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I have a M1, got it because I wanted to try something new. Now I love my M1, but it’s a special time. They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architectur

I have a M1, got it because I wanted to try something new. Now I love my M1, but it’s a special time. They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. While apple is strategically buying up time on a limited production capacity like no one else can. Innovative design integrating all kind of slow components. I think it was an opportunity that won’t last, intel and amd are waking up to this fact. I see AMD and Intel coming up with some RISC and hybrid type solutions. Where they might not be able to do better is the PC integration. Memory and processing have always been separated and it’s going to be hard to integrate those just because of the cooperative structures. I think Apple can stay ahead if they keep going. If there is a M2 this year that is better, I’m buying it again with more memory, because M1 has been workable it’s not optimal for all my workflows.

scarface74 4y ago
The personal computing market is a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things. Apple alone sells more ARM based mobile devices than the entire worldwide PC market not including servers. Even with the server market, AWS is moving toward ARM where ever it can (disclaimer I work at AWS). Even if Intel regains momentum in the PC market, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if they can’t get into the mobile market.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Even if the PC market (including laptops) is quite a bit more than a nothingburger, the segment of the PC market that really cares about the top decile or two of performance for whatever reason (real or imagined) is tiny. A lot of people are fine with a 5 year old system that's still supported, or even a Chromebook at this point.
unfocussed_mike 4y ago
AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive. I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century. The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design. It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  I think Intel is too late. They can play catch up with the ARM market, but it will take time because there are are enough other players that they're not relevant enough to be on top again. That is unless they can out-innovate the competition, which I doubt, but who knows. Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
  - unfocussed_mike 4y ago
    Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Might take a decade for them to realise. Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong. Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      >Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
      - ravenstine 4y ago
        In fairness, are you not merely implying the opposite prediction? I'm sure there were people who thought pagers/beepers wouldn't instantaneously disappear from use, and there were plenty of developers who thought Java was going to be the language for the web. I'm not sure how pointing to the year of the Linux desktop is a good argument. Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
> They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. Apple is singlehandedly using up almost all of TSMC's 5nm processes. There are no smaller processes available anywhere in the world, and Samsung's is disappointing. Processes that have largely been driven by demand from AMD and Apple (EPYCs and Ryzens from AMD, and Apple's mobile chips). They capitalized on nothing except having fat wads of cash to slap people around with. Additionally, it's not "being a RISC architecture" that makes the M1 a beast. Slap a 5950X on a SoC with directly available memory and GPU, and you get similar (better, even, considering current gen CPUs do get better performance already) results. "Deep integration of an entire stack makes things more performant" is not a new thing, it's merely that Intel and AMD have been upholding the contract of x86/64 that is interoperability and replaceability (well, Intel has been doing some socket fuckery for upgrades, but upgrades are still entirely possible), and Apple can afford to throw it away. EDIT: bUt ThIs oVeRlOoKs PoWeR CoNsUmPtIoN I swear I'm going to come out with a souped up raspberry pi and tell HN "look, it uses 1W of power for 10GFlops" and you would buy it because tHe PoWeR pEr wATt iS BeTTeR !11!!
- muro 4y ago
  It's possible, yet noone is doing that. I wish someone did!
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    The Udoo Bolt v8 is about the tiniest x86 "SoC" that I know that runs a Ryzen V1605B, 16GB of RAM and a Vega 8 that costs $500 and scores about half of the M1 Max in Passmark. Not too shabby for something that still has to deal with DDR4-2400 and storage far away!
- pschastain 4y ago
  This overlooks power consumption
- tedd4u 4y ago
  That might compete on performance but I wonder how “easy” it would be to compete on the power-performance curve.
philistine 4y ago
You're rewriting history there. Intel has tried, tried, TRIED! to compete against ARM since it's been clear all the market growth was happening there around 2010. Their most credible strategy was to produce modems to steal Qualcomm's insane margins on those chips and break the forced mariage of their modems with their not-so-good processors. It was such a resounding failure that Apple bought the whole division for scraps. I don't see how Intel suddenly gets its shit together now that the ARM chips are in computers. The fact that the chips ended up in computers is a direct consequence of their decade of failure. I expect Apple to stay ahead of Intel and AMD in terms of power per watt for a decade at least.
Kye 4y ago
It's kind of the same situation with Tesla vs. the big car companies. They were always going to catch up, and they made huge progress in the last few years. AMD and Intel have spent decades trading places, sometimes with unethical practices that would make 2000s Microsoft blush. I'm not sure Apple is prepared for what happens when AMD and Intel both come for them.

scarface74 4y ago

The personal computing market is a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things. Apple alone sells more ARM based mobile devices than the entire worldwide PC market not including servers. Even with the server market, AWS is moving toward ARM where ever it can (disclaimer I work at AWS). Even if Intel regains momentum in the PC market, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if they can’t get into the mobile market.

ghaff 4y ago
Even if the PC market (including laptops) is quite a bit more than a nothingburger, the segment of the PC market that really cares about the top decile or two of performance for whatever reason (real or imagined) is tiny. A lot of people are fine with a 5 year old system that's still supported, or even a Chromebook at this point.

unfocussed_mike 4y ago

AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive. I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century. The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design. It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.

ravenstine 4y ago
I think Intel is too late. They can play catch up with the ARM market, but it will take time because there are are enough other players that they're not relevant enough to be on top again. That is unless they can out-innovate the competition, which I doubt, but who knows. Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
- unfocussed_mike 4y ago
  Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Might take a decade for them to realise. Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong. Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    >Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
    - ravenstine 4y ago
      In fairness, are you not merely implying the opposite prediction? I'm sure there were people who thought pagers/beepers wouldn't instantaneously disappear from use, and there were plenty of developers who thought Java was going to be the language for the web. I'm not sure how pointing to the year of the Linux desktop is a good argument. Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

> They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. Apple is singlehandedly using up almost all of TSMC's 5nm processes. There are no smaller processes available anywhere in the world, and Samsung's is disappointing. Processes that have largely been driven by demand from AMD and Apple (EPYCs and Ryzens from AMD, and Apple's mobile chips). They capitalized on nothing except having fat wads of cash to slap people around with. Additionally, it's not "being a RISC architecture" that makes the M1 a beast. Slap a 5950X on a SoC with directly available memory and GPU, and you get similar (better, even, considering current gen CPUs do get better performance already) results. "Deep integration of an entire stack makes things more performant" is not a new thing, it's merely that Intel and AMD have been upholding the contract of x86/64 that is interoperability and replaceability (well, Intel has been doing some socket fuckery for upgrades, but upgrades are still entirely possible), and Apple can afford to throw it away. EDIT: bUt ThIs oVeRlOoKs PoWeR CoNsUmPtIoN I swear I'm going to come out with a souped up raspberry pi and tell HN "look, it uses 1W of power for 10GFlops" and you would buy it because tHe PoWeR pEr wATt iS BeTTeR !11!!

muro 4y ago
It's possible, yet noone is doing that. I wish someone did!
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  The Udoo Bolt v8 is about the tiniest x86 "SoC" that I know that runs a Ryzen V1605B, 16GB of RAM and a Vega 8 that costs $500 and scores about half of the M1 Max in Passmark. Not too shabby for something that still has to deal with DDR4-2400 and storage far away!
pschastain 4y ago
This overlooks power consumption
tedd4u 4y ago
That might compete on performance but I wonder how “easy” it would be to compete on the power-performance curve.

philistine 4y ago

You're rewriting history there. Intel has tried, tried, TRIED! to compete against ARM since it's been clear all the market growth was happening there around 2010. Their most credible strategy was to produce modems to steal Qualcomm's insane margins on those chips and break the forced mariage of their modems with their not-so-good processors. It was such a resounding failure that Apple bought the whole division for scraps. I don't see how Intel suddenly gets its shit together now that the ARM chips are in computers. The fact that the chips ended up in computers is a direct consequence of their decade of failure. I expect Apple to stay ahead of Intel and AMD in terms of power per watt for a decade at least.

Kye 4y ago

It's kind of the same situation with Tesla vs. the big car companies. They were always going to catch up, and they made huge progress in the last few years. AMD and Intel have spent decades trading places, sometimes with unethical practices that would make 2000s Microsoft blush. I'm not sure Apple is prepared for what happens when AMD and Intel both come for them.