The Titanic actually changed direction very quickly....from horzontal, to vertical !
I suspect Intel will follow suit as it was already losing to AMD with what it has to offer.
Since I took delivery of my 'base' M1 MBA, my newish Windows HP Laptop has been untouched and lives in a drawer. It is slow, noisy and burns my lap in use - which now makes a PC look like VHS when the world has moved on to streamed video.
Apologies as perhaps I did not explain myself fully with my original post.
What I meant was, it would be lovely to go buy a brand new Series X console, and play all the latest high end games on the console, just as now.
But when you wanted to do a bit of "Office" work, or perhaps some Skype/Facebook stuff, or a litt;e photo editing in Photoshop.
You could via a menu, kick it into Windows 10 mode and use it as a reasonable powerful ? PC, then when you have done those things, flip back into console mode and enjoy your games again.
As opposed to needing to buy a separate PC for that work.
It was just a nice thought
AMD/Intel/Qualcom/NVIDIA etc will be able to respond on the GPU and CPU at some point. However, how well will they be able to produce a M1 equivalent with its neural engine and other coprocessors? It requires high level of cooperation between many companies including Microsoft which we have not seen much of. Efficacy has traditionally not been a hall mark of the PC industry.
Traditional PC/Mac people: performance per watt always wins. Look at the supercomputers, the electricity bill is always considered.
At any rate Apple sits now, in my opinion, on the throne of most interesting chips, while the rest of the PC industry follows the same paradigms founded 30-40 years ago. Remember that windows is NOT a dominating OS even in corporate world as most admin systems now need to work with mobile phones (Android/iOS) and hence via web interfaces.
Reminds me of the transition happening with the car industry going from cars using lots of petrol to far less petrol. I suspect that was one of the reasons, US car industry suffered badly? If not European and asian car industry is rapidly switch to electricity (where US now via Tesla i leader), they will suffer as well (so please hurry up!!!). Likewise, Apple has now an edge and the other chip vendors and software companies need to transition quickly or lose ground.
If AMD and Intel do lose market share to Apple, it will be a long-term shift rather than a relatively quick shift.
Computers of mid tier spec and up have fairly long service lives today. Many people who see it as an appliance will not upgrade until they need to. That being said, a robust battery life does improve the chance that someone might upgrade early, not for 'speed' but for a battery that lasts a whole day of work.
This is an interesting thread, and I have given this a little bit of thought lately.
When Apple released M1, I thought "wow, amazing"! And it certainly was. But then I realized how Apple's marketing is smart and runs circles around everyone else. I took two points into consideration:
- Apple has been developing its A-series chip for some time now. it has shown significant improvements, and Apple's M1 is an evolutionary step but by no means a revolution. The single-core performance is great but should be expected following Apple's A-series improvements over the years.
- Apple compared M1 to last year's processors. It was smart enough to launch the M1 in time to compare it with Intel's 10th gen processors, which were released one year ago. So it could claim something closer to twice the speed.
I think PC's response will come faster than ever, for the following reasons, and each company may play its part well.
First, Intel. Intel has been suffering a lot by being stuck at 10nm for the past years, and improvements have been very small compared to the past. Intel is in a bad place, but it is struggling to recover.
But Intel's 11th gen chips seem to perform significantly better than the last generation. The power-efficient quad-core Core i7-1165G7 hit some average 1450-1550 points on Geekbench 5 single-core tests (depending on the model tested), and the Core i7-1185G7 hit quite impressive 1500-1600 points.
Apple's M1 is still superior at around 1650-1750 points. But the difference between the M1 and Intel's current flagship is somewhere between 5-20%. This is still very significant but it is by no means nearly double the performance as Apple may have suggested in its presentation (when it compared M1 to Intel's 10th gen).
And Intel's 12th gen chips will make use of power-efficient cores to have better battery management. My take is that at the time Apple announces the next M-series chips, Intel will be closer to them in terms of performance and energy management. Apple may still have the edge even in the next generation, but Intel is fighting to catch up.
Second, Qualcomm. Qualcomm tried to put its chips inside a PC, and the attempt was not successful, due to the poor performance.
However, Qualcomm is improving its offerings and may soon offer something more credible, especially now that all eyes are turned to ARM following M1's release. Qualcomm is not on par with Apple in terms of mobile chips, and will hardly be able to catch up with it on PCs as well, but it is another worthy contender.
Third, there is AMD. AMD has shown significant improvements in its x86 line-up, and will now invest in ARM chips as well. It still has some catch-up to do, though.
And then there is Nvidia. Nvidia does not make CPUs, but it is the king of GPUs. And it paid some $40 billion for ARM itself. So it may have everything it needs now to create a killer chip to put everyone else to shame.
While I think none of these contenders will take Apple down in the short run, they will respond very quickly to the arrival of the M1. In 2021, x86 chips will become more competitive, and ARM alternatives for PC will flourish. Apple's M1 may be the best one for now and for some time in the future, but competition will be fierce.
