer from power costs to evaluate, time penalties just to fill the registers with enough data from cache or memory, and real workloads don't benefit from SIMD as much in practice when compilers are terrible at autovectorization (and humans are only marginally better at doing it manually). AVX-512 is an example of a feature that improves special cases that show up in faux-workloads (eg: fancy benchmarks and HPC) but does not manifest higher performance for the vast majority of workloads, including things that ostensibly should be embarrassingly parallel and reap gains from SIMD.
- Decabytes 5y ago
  We spent years with quad core i7 processors being the norm, with higher core count processors being locked to Intels HEDT platform. When Ryzen came out all of a sudden the i7 8700k was able to be a 6 core processor instead of a 4 core. Then it wasn’t until Alder lake released in November of last year that we finally got desktop processors that weren’t on 14nm+++ (or however many + it was at). That’s not including the fact that you could overclock all the initial Ryzen processors, while Intel locked you to specials skus of CPU and motherboard
  - greggsy 5y ago
    It’s basically innovation 101: don’t spend more money developing something if you know you customers needs are already met. They likely knew what apple were up to with efficiency cores several years ago, and only decided to accelerate manufacturing of Alder lake once they realised the market was cool with that form or architecture.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      "Innovation 101: don't innovate if there's no demand for" doesn't sound like innovation to me.
      - touisteur 5y ago
        Putting effort where demand is, doesn't seem like the stupidest strategy to me. Creating demand for a new kind of product or service is nice, but reaching a market where their needs are, seems clever. What baffles me about this 'innovate on something else than peak perf' is... What did they innovate on massively instead then, if not that? Apart from AVX512?
        q-big 5y ago
        > Putting effort where demand is, doesn't seem like the stupidest strategy to me. It can indeed be a sensible business strategy, but it will much less likely lead to remarkable innovations.
- cowmix 5y ago
  Back in ~2012 I ran the Python Meetup here in Phoenix. One of the compiler leads for Atom processor attended and he basically told the tale that the Atom processor was being neutered. Intel higher ups were worried the Atom was getting too close to desktop/server processor performance. They were very concerned about cannibalization from within. Also, even then, Intel thought very little of mobile processors.
  - AyyWS 5y ago
    The classic tale of protect the dinosaur technology. Xerox Alto PC, Kodiac killing their own digital camera, etc.
  - nickm12 5y ago
    That's disappointing if true. If you don't cannibalize your business, someone else will.
- cestith 5y ago
  Interesting processors? Yes, Intel released IA64 with Itanium which was interesting and a dud in the market. Then they came up with Xeon Phi, which was a dud in the market. Then they brought Larabee, which was a failure in the market. Part of Larabee's issues did stem from process limitations. Intel had every opportunity to hedge its bets by buying from TSMC, Samsung, or others just as everyone did, but kept sinking more money into their own foundries without getting what they paid for. Meanwhile AMD gave the market what customers clamored for: a 64-bit extension to the IA32 platform. Then AMD gave us massively performant APUs. Then AMD gave us multi-die packaging and left the IO die on a more sensible process for that function while using smaller processes where frequencies matter more. Then Apple with some help from ARM gave us a SOC for laptop and desktop use that's frankly kind of embarrassing AMD and Intel, not so much for the core design really as its integration with memory. Intel isn't just unlucky here. They've made a series of serious missteps going back a couple of decades now.
mhh__ 5y ago
Do you realize that Apple silicon is the result of decades of chip design experience? They didn't just decide to do it Q3 next year, one day. Intel rested on their laurels because AMD almost wiped themselves out, which led to them getting complacent with the process. The actual designs were quite good, it took AMD a few years of better process and newer designs to properly dethrone intel (which intel have now reclaimed in the mid range, this will now yo-yo as it should always do)
- gwd 5y ago
  > Intel rested on their laurels because AMD almost wiped themselves out You mean, Intel almost illegally wiped AMD out using its monopoly position in the x86 market: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Bulldozer was terrible
    - gwd 5y ago
      Hard to innovate properly when your income stream is artificially restricted.
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        Then how did Ryzen work?
        neogodless 5y ago
        Semi-custom (aka console) chips kept them afloat, and they executed well on Ryzen while Intel made modest year-over-year improvements. Doesn't mean they weren't working on a relatively tight R&D budget, though.
        mhh__ 5y ago
rob74 5y ago
Beside "being able to switch from x86", there are some other factors that make this feat look easier than it actually is: - building on the ARM architecture, which (1) saved them a lot of design costs and (2) being a simpler architecture already has a "built-in" performance advantage over x86. - having years of experience already with the "A-series" of chips used in iPhones and iPads since 2010. Everyone is talking about "Apple silicon" now, but these predecessors are often forgotten. - having a privileged partnership with TSMC, where they have access to the latest and best processes and priority over all other TSMC customers.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  You're forgetting the most important one: - This is not heir first rodeo. They've migrated from PowerPC to x86 and developed first Rosetta, UniversalBinary format and related machinery. They've tapped into that experience, and it went way way smoother.
  - tines 5y ago
    It's a small nitpick but I think technically they moved from PowerPC, not POWER.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Yeah, you’re right, sorry. Fixed it. :)
  - cestith 5y ago
    Just within Mac they've gone from 680x0 to PowerPC (related to POWER but separate), to AMD64, to Apple Silicon. Before the Mac, they also had the 6502 and 6800 platforms.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      However, as far as I can remember, they didn’t had to make a transition plan like they did in Intel transition. They had to research how to make it completely seamless that time, for the first time.
StreamBright 5y ago
Absolutely. I wasn't expecting Apple to beat any decent current GPU with the performance. What I like about the M1 is that I get 60-70% of the performance with a chip that is much smaller and cooler than the GPUs it beats. I think for a long time we were thinking about computers as big bulky noise heat generators and Apple just shows the way that we can achieve roughly the same in a much smaller equipment that is much cooler (in terms of temperature). This is why M1 is a breakthrough for me.
- neogodless 5y ago
  > a chip that is much smaller and cooler I assume you mean "enclosure" that's smaller? M1 Ultra is 114 billion transistors, while the RTX 3090 is 28 billion. (Not sure of physical size of the chips, though - do you have a reference for that?) Original point stands, of course, on efficiency/heat!
  - ac29 5y ago
    > Not sure of physical size of the chips, though - do you have a reference for that? Anandtech has M1 Max at 432 mm2, Wikipedia has 3090 at 628 mm2. So, since M1 Ultra is 2x M1 Max, it is physically larger than the 3090.
    - rovr138 5y ago
      If that's for the full chip M1 chip, not just GPU, we also need to consider the i9 transistors on the benchmark.
      - Macha 4y ago
        The last time Intel released transistor count was for the i9-7980XE. It's a physically larger 18 core chip on the same process node as the 10 core 10900K tested, and googling says it had 9 billion transistors. If we assume that their improvements on 14nm let them fit all the same chips as the larger CPU into the newer one, then.... the i9 transistor count doesn't make a meaningful difference to the comparison.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
The mere fact that Apple's claims to challenge NVidia's best weren't dismissed with a laughable graph, and instead were concluded to be "well, a bit of a marketing stretch, but not a bad attempt Apple"... When Intel has been failing at discrete graphics competition with ATI/NVidia for... two decades? Yet Apple cranks out a functional competitor a year after their first desktop chip. Yes they probably have lots of experience with integrated graphics on SOC for the iPhones so this isn't totally out of the blue. But still. What has Intel been doing all these years? Is it THAT dysfunctional? Add to the failures of VLIW/Itanium, loss of the SSD crown, underwhelming XPoint, no ARM competitors, no real position in mobile, twice getting passed up by AMD in the performance race, a company with 1/10th, possibly 1/100th the resources.
- mmis1000 5y ago
  Intel did make GPU recently, I think? I though they have at least improved from "Just don't play games on this" to "Plays if it isn't power hungry". Consider they are not really doing anything about gaming in the past 10(?) years. It is a decent improvement.

Sporktacular 5y ago

They've been trying to move into other non-x86 architectures. Had they taken off they would have been in a more competitive position now.

q-big 5y ago

> Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, What evidence do you have for that? Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). They even back-ported some of their planned CPU architectures to their working 14 nm process "just to get something out". Since these processors were not developed with 14 nm in mind, they of course were not as good as they could have been.

ColonelPhantom 5y ago
Intel did have any major advances from 2nd gen all the way until the 7th. The advancements were generally small (single-digit often) IPC or clock speed improvements. Only after AMD released Ryzen, Intel had to respond at their 8th gen by cranking up core counts. And IPC did not have any increases, until 11th gen(the backported arch you mentioned). In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small.
- morganvachon 5y ago
  > In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small. Two of my Linux workstations are Sandy Bridge and Kaby Lake, and my real world experience bears this out. I can't distinguish between the two for everyday use cases; only synthetic benchmarks show any real advantage in the newer system. I can't speak for Windows performance differences, as my only Windows system is my gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 3600, which of course trounces both of the workstations no matter the OS.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gigaflop 5y ago
    Are there still software features exclusive to Intel's chips? I remember my dabble in Android Studio was painful, since the 'simulated device' functionality was only available on Intel, while I had some FX-8??? AMD chip. I'm not in the market for a new gaming PC quite yet, but it's also going to be a personal workstation, so I don't want to deal with anything like above if it can be helped.
    - scns 5y ago
      Get a Ryzen. Intel is restricting many features like ECC, overclocking or virtualization (important for emulators/android development) to certain processors/chipsets. If you want to save money, get a used workstation. ECC -> Xeon/C OC -> K/Z Virtualization -> Xeon&non-K/C&H
      - sliken 5y ago
        Intel caved a little, alder lake consumer chips have ECC ... if you use the right chipset: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-enables-ecc-on-12th-gen-core-cpus https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-enables-ecc-on-12th-...
      - gigaflop 5y ago
        Looks like it's time to update the fantasy roster on pc part picker. A shame, since it had such a nice aesthetic! The Vision D looks so clean and well-featured By the time I get around to actually building it, there may be some similarly-styled mini-ITX AM4 motherboards, so not all hope is lost.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
Yeah, I've always been pretty skeptical of the "Intel just sat doing nothing" narrative. The impression I got back in the day is that they went quite hard on their 10nm process with a reasonably ambitious set of changes, then failed to scale it to production. That had substantial knock-on effects including delays to the associated microarchitectures as well as subsequent nodes and backports. Regardless of the reasons I hope they recover; multiple providers of cutting-edge fabrication technology will be essential.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Intel has absolutely been lazy and literally just gave 5% performance increase per year for quite some time. When AMD was making shitty processors, Intel was just trying to squeeze as much money as possible from marginal upgrades. You can run Windows on a Intel cpu that is 10 years old and notice hardly any difference in performance. And on the other hand, they changed everything. Their cpus are actually innovative and really fast, and brought the entire multi core thing into consumer hands in a real way.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Closi 5y ago
> Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). Intel was just doing what they have been doing for the last 40 years - building faster x86 CPU's. They weren't even considering something as grand for desktop/laptops as Apple was with the M1 (i.e. a fully integrated SOC). I don't think they were twiddling their thumbs to be fair - they were probably pushing hard in the same direction they have been pushing in for the last 40 years, but failed to see the industry change under their feet.
- tallanvor 5y ago
  It's expected that they're trying to build chips that are faster on x86 rather than switch to an entirely new architecture - they can't switch without the full support of Microsoft and at least some major Linux distributions, not to mention the OEMs they sell their chips to.
  - Closi 4y ago
    They absolutely could have built an ARM chip. The fact that Microsoft has released several ARM laptops but selected Qualcomm to provide the processors suggests that Intel at least had an opportunity to play the game, they just never came to the table. It’s hardly Microsoft slowing them down when Microsoft is ahead of Intel on this, but their reluctance to push forwards means that they are now behind. It’s not Microsoft’s job to push intel anyway, it’s intels job to create a product so compelling that their partners adopt it. If they want the support of major Linux distros, they just have to write it themselves rather than wait for volunteers to do their work for them.
- q-big 5y ago
  > They weren't even considering something as grand for desktop/laptops as Apple was with the M1 (i.e. a fully integrated SOC). Perhaps I misinterpret your argument, but it is my impression that Intel (and also AMD!) did huge steps into that direction, just in a more incremental way than what Apple did: - integrated GPU: check - integrated memory controller: check - integrated northbridge: check: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Northbridge_(computing)&oldid=1070541069#Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Northbridge_(comp... - developing a smartphone SoC: Intel did invest serious money into it and developed SoFIA and Broxton. Intel even strongly subsidized smartphone producers to use them. This all turned out to be a huge commercial failure and thus Intel left the smartphone SoC business. It is also not the case that a fully-integrated SoC is "better". Rather having not everything in one SoC enabled much more flexibility for OEMs. Fully integrated SoC versus more chips is rather a trade-off between various goals.
bayindirh 5y ago
> Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors... No. Intel just wanted to show some little improvements to keep performance gap constant, hide their neat tricks until competition catch up, and use them when clients or the market really demanded it. The only notable efforts I've seen were reducing performance penalty of SpeedStep performance switching, making better memory controllers to "Catch" AMD, and other power-gating and independent throttling capabilities to address density issues in systems. When fab/power/thermal issues became apparent, they started to hide AVX/AVX2 frequencies, created frankenprocessors for some applications, etc. However, I've seen no real effort to make groundbreaking innovations in x86 space rather than protecting what they already had. Performance counters, and other underlying piping to make processor observable was nice though. As a result, I can still use a 3rd generation i7 as a daily driver for almost all tasks at hand, including development. The only definitive performance difference shows itself when I run my scientific code after compiling it with platform platform specific optimizations on newer systems. On that regards, an M1 MacBook air can be 25% faster than a 7th gen 7700K processor, and I find it ironic.
- q-big 5y ago
  > However, I've seen no real effort to make groundbreaking innovations in x86 space rather than protecting what they already had. I consider what AVX-512 has to offer to be highly innovative. Unluckily, just when they planned to introduce AVX-512 into most desktop/laptop CPUs (not just server CPUs or special-purpose accelerators), the problems with 10 nm occured. So this was delayed a lot and even today, many desktop/laptop CPUs of Intel have no support for this feature. Also Intel TSX was in my opinion really innovative (even though this feature was to my knowledge mostly used in (business) databases; what a pity).
  - duped 5y ago
    I wouldn't call wider SIMD lanes terribly innovative. Particularly when they suffer from power costs to evaluate, time penalties just to fill the registers with enough data from cache or memory, and real workloads don't benefit from SIMD as much in practice when compilers are terrible at autovectorization (and humans are only marginally better at doing it manually). AVX-512 is an example of a feature that improves special cases that show up in faux-workloads (eg: fancy benchmarks and HPC) but does not manifest higher performance for the vast majority of workloads, including things that ostensibly should be embarrassingly parallel and reap gains from SIMD.
Decabytes 5y ago
We spent years with quad core i7 processors being the norm, with higher core count processors being locked to Intels HEDT platform. When Ryzen came out all of a sudden the i7 8700k was able to be a 6 core processor instead of a 4 core. Then it wasn’t until Alder lake released in November of last year that we finally got desktop processors that weren’t on 14nm+++ (or however many + it was at). That’s not including the fact that you could overclock all the initial Ryzen processors, while Intel locked you to specials skus of CPU and motherboard
- greggsy 5y ago
  It’s basically innovation 101: don’t spend more money developing something if you know you customers needs are already met. They likely knew what apple were up to with efficiency cores several years ago, and only decided to accelerate manufacturing of Alder lake once they realised the market was cool with that form or architecture.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    "Innovation 101: don't innovate if there's no demand for" doesn't sound like innovation to me.
    - touisteur 5y ago
      Putting effort where demand is, doesn't seem like the stupidest strategy to me. Creating demand for a new kind of product or service is nice, but reaching a market where their needs are, seems clever. What baffles me about this 'innovate on something else than peak perf' is... What did they innovate on massively instead then, if not that? Apart from AVX512?
      - q-big 5y ago
        > Putting effort where demand is, doesn't seem like the stupidest strategy to me. It can indeed be a sensible business strategy, but it will much less likely lead to remarkable innovations.
cowmix 5y ago
Back in ~2012 I ran the Python Meetup here in Phoenix. One of the compiler leads for Atom processor attended and he basically told the tale that the Atom processor was being neutered. Intel higher ups were worried the Atom was getting too close to desktop/server processor performance. They were very concerned about cannibalization from within. Also, even then, Intel thought very little of mobile processors.
- AyyWS 5y ago
  The classic tale of protect the dinosaur technology. Xerox Alto PC, Kodiac killing their own digital camera, etc.
- nickm12 5y ago
  That's disappointing if true. If you don't cannibalize your business, someone else will.
cestith 5y ago
Interesting processors? Yes, Intel released IA64 with Itanium which was interesting and a dud in the market. Then they came up with Xeon Phi, which was a dud in the market. Then they brought Larabee, which was a failure in the market. Part of Larabee's issues did stem from process limitations. Intel had every opportunity to hedge its bets by buying from TSMC, Samsung, or others just as everyone did, but kept sinking more money into their own foundries without getting what they paid for. Meanwhile AMD gave the market what customers clamored for: a 64-bit extension to the IA32 platform. Then AMD gave us massively performant APUs. Then AMD gave us multi-die packaging and left the IO die on a more sensible process for that function while using smaller processes where frequencies matter more. Then Apple with some help from ARM gave us a SOC for laptop and desktop use that's frankly kind of embarrassing AMD and Intel, not so much for the core design really as its integration with memory. Intel isn't just unlucky here. They've made a series of serious missteps going back a couple of decades now.

mhh__ 5y ago

Do you realize that Apple silicon is the result of decades of chip design experience? They didn't just decide to do it Q3 next year, one day. Intel rested on their laurels because AMD almost wiped themselves out, which led to them getting complacent with the process. The actual designs were quite good, it took AMD a few years of better process and newer designs to properly dethrone intel (which intel have now reclaimed in the mid range, this will now yo-yo as it should always do)

gwd 5y ago
> Intel rested on their laurels because AMD almost wiped themselves out You mean, Intel almost illegally wiped AMD out using its monopoly position in the x86 market: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Bulldozer was terrible
  - gwd 5y ago
    Hard to innovate properly when your income stream is artificially restricted.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      Then how did Ryzen work?
      - neogodless 5y ago
        Semi-custom (aka console) chips kept them afloat, and they executed well on Ryzen while Intel made modest year-over-year improvements. Doesn't mean they weren't working on a relatively tight R&D budget, though.
      - mhh__ 5y ago

rob74 5y ago

Beside "being able to switch from x86", there are some other factors that make this feat look easier than it actually is: - building on the ARM architecture, which (1) saved them a lot of design costs and (2) being a simpler architecture already has a "built-in" performance advantage over x86. - having years of experience already with the "A-series" of chips used in iPhones and iPads since 2010. Everyone is talking about "Apple silicon" now, but these predecessors are often forgotten. - having a privileged partnership with TSMC, where they have access to the latest and best processes and priority over all other TSMC customers.

bayindirh 5y ago
You're forgetting the most important one: - This is not heir first rodeo. They've migrated from PowerPC to x86 and developed first Rosetta, UniversalBinary format and related machinery. They've tapped into that experience, and it went way way smoother.
- tines 5y ago
  It's a small nitpick but I think technically they moved from PowerPC, not POWER.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Yeah, you’re right, sorry. Fixed it. :)
- cestith 5y ago
  Just within Mac they've gone from 680x0 to PowerPC (related to POWER but separate), to AMD64, to Apple Silicon. Before the Mac, they also had the 6502 and 6800 platforms.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    However, as far as I can remember, they didn’t had to make a transition plan like they did in Intel transition. They had to research how to make it completely seamless that time, for the first time.

StreamBright 5y ago

Absolutely. I wasn't expecting Apple to beat any decent current GPU with the performance. What I like about the M1 is that I get 60-70% of the performance with a chip that is much smaller and cooler than the GPUs it beats. I think for a long time we were thinking about computers as big bulky noise heat generators and Apple just shows the way that we can achieve roughly the same in a much smaller equipment that is much cooler (in terms of temperature). This is why M1 is a breakthrough for me.

neogodless 5y ago
> a chip that is much smaller and cooler I assume you mean "enclosure" that's smaller? M1 Ultra is 114 billion transistors, while the RTX 3090 is 28 billion. (Not sure of physical size of the chips, though - do you have a reference for that?) Original point stands, of course, on efficiency/heat!
- ac29 5y ago
  > Not sure of physical size of the chips, though - do you have a reference for that? Anandtech has M1 Max at 432 mm2, Wikipedia has 3090 at 628 mm2. So, since M1 Ultra is 2x M1 Max, it is physically larger than the 3090.
  - rovr138 5y ago
    If that's for the full chip M1 chip, not just GPU, we also need to consider the i9 transistors on the benchmark.
    - Macha 4y ago
      The last time Intel released transistor count was for the i9-7980XE. It's a physically larger 18 core chip on the same process node as the 10 core 10900K tested, and googling says it had 9 billion transistors. If we assume that their improvements on 14nm let them fit all the same chips as the larger CPU into the newer one, then.... the i9 transistor count doesn't make a meaningful difference to the comparison.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

The mere fact that Apple's claims to challenge NVidia's best weren't dismissed with a laughable graph, and instead were concluded to be "well, a bit of a marketing stretch, but not a bad attempt Apple"... When Intel has been failing at discrete graphics competition with ATI/NVidia for... two decades? Yet Apple cranks out a functional competitor a year after their first desktop chip. Yes they probably have lots of experience with integrated graphics on SOC for the iPhones so this isn't totally out of the blue. But still. What has Intel been doing all these years? Is it THAT dysfunctional? Add to the failures of VLIW/Itanium, loss of the SSD crown, underwhelming XPoint, no ARM competitors, no real position in mobile, twice getting passed up by AMD in the performance race, a company with 1/10th, possibly 1/100th the resources.

mmis1000 5y ago
Intel did make GPU recently, I think? I though they have at least improved from "Just don't play games on this" to "Plays if it isn't power hungry". Consider they are not really doing anything about gaming in the past 10(?) years. It is a decent improvement.