Alleged Intel source: "Apple scares us more than AMD"

[cocoua]

Regardless of any of this, I doubt that Apple is a significant threat to Intel or AMD. They are not interested in selling their chips to a third party, they do not target the server market, and they only offer products in the premium consumer segment. I think that long-term Apple might dominate the premium consumer as well as the mobile workstation and desktop video editing market, but I doubt they will surpass 15-20% of the PC market share.

Intel is threatened with death.

The whole world is waiting the M2 to see if X86 will be totally dead in 3 years.

NVIDIA has buy ARM Holdings, Microsoft is working harder than ever on the ARM Windows version and even Intel is planning to open new factories to manufacture ARM chips for others.

The whole silicon market could change beyond M2, and Intel could survive with different business model if want to be the giant it is today (ahem! IBM…)

 

[cocoua]

"My brothers wife's friends sister who knows someone who works at Intel....said Intel is more scared of Apple than AMD"

XD indeed…

Anyway, there is no doubt about the Intel's position about the ARM threat when has put so many efforts on campaigns to ridicule Macs and the new ARM factories rumors in USA.

 

[Lihp8270]

Intel is threatened with death.

The whole world is waiting the M2 to see if X86 will be totally dead in 3 years.

NVIDIA has buy ARM Holdings, Microsoft is working harder than ever on the ARM Windows version and even Intel is planning to open new factories to manufacture ARM chips for others.

The whole silicon market could change beyond M2, and Intel could survive with different business model if want to be the giant it is today (ahem! IBM…)

There’s no way x86 will be dead in a decade never mind 3 years.

Too many industries rely on huge software packages that run exclusively on Windows and x86.

 

[ian87w]

Regardless of any of this, I doubt that Apple is a significant threat to Intel or AMD. They are not interested in selling their chips to a third party, they do not target the server market, and they only offer products in the premium consumer segment. I think that long-term Apple might dominate the premium consumer as well as the mobile workstation and desktop video editing market, but I doubt they will surpass 15-20% of the PC market share.

It's not a direct threat from Apple that intel is afraid of. Apple Silicon paved the way for ARM to be in the consumer desktop. You have to remember that despite the "wintel" image, Microsoft have never been too fond of intel. Microsoft has been pushing for ARM computers into consumers since the days of Windows RT. Apple's total transition only solidifies that, and Microsoft is probably already working ultra hard to make Windows on ARM to be consumer ready. We see their prototypes (Windows RT up to Surface Pro X).

Once consumers accept and be comfortable with it, Microsoft will probably start ditching their legacy stuff further.

Obviously it won't happen overnight. There's also the enterprise market that moves very slowly. However, the enterprise side has been transitioning to cloud that the hardware doesn't matter anymore, be it x86 or ARM.

We won't see much difference in a year or two, but in 10 years, things can be wildly different than they are now. And that's probably what intel is afraid of. Once investors see that x86 is sunsetting and intel has nothing new, intel stocks can tank.

 

[11235813]

I have to use a Windows laptop for work with an Intel i5 CPU. Every time I hear its loud fans, I know Intel is toast. The cheapest M1 Air is a better laptop than 2x expensive Intel laptops in pretty much every aspect. This is only M1. Think about how it will be with M3 or M4. There's no way Intel can come from this much behind and compete. It's like old Kodak cameras with film vs. digital cameras with SD cards at the time. It'll take time to be official, but the fight is already over.

 

[psingh01]

Until windows and windows software work well enough on arm, they don’t have to worry too much about anyone else except amd. Apple isn’t giving their chip to anyone.

 

[leman]

Intel is threatened with death.

The whole world is waiting the M2 to see if X86 will be totally dead in 3 years.

It's not a direct threat from Apple that intel is afraid of. Apple Silicon paved the way for ARM to be in the consumer desktop. You have to remember that despite the "wintel" image, Microsoft have never been too fond of intel. Microsoft has been pushing for ARM computers into consumers since the days of Windows RT. Apple's total transition only solidifies that, and Microsoft is probably already working ultra hard to make Windows on ARM to be consumer ready. We see their prototypes (Windows RT up to Surface Pro X).

The big problem is still lack of high-performance ARM chips. Let’s be honest here, x86 CPUs are fast. They might not be the most energy-efficient kid in the block, but they deliver good performance. For ARM to threaten x86 globally, ARM needs to offer a competitive advantage.

What do we have right now in terms of ARM CPUs available to the third party? Cortex X1 on a 7nm node is roughly comparable to A12. It can’t compete with Tiger Lake and Intel is just as fast at the same power consumption. Cortex X2 is coming next year with promised 16% performance increase. That might make it an interesting choice for tablets/ultrabooks, but that’s about it. Server space is a bit different since ARM can leverage their good power efficiency and SIMD technologies. But again, at 5W power consumption, modern ARM cores are not any faster than modern x86 cores. And I doubt that anyone will be able to repeat Apples feat any time soon, because well, nobody so far came even close to building an ARM CPU quite like what Apple does. Maybe Qualcomm, now that they have acquired Nuvia (folks that have originally designed Apple CPUs).

I do agree that Apple broke a psychological block, and more folks will probably seek to challenge x86 hegemony. But that’s a very difficult thing to do.

 

[AgentMcGeek]

For ARM to threaten x86 globally, ARM needs to offer a competitive advantage.

You don't think that's already the case? I'd be ready to sacrifice some performance if that meant being able to game on the go for a half a day or even a whole day on a 13/14" form factor. That's not possible today. One of the groundbreaking side of M1 is that it opens up new use-cases.

Besides, I'm expecting M1X/M2 to be pretty competitive perf-wise, even against 11th Gen Intel and Zen 3 Ryzen (imho).

 

[cocoua]

There’s no way x86 will be dead in a decade never mind 3 years.

Too many industries rely on huge software packages that run exclusively on Windows and x86.

my bad, I was talking about PC for consumer market.

Anyway even their server business will be very affected and in mid term X86 will be a fraction of what is today.

 

[TiggrToo]

without amd , intel is struggle with itanium

They've given up with IA-64. It's been officially discontinued...

 

[TiggrToo]

my bad, I was talking about PC for consumer market.

Anyway even their server business will be very affected and in mid term X86 will be a fraction of what is today.

Doubtful on all counts.

 

[AgentMcGeek]

Me too. Rosetta 2 has proven very potent. Pro apps will either be ported to native or will run easy on Rosetta, in most cases.

 

[leman]

You don't think that's already the case? I'd be ready to sacrifice some performance if that meant being able to game on the go for a half a day or even a whole day on a 13/14" form factor. That's not possible today. One of the groundbreaking side of M1 is that it opens up new use-cases.

Besides, I'm expecting M1X/M2 to be pretty competitive perf-wise, even against 11th Gen Intel and Zen 3 Ryzen (imho).

Yes, but that is only possible with Apple CPUs. Other ARM CPUs are not nearly as performant. This is a common source of confusion: people see how fast M1 is and conclude that ARM has caught up with x86. But that is not true. Apple has caught up with x86, not ARM. Other ARM CPUs are 30-40% slower.

 

[AgentMcGeek]

Yes, I agree with you. However, with Intel, Nvidia and AMD all investing in big.LITTLE and ARM, I'm expecting that gap to somewhat narrow. The whole ecosystem will reorient towards ARM and away from x86. I still think Apple will maintain a safe lead though. Their system integration can't be matched.

 

[ian87w]

The big problem is still lack of high-performance ARM chips. Let’s be honest here, x86 CPUs are fast. They might not be the most energy-efficient kid in the block, but they deliver good performance. For ARM to threaten x86 globally, ARM needs to offer a competitive advantage.

What do we have right now in terms of ARM CPUs available to the third party? Cortex X1 on a 7nm node is roughly comparable to A12. It can’t compete with Tiger Lake and Intel is just as fast at the same power consumption. Cortex X2 is coming next year with promised 16% performance increase. That might make it an interesting choice for tablets/ultrabooks, but that’s about it. Server space is a bit different since ARM can leverage their good power efficiency and SIMD technologies. But again, at 5W power consumption, modern ARM cores are not any faster than modern x86 cores. And I doubt that anyone will be able to repeat Apples feat any time soon, because well, nobody so far came even close to building an ARM CPU quite like what Apple does. Maybe Qualcomm, now that they have acquired Nuvia (folks that have originally designed Apple CPUs).

I do agree that Apple broke a psychological block, and more folks will probably seek to challenge x86 hegemony. But that’s a very difficult thing to do.

More and more PCs sold out there are laptops, where the efficiency part will be an advantage. There will be a turning point that the Snapdragons or custom chips that Microsoft is doing will be fast enough for the general masses, while providing great battery life and less heat/no fans. Basically what the core m series was supposed to deliver. People will start noticing these things, especially battery life and heat/noise.

Things are heating up in the x86 world, and I'm seeing more and more laptops sporting AMD chips now, threatening intel in its own backyard. We are surely in an exciting development/transition period.

 

[leman]

Yeah, we’ll see. Personally, I am not interested in x86 anymore and I wish it a quick retirement. My primary platform is Aarch64 and if becomes commonplace on desktop, it only means better software and less worry about cross-platform development for me. I am just not sure that things will go as smoothly as you guys think. Alder Lake will be a big litmus test.

 

[Falhófnir]

Yeah, we’ll see. Personally, I am not interested in x86 anymore and I wish it a quick retirement. My primary platform is Aarch64 and if becomes commonplace on desktop, it only means better software and less worry about cross-platform development for me. I am just not sure that things will go as smoothly as you guys think. Alder Lake will be a big litmus test.

With AMD rumoured to have an upcoming line of Arm based chips (not to mention Microsoft, Google and Amazon) I wouldn't be surprised to see x86 bow out of the consumer computing market before the end of the decade. It will be interesting to see if Intel have also been silently working on something similar in the background, or if they will try a curveball like RISC V.

 

[spiderman0616]

Whether the quote that prompted this thread is legit or not, it's clear that M1 (and its successors) is scaring not only the PC industry, but also all the forum trolls.

The M1 is step 1--it's a retrofit to current designs and software to show that it's not a beta or prototype but a full blown consumer product. And it has been a massive success. Anyone who thinks there's not going to be a step 2 any time soon or that Intel is going to be able to follow suit with anywhere near this amount of success--I have a bridge to sell you. The competition has been caught flat footed. Adapt or die.

 

[bobcomer]

my bad, I was talking about PC for consumer market.

A lot of people buy what they use at work, at least in my experience.

Anyway even their server business will be very affected and in mid term X86 will be a fraction of what is today.

Maybe in 20 or 30 years. Normal non-computer businesses move extremely slow -- the ROI of upgrading to something new just isn't there. Heck, we actually have a PC in the plant that runs DOS. It's a fiber length testing machine, and it never gets updated worldwide because there is no advantage to updating it. There's a lot of software like that!

I'd absolutely LOVE to upgrade all our software to something modern, and I really wouldn't care what hardware it ran on, but it isn't going to happen, there is just no argument for it. And my corporate overlords only add new apps on their side rather than modernizing old ones. You'd laugh if I told you what their main application is, so i wont, but I will say it's all custom code written a very long time ago. It does the job needed.

I like my M1 for the most part, and the next version is going to be better, but there is no way that's going to change things around here. Power is cheap, so chip efficiency means nothing, only does it get the job done without being too annoying is a low bar for Intel to overcome. I'll be buying the 14" MBP when it comes out, but only for home.

 

[EntropyQ3]

Yup. A friend of mine just changed his job - to maintaining and servicing a COBOL codebase at a bank.
I was horrified.
And more than a little envious when I learned what they paid him for his skills. ?

 

[bobcomer]

Yup. A friend of mine just changed his job - to maintaining and servicing a COBOL codebase at a bank.
I was horrified.

It's not so bad, stable income, in demand, good pay. You should have seen what they paid people for Y2K temp jobs!

I don't use COBOL in my current job, but I it's one of the many languages I've used.

 

[EntropyQ3]

It's not so bad, stable income, in demand, good pay. You should have seen what they paid people for Y2K temp jobs!

I don't use COBOL in my current job, but I it's one of the many languages I've used.

I counter with FORTRAN IV. ?
But seriously, science is also an area where neolithic code and hardware can be found because it does the job. I would guess that that’s the case in many/most businesses where computers and software is just another tool to get the days work done.
30% improvements in IPC may be huge news for CPU architecture nerds, but it just doesn’t matter in a lot of settings. Legacy code and industry inertia is a huge strength for x86.

 

[dgdosen]

... they do not target the server market...

IMO, that market is too juicy for Apple not to bite. Soon.

 

[leman]

IMO, that market is too juicy for Apple not to bite. Soon.

How do you imagine that working? I mean, they will definitely ship workstations, and they will be great workstations, but servers? What kind of software are those servers supposed to run? It's just not Apple's business and I don't see how they would be good at it. They sell products/experiences, but server business is selling tailored platforms for others to build their products upon.

Besides, their chief CPU engineer left Apple to find his own server CPU company because Apple was not interested in that kind of stuff.

 

[11235813]

Intel's biggest problem is, increasingly, "software" means "website". Almost everything is done over the web now. Other than big software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Suite etc, everything is done over the browser and this trend will only continue. I won't be surprised if soon we get a full fledged Photoshop online, working on Chrome. In a few years, pretty much nobody will need a strong CPU for personal use. A decent ARM CPU which doesn't need a fan, very easy on the battery, will be what pretty much anybody needs.