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Alleged Intel source: "Apple scares us more than AMD"
- Thread starter Colstan
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“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” - Ed Colligan
This is the hubris that ends entire companies. One must always be ahead of the game, or be doomed to fall behind.
This isn't about Apple more than it is the power of ARM. Intel tried to break out with the HP sourced Itanium IA-64 processors - but even at their heyday they were never much in demand, and next month sees the end of that era.
Now, along come Apple and, just like Intel did with HPs tech, they took ARMs tech and made it their own, except this time they scored out the park on the first throw.
All Intel has is Intel - and with the issues that are still plaguing them with Meltdown etc., they're seeing not only Apple win with the M1 Chip but also seeing Microsofts moves with ARM.
Extrapolate that out a couple of years and imagine an ARM world with Windows, Linux AND Mac OS able to run on ARM based processors.
Microsoft did it before with the IA-64 Windows Server SKUs which never took off due to the general dissatisfaction with the processor. This may not be the case this time around.
All of a sudden Intel's staring at an ARM world...
I'm not sure it matters how many million silicon SoCs Apple make a year - it's all proprietary stuff - fast revolving portables - Ipads, iphones etc, that's not a market traditionally occupied by any of the big players.
It's also quite clear that Silicon is not going to be a race of any kind. It's going to be a crawl. I honestly couldn't believe that Apple didn't follow M1 with M1X within six months. I thought they had it all planned and ready. But one chip a year? Yeah, that "reign" in synthetic benching is not going to last long. And again, don't get me wrong, I'll most likely buy whatever follows M1, but heck - to wreck the entire lineup (cause like - WTF would buy Intel mac now, right?), screw up entire macOS software environment, render every single third party hardware useless, bulldoze through the entire industry established around upgrades and maintenance - to do all that and not have at least three different chip iterations in immediate pipeline for staggered rollout. Wow. That's some bad planning. I can't think of anything like this in modern computer industry. Can you imagine if Intel tried something like this? "Hello customers, we've just rolled out our new chip. This will be the only chip for all your devices this year. It's available in two "almost no memory" configurations - and in two versions - a fully working A-grade one and a slightly crippled one from B-stock bin, running floppy on some cores with half the ports disabled. Orders are open. Line up.".
Apple Silicon will never be big enough competition for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks unless something of value to PCs and notebooks runs on it in spectacular enough fashion to justify the cost. Otherwise it's just a chip for pretty and expensive browsing machines. For synthetic bench record breaking Safaribooks.
For ages processing speed competition was maintained among Pro users - because Macs were preferred weapon of choice to video and audio editing industry. Pro market made Apple. Pro market rescued Apple after all mistakes. All of us are here, because people making movies and music shown us it was ok to overpay $$$$ for a basic spec PC with the lowest of graphics running weird version of BSD, because you could do some proper serious **** with it.
But after years of Apple doing everything in their power to alienate Pro market this competition is nearly over. Unless you are (like myself) bound by Apple specific environment for video or audio tasks, any Pro money will be far better spent on Windows workstation. And yes - we don't give two flying monkeys about "power per watt" and such. If it can run more frames per second at 3kW, we will gladly give it 4kW just in case.
For everything else - whether it's storage, third party apps, graphics acceleration, capture devices, scalability and upgradability - it's no secret that everything is far cheaper, more stable and better performing on windows workstations than Macs.
It's no secret that you don't buy Macs for Adobe performance, because $20,000 Mac Pro will easily loose to $4,000 PC workstation. You buy Mac Pro because your workflow is bound to FCPX or Logic Pro.
But M1 is a bit of a game changer. But not the way you think. It breaks the software our work revolved around. From now on 99% of plugins in our workflows are in 'legacy mode'. It must be run in x86 emulator to work at all. This revolution for faster browsing make our pro work slower. New versions, if they eventually appear at all - will probably have to be purchased again, it's unlikely that companies will rewrite them and keep optimising them for free. So - if we have to rebuild our workflows over the next few years from scratch - we might as well do it in environment that's cheaper, more powerful, more upgradable and won't surprise us with dropping OS support for half of our workstations in two or three years.
WTF cares about you 'alleged pros", you ask. Well, the bottom of hell pit is lined up with corporations larger than life that at some point in history, were once "faster", "more powerful" than boring beige PC workstations. The Apple PowerPCs, Sun's, DEC Digitals, SGI's, Cray's of the yesteryear. Benchmark aces. Unsinkable. Nouveaux. Pretty. Stunning designs. All dead and forgotten. All of them lost their purpose on "pro" market and shortly later any speed advantage or lack thereof was no longer important. Food for thought/two pence worth.
For all practical purposes, they already are. They lost out on mobile to ARM and those are the majority of CPUs shipped in the world today. All of Android, all of iOS, all of iPadOS and now macOS. Not to mention the completely separate world of embedded processors. Even just looking at application processors it is ARM to a large degree.
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AWS is offering VMs with its own ARM Server CPUs. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are planning their own ARM server offerings. If MacBooks start embarrassing high end Windows Laptops, Microsoft will be forced to get serious about Windows On Arm.
I think the Apple Silicon rollout is going fine. If you need an Intel Mac, buy an Intel Mac, I did. The current ARM Macs are aimed at the consumer end of the market but they already account for more than half of Mac sales so software vendors are forced to support MacOS fat binaries.I'm not sure it matters how many million silicon SoCs Apple make a year - it's all proprietary stuff - fast revolving portables - Ipads, iphones etc, that's not a market traditionally occupied by any of the big players.
It's also quite clear that Silicon is not going to be a race of any kind. It's going to be a crawl. I honestly couldn't believe that Apple didn't follow M1 with M1X within six months. I thought they had it all planned and ready. But one chip a year? Yeah, that "reign" in synthetic benching is not going to last long. And again, don't get me wrong, I'll most likely buy whatever follows M1, but heck - to wreck the entire lineup (cause like - WTF would buy Intel mac now, right?), screw up entire macOS software environment, render every single third party hardware useless, bulldoze through the entire industry established around upgrades and maintenance - to do all that and not have at least three different chip iterations in immediate pipeline for staggered rollout. Wow. That's some bad planning. I can't think of anything like this in modern computer industry. Can you imagine if Intel tried something like this? "Hello customers, we've just rolled out our new chip. This will be the only chip for all your devices this year. It's available in two "almost no memory" configurations - and in two versions - a fully working A-grade one and a slightly crippled one from B-stock bin, running floppy on some cores with half the ports disabled. Orders are open. Line up.".
Apple Silicon will never be big enough competition for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks unless something of value to PCs and notebooks runs on it in spectacular enough fashion to justify the cost. Otherwise it's just a chip for pretty and expensive browsing machines. For synthetic bench record breaking Safaribooks.
By the time the serious Pro stuff is available, developers will have had plenty of time to get their software ready.
Apple is dealing with a brand new TSMC node. They are ramping up production while at the same time getting ready to ship 100's of millions of A15 SoCs for the iPhone. The majority of TSMC's 5nm production has to be reserved for the iPhone. It is just a financial reality. I'm sure the next SoC is ready to go from an engineering point of view but that doesn't mean that TSMC currently has the capacity to manufacture them in the quantity that Apple needs to release a product. And there are obviously other supply chain issues that have nothing to do with the next Apple silicon SoC.
The reality is that we don't know if the current ASi production has been running to plan or if Apple got unexpectedly delayed.
Quite a lot to unpack here....
1) Apple Silicon will never be big enough competition for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks unless something of value to PCs and notebooks runs on it in spectacular enough fashion to justify the cost.
What do you classify as "something of value"? I've moved pretty much all of my development, productivity, communication and creative software to the M1 without issue. It runs noticeably faster than the $4000 MBP16 I bought in 2019, and a third of the price. Is is "spectacular"? Maybe not, but it is certainly impressive. My value judgement is whether I can do my work better on it. I can. So that is of value to me.
2) New versions, if they eventually appear at all - will probably have to be purchased again, it's unlikely that companies will rewrite them and keep optimising them for free
Surely that depends on the software vendor, not Apple. I haven't had to repurchase any software to get it run on the M1, many of which are native apps.
3) It's also not anything that the "big boys" haven't seen before - to a general PC market M1 running macOS is nothing more than another Chromebook with Tegra or Windows running on Snapdragons. And just as relevant to the needs of general public. Useless to gamers. Useless to corporate market running specific productivity suites on policy locked networks.
Seriously? The M1 Macs are far better than a Chromebook or current WoA offerings. Do you really own one? "just as relevant to general public"? The general public should view the new Macs in the same way they view current Macs, just better. They may be seen as "premium" or "too expensive", but I doubt the public perception has changed much. I can't speak for gamers, but I doubt hardcore gamers would consider any Mac. For casual use, I expect they are OK. As for corporate use - it depends. Most businesses I work with have a BYOD policy, and while they may not support Macs directly, they accept their use, so I don't think anything has changed there. Apple Silicon or Intel is irrelevant - they either support / tolerate Macs, or they don't.
4) Your beef with Apple Silicon seems to be lack of native plug-in support (presumably for Logic or FCPX). Whose responsibility is this though? Developers have had access to dev machine for over a year (admittedly the A12Z dev boxes didn't work for everyone). Apple has provided a platform; it's up to software vendors to support it or not. If your chosen software isn't supported, then Apple Silicon is not a choice for you. Neither in Windows or Linux for Logic or FCPX.... are you hassling Linux forums with the same complaints?
5) So, my M1 Mac Mini at the moment is just a brilliantly fast browsing portable device, with little memory, with almost no expansion ports, next to no native IO for video or audio capture, tons of hardware issues, and a ******* headache to anyone who just needs to do their work (beside daily drool from Apple adoration channels on YouTube).
Well, my M1 Mac Mini is one of the best computers I've ever used, and has shown itself well up to the task of professional work (development, cloud infrastructure design & operation, work in large project teams). It has more expansion ports than my MBP16, works just fine with my audio interfaces and video capture device (pray tell which computers have native IO for video and audio capture? I presume you mean video and digital audio inputs on the machine, without the need for interfaces ), has no hardware issues to speak of (I did have some Bluetooth connectivity issues but these appear to be resolve by recent updates)
I'm sorry that your experience with the M1 Mac has been poor. Mine has been excellent. Perhaps your expectations need adjustment.
If anyone has the capital, the market power, and the human resources to disrupt Intel, it's Apple. I'm not convinced that they have the ambition to do this though. They have so much more on their plate. They just want to make a powerful yet efficient chip that makes sense for their market and makes it easier to unify the experience across their product range.
without amd , intel is struggle with itanium. shall the name x86_64 amd. most gaming going to amd platform and work enviroment to intel. The main problem is end user now. It dam pricy graphic card and laptop today. Mac mini m1 the best price for the workjob whom had old equipment. Apple user don't have to think viruses everyday like windows . Same as linux for high end platform, rare virus but still existed.
Have you looked at Apple's current product range - and prices - not to mention their historical product range?
They could have entered the cheapo laptop market years ago, but that would likely decimate their premium products.
Not gonna happen. It's not how they do business.
Hell, you can't even buy a set of wheels for a MacPro for that kind of money!
Yeah, but Apple has a superior CPU design while nobody else does. ARM themselves don't seem to be able to design a core that outperforms state of the art x86 cores. Apples technology is unique as they managed to break the power efficiency barrier. It's not clear yet that anyone will be able to repeat this feat in the close future — no matter which ISA we are talking about.
And IA-64 was a flawed design, so that's a different story.
They have it planned and ready, but chips are not the only bottleneck. There are many other constraints. I agree that it's annoying that we must wait this long for prosumer hardware, but so far Apple's strategy has been sound. Achieve massive economy of scale with the most popular entry-level Macs, build up hype, wait until the software ecosystem matures and the pro software catches up.
I hope you are joking. This is exactly what Intel has been doing for years. They released Skylake in 2015 and since have just printed rebranded chips making them hotter and hotter to pretend that there are performance improvements. The promised 10nm chips were limited to quad-core low-power SKUs since 2018, it took them four years to launch 10nm CPUs for larger laptops. And there is still no 10nm tech on desktop. So yeah, if you are looking for Intel's M1 — that's the Ice Lake/Tiger Lake series. Only that Intel kept theirs without much advancement for four years.
Intel's big hope at this point is Alder Lake. They promise some real improvement in energy efficiency and 20% higher single-threaded performance over Tiger Lake. Sounds to me like it's just enough to match M1.
Yes, and now they are giving you a much better computer for the same $$$. Especially in tasks you mention (video ad audio) there won't be any competition to Apple for a very long while, simply because Apple is the only company that offers a low-cost heterogeneous computing platform with mature APIs. The only other platforms of similar capability are limited to datacenter and are not even shipping yet (Nvidia Grace, whatever AMD plans for CDNA).
If Apple's chips turn out to be "all that"... (And - from what I've followed so far - it seems that they are?!)
What's to stop them becoming a supplier to the "PC" computer market?
Does the "system on a chip" aspect of the M series exclude the possibility of them being used on non-Mac computers?
Admittedly - this would not follow Apple's existing strategy - selling products that are not direct to customer... But - I don't think Apple gives two hoots about becoming the dominant computer company any more, so supplying chips to Windows-based machines wouldn't really be an issue?
What's to stop them becoming a supplier to the "PC" computer market?
Does the "system on a chip" aspect of the M series exclude the possibility of them being used on non-Mac computers?
Admittedly - this would not follow Apple's existing strategy - selling products that are not direct to customer... But - I don't think Apple gives two hoots about becoming the dominant computer company any more, so supplying chips to Windows-based machines wouldn't really be an issue?
Lack of interest on Apple's side? They have a better business model than being supplier for other manufacturers.
They have superior chips with superior capabilities, and a software ecosystem that can take advantage of unique capabilities of those chips. Why would they give those chips to their competitors? What would the advantage be for Apple? They won't be able to make much money from selling them (their chips are already very expensive to manufacture because they use all this custom stuff), and manufacturing them from the third party is going to bottleneck the already scarce production for Apple's own products.
Na, that's just not going to happen. Bad business.
The noise that M1 made in the tech industry show that it is a big deal
1) Just one SoC made this, from now on they can only improve the "noise" level
2) The SoC brain is in Apples hands, until he leaves Apple, it has the upper hand, remember, Intel was where it was more than a decade ago thanks to the same brain,after he left Intel , intel begun a decreasing way
Again, Intel , amd sells/have dozens of chips, while Apple shake a little bit the tech industry with just M1 placed under 3-4 macs and this in just half a year
Think about the scaling and where we will be at the end of 2022 when we will have at least 2 or 3 more these SoC that can compete 40-60-100W with the 200W-300W
Apple also has the developers, and i saw how many of my apps started to be native after just 1 months, and others, after 3 or 4 months
1) Just one SoC made this, from now on they can only improve the "noise" level
2) The SoC brain is in Apples hands, until he leaves Apple, it has the upper hand, remember, Intel was where it was more than a decade ago thanks to the same brain,after he left Intel , intel begun a decreasing way
Again, Intel , amd sells/have dozens of chips, while Apple shake a little bit the tech industry with just M1 placed under 3-4 macs and this in just half a year
Think about the scaling and where we will be at the end of 2022 when we will have at least 2 or 3 more these SoC that can compete 40-60-100W with the 200W-300W
Apple also has the developers, and i saw how many of my apps started to be native after just 1 months, and others, after 3 or 4 months
I do hope that this brain is training more brains, and laying down the directions for young blood to take over.
Throwing my 2c in, I'm in the "acting as catalyst for change" camp in terms of threat to Intel.
However people are assuming that Apple being successful in their SoC designs means that other players can do the same thing just because they use aarch64, and that is not a given. Also I wonder how Nvidia taking over ARM (when/if it happens) will change market dynamics. Will jumping ship from intel dominated x86 to an ARM where Nvidia calls the shots without even an AMD to keep them semi-honest be palatable? Both Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Android) has spoken against Nvidias takeover, so it seems clear that they would regard it as detrimental to their future plans. And the Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers aren't ecstatic about replacing a lopsided duopoly with a monopoly vendor either.
Initially this is mitigated by IP contracts but when planning for the future it's obvious why putting your eggs in Nvidias basket may give pause.
Interestingly, insecurity about the future of the ARM ecosystem is going to boost x86, which is at least predictable in what they supply. Meanwhile Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.
However people are assuming that Apple being successful in their SoC designs means that other players can do the same thing just because they use aarch64, and that is not a given. Also I wonder how Nvidia taking over ARM (when/if it happens) will change market dynamics. Will jumping ship from intel dominated x86 to an ARM where Nvidia calls the shots without even an AMD to keep them semi-honest be palatable? Both Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Android) has spoken against Nvidias takeover, so it seems clear that they would regard it as detrimental to their future plans. And the Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers aren't ecstatic about replacing a lopsided duopoly with a monopoly vendor either.
Initially this is mitigated by IP contracts but when planning for the future it's obvious why putting your eggs in Nvidias basket may give pause.
Interestingly, insecurity about the future of the ARM ecosystem is going to boost x86, which is at least predictable in what they supply. Meanwhile Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.
