What will be the PC response to Apple's M1 ?

[The_Interloper]

Absolutely. I've been in IT for a long time and anyone younger than maybe 25 or 30 probably doesn't appreciate the degree to which Microsoft was engaged in unscrupulous, unethical and downright illegal behaviour around the mid 1990s and therefore why they were so hated.

This, 100%. I'm also old enough to have been around then and Microsoft - and Windows, in particular - was absolutely despised. I once witnessed an employee throw a monitor down a spiral staircase in frustration, only having to go back to grab the CPU base unit when he realised he hadn't destroyed the actual PC.

For a certain generation, Windows still represents the absolute pits when it comes to computing. It's no wonder they switched to Macs and iPhones and won't touch PCs still, no matter how much better Windows 10 (or even 7 at the time) is. For a lot of people, it will always represent ugly beige boxes, incomprehensible error messages and BSODs. In human terms, time in their lives they'll never get back.

Vista may go down in history as the turning point when Apple started clawing out a bigger chunk of the market share.

True, but I think Apple really missed a trick when Windows 8 was released. That was a godawful mess of an OS with the most abysmal mish-mash of a UX in history. I don't know anyone who didn't hate it. I would shake my head in disbelief at it on a daily basis (the 'Charms' bar on a desktop OS - what a debacle). But Apple was too distracted to care - they released the trashcan Mac Pro and the lousy 2014 Mac Mini in subsequent years and wasted a golden opportunity, seemingly losing interest in the Mac itself at the time when they could have hoovered up market share from Windows users who had finally had enough.

 

[pshufd]

You have to differentiate between what WILL be the PC response and what SHOULD be the PC response.

M1 did not drop out of the sky. It has been coming for a long time; roughly since the A Series stopped using ARM designs and Apple went to only using the ISA but having their own microarchitecture. Let's remember that in the mobile world the A Series has been running rings around all the other SoCs for years and that M1 is a child of the A Series. So M1 is not just blowing away the x86 competition but it also smokes ARM too.

So what SHOULD the PC response be? To really bear down on efficiency. To work on and either solve the inherent limitations in CISC and x86 that stop them from using an 8 wide architecture like Apple or create a new ISA that is not hamstrung like this. To come up with common frameworks that allow PCs to take advantage of things like DSP blocks, Machine Learning and other functional divisions. And by common frameworks it means all current PC development languages and environments will need to change also.

What WILL they do? Well, one thing to note is there is no monolithic "PC". It is a bunch of different companies doing different things and competing against each other. So a "PC" response is not going to match M1 because the fragmented nature of the PC world means it cannot and still be able to work on the wide variety of hardware and software. What it MAY do is look for ways to improve PPW which is a big challenge.

I don't see a solution for CISC and apparently Microsoft doesn't either. So let's say AMD and Microsoft go to ARM designs. This means that Microsoft has something usable in maybe two years that adds a lot of functions to the chip and is high-power process but there will be far more incompatible programs and a lot of programs that will never be ported over. And they will be behind Apple because Apple has been doing this for a decade.

And then Apple is a moving target and making significant improvements every year. And they tie up Taiwan Semi's best process.

And are OEMs going to want to have Microsoft as their chip supplier? Right now they have AMD and Intel as suppliers. I could see Microsoft requiring Microsoft's ARM design to build PCs with with Intel/AMD-sized margins.

The legacy players also have to deal with so much x86 software - in Linux as well. The cloud world may have to deal with this too. All I can say is that it is a great time to be an Apple shareholder. And a bad time to be in Intel. A friend bought the bottom of the Intel gap despite me talking about their problems a lot. He rode to the top of the gap for a very nice gain and then the price collapsed yesterday. His was a technical play which I understand. I will do similar gap trades but you get out at the top of the gap. He thought it would keep going.

 

[MBAir2010]

I cant see anyone at Dell worried over improving the XPS to using a non-intel processor over the success on the M1 processor. They seem to be fine.

 

[Joelist]

Just transitioning to the ARM ISA means nothing. Like I said Apple Silicon is WAY more performant than other ARM designs.

 

[spiderman0616]

You have to differentiate between what WILL be the PC response and what SHOULD be the PC response.

M1 did not drop out of the sky. It has been coming for a long time; roughly since the A Series stopped using ARM designs and Apple went to only using the ISA but having their own microarchitecture. Let's remember that in the mobile world the A Series has been running rings around all the other SoCs for years and that M1 is a child of the A Series. So M1 is not just blowing away the x86 competition but it also smokes ARM too.

So what SHOULD the PC response be? To really bear down on efficiency. To work on and either solve the inherent limitations in CISC and x86 that stop them from using an 8 wide architecture like Apple or create a new ISA that is not hamstrung like this. To come up with common frameworks that allow PCs to take advantage of things like DSP blocks, Machine Learning and other functional divisions. And by common frameworks it means all current PC development languages and environments will need to change also.

What WILL they do? Well, one thing to note is there is no monolithic "PC". It is a bunch of different companies doing different things and competing against each other. So a "PC" response is not going to match M1 because the fragmented nature of the PC world means it cannot and still be able to work on the wide variety of hardware and software. What it MAY do is look for ways to improve PPW which is a big challenge.

Exactly. This is dead on. And it’s flying under the radar because people are really busy gushing about the end product right now. It’s going to take a couple years to see the real world consequences for any competition who has NOT spent the last ten years mastering how to build their own chips.

 

[pshufd]

I cant see anyone at Dell worried over improving the XPS to using a non-intel processor over the success on the M1 processor. They seem to be fine.

I can.

Let's look at the student market. You want thin and light and long battery life and a lower price point. The delta between the M1 and i5 options on the MBP 13 is $100.

What do you think when the M1X comes out and you get more than double the compute horsepower of the XPS?

And then Apple increases CPU horsepower by 20% to 30% every year?

I have an XPS and a Studio XPS. I'm waiting for an M1X. Do you think that Dell will be able to touch an M1X for performance?

 

[pshufd]

Just transitioning to the ARM ISA means nothing. Like I said Apple Silicon is WAY more performant than other ARM designs.

Yes, but you get rid of the CISC penalty. And that looks to be quite significant. You're still playing catchup from there and it may well be that nobody is able to catch up.

 

[JouniS]

I disagree with this and think you have it backwards. The biggest issues facing Intel and the x86/64 ISA on the hardware side and Windows on the software side is their feature bloat due them both being "jack of all trades, master of none" and the fact that they both have to maintain compatibility for legacy features stretching back decades. It's with these products that people are paying for features they don't need.

Apple has basically been able to start completely unencumbered by this and if anything, the compromise is that they are lacking features that some people might need for niche applications because of their laser focus on efficiency.

General-purpose computers are intended for niche applications the manufacturer may not even know about. That's what separates them from consumer devices such as phones and tablets. Their main advantages are flexibility and compatibility, and economies of scale also make them cost-effective choices for many non-niche tasks.

Apple designs its computers as consumer devices targeted to specific audiences. The base models are usually great and cost-effective. But if you want flexibility, you either have to pay a huge premium for the upgrades (because you can't upgrade later), or you have to buy a more expensive model with unnecessary features.

A few examples:

• In (data) science, people often write custom software for a limited number of users. Because RAM is cheap and developer time is expensive, it often makes sense to do things in the easy way and load the data into memory and process it there. If tighter integration makes RAM scarce and/or expensive, such computers will be less cost-effective.
• People doing mobile work often want a laptop with a large display. But because Apple equates size with performance, they have to pay extra for a MBP 16" when a MBA 16" would be enough for their needs.
• Apple is notorious for using weak GPUs. Apple Silicon will help a bit, but the fundamental problem remains, because most Macs are thin and thermally constrained. A modular "Mac Midi" desktop could bring high-end GPUs to the $2000 to $3000 price range, making Macs competitive with PCs in this space.

 

[JeepGuy]

I can.

Let's look at the student market. You want thin and light and long battery life and a lower price point. The delta between the M1 and i5 options on the MBP 13 is $100.

What do you think when the M1X comes out and you get more than double the compute horsepower of the XPS?

And then Apple increases CPU horsepower by 20% to 30% every year?

I have an XPS and a Studio XPS. I'm waiting for an M1X. Do you think that Dell will be able to touch an M1X for performance?

for office/corporates it could have an impact, engineering manufacturing will have a harder transition, Student market is already mostly mac, My work laptop is a Dell Precision 5520, and and I'm due for an upgrade next year, but it won't be a mac , I get a new Laptop and tower every 2 years from work, I don't think Dell will match the performance but it really comes down to what software you need to run, for myself for work I'm tied to windows and intel. For home it's mac all the way.

 

[pshufd]

for office/corporates it could have an impact, engineering manufacturing will have a harder transition, Student market is already mostly mac, My work laptop is a Dell Precision 5520, and and I'm due for an upgrade next year, but it won't be a mac , I get a new Laptop and tower every 2 years from work, I don't think Dell will match the performance but it really comes down to what software you need to run, for myself for work I'm tied to windows and intel. For home it's mac all the way.

Well, you can customize a Precision like mad so there's a world of difference between that type of specialized system and an M1.

But if the M1X, etc., have a two or three to one performance per watt advantage, then I'd see software vendors porting to it. Maybe one year, two years, three years down the road.

 

[iPadified]

I think you totally misunderstand what most "normal" users primary use their computers for.

Email
Web
MS Office
Messaging/video calls
Basic photo viewing/minor editing
Document viewing (Eg PDF)

All of these tasks can be accomplished using either exactly the same apps as under x64 Windows, or highly capable alternative applications.

Hint: most "normal" users are not hardcore PC gamers.

I think you also described the vast majority of office user tied to Windows today. Probably 99% of the used get by fine with these functionalities. If you also occasionally do some minor video work, even the M1 is tolerable.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

A few examples:

• In (data) science, people often write custom software for a limited number of users. Because RAM is cheap and developer time is expensive, it often makes sense to do things in the easy way and load the data into memory and process it there. If tighter integration makes RAM scarce and/or expensive, such computers will be less cost-effective.
• People doing mobile work often want a laptop with a large display. But because Apple equates size with performance, they have to pay extra for a MBP 16" when a MBA 16" would be enough for their needs.
• Apple is notorious for using weak GPUs. Apple Silicon will help a bit, but the fundamental problem remains, because most Macs are thin and thermally constrained. A modular "Mac Midi" desktop could bring high-end GPUs to the $2000 to $3000 price range, making Macs competitive with PCs in this space.

Yep, ok, I totally misunderstood what you meant with regards to "features". I was more focusing on CPU/SoC functions and OS functions, not specifications and functionality of their machines as a whole. I understand what you mean now and agree with what you are saying.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

But Apple was too distracted to care - they released the trashcan Mac Pro and the lousy 2014 Mac Mini in subsequent years and wasted a golden opportunity, seemingly losing interest in the Mac itself at the time when they could have hoovered up market share from Windows users who had finally had enough.

Apple really did neglect the whole Mac business unit during this period in favour of their iDevices and whilst it was a missed opportunity, they were clearly following the money.

 

[iPadified]

General-purpose computers are intended for niche applications the manufacturer may not even know about.

That is the very true observation. All desktops are general purpose computers and for the vast majority of people, at home or at work, a completely unnecessary complication. Niche is the operative word meaning that very few will benefit from a general purspose machine. Laptops should be listed under phones and tablets.

If you do serious compute science you have a server some where with cheap RAM and CPU. How much GPU do you really need for displaying? I assume you mean GPGPU functionality which seen to be moved into coprocessors in the M1 such as the neural engine. Also the traditional GPU is under threat by the M1 heterogeneous architecture.

"Consumer" and "professional" is a very poor descriptor as compute power and modularity says nothing about being professional. You can be a professional with a feather light M1 computer and a consumer with a 4X TITAN GPUs rig under the table.

 

[deconstruct60]

I disagree with this and think you have it backwards. The biggest issues facing Intel and the x86/64 ISA on the hardware side and Windows on the software side is their feature bloat due them both being "jack of all trades, master of none" and the fact that they both have to maintain compatibility for legacy features stretching back decades. It's with these products that people are paying for features they don't need.

Some folks need the legacy features. With a very large market share that subset of folks is "large enough" to not want to shake off. For example, if have 90% of the overall market and only 10% of your user base has very large legacy needs then that amounts to 9% of the market. 9% is bigger than macOS. If it is a 20% user base with significant, hard requirements then that is 18% (again in the range of twice as large as Apple's percentage).

It isn't the legacy stuff as much as the inertia of trying to be everything for everybody. Part of the problem with Intel is that they want the whole line up to be too homogenous. It doesn't have to be. Itanium didn't succeed ( other than killing off the most of the enterprise RISC vendors for a very long while), but it was demonstrative that Intel could have two lines. Intel ( or AMD) probably could go 64-bit only for a subset of their line up. [ Windows is getting there as OEM's aren't going to be able to get Windows 10 32-bit going forward. MS has a very similar large inertia problem. ]

x86 is a dual edge sword for Intel (and AMD). it is a pragmatically a large barrier to entry because they have the practical major licenses for it. And it incurs overhead. The latter is a bigger problem when Intel (and AMD) can't get to the bleeding edge fab processes before the other competitors.

Apple has basically been able to start completely unencumbered by this and if anything, the compromise is that they are lacking features that some people might need for niche applications because of their laser focus on efficiency.

Apple isn't unencumbered. There are just far more willing to throw user's software under the bus. Apple purged 32-bit software software on the Intel x86-64 side of macOS also. They are in process of tossing out all device drivers( IOkit -> DriverKit ). Carbon gone. Legacy video/audio media en/decoders ... gone.

Apple is encumbered, they are just for more willing to take the blow-back lumps. in part, because they don't have 90+% of the market. If they piss off 1% (who stomp off in a huff to other OS or just stop bying for a very long time) and managed to get a new 1% to switch from Windows to macOS, then they just swap users.

Apple isn't only tossing significant chunks of their software stack under the bus just for efficiency (implementation and/or energy). It is better margins also.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

This, 100%. I'm also old enough to have been around then and Microsoft - and Windows, in particular - was absolutely despised.

Not just Microsoft as a whole company either - a lot of the vitriol was directed at Bill Gates personally. He was basically the "Pharma Bro" of the 1990s. Ironically, now that he has pretty much dedicated his life to philanthropy and actually put his money where his mouth is by giving billions of his own money away, he gets accused by all these conspiracy crackpots of being some sort of James Bond-esque global super villain.

For a certain generation, Windows still represents the absolute pits when it comes to computing. It's no wonder they switched to Macs and iPhones and won't touch PCs still, no matter how much better Windows 10 (or even 7 at the time) is. For a lot of people, it will always represent ugly beige boxes, incomprehensible error messages and BSODs. In human terms, time in their lives they'll never get back

For me, after suffering through the Windows 9x releases, I switched to Linux and FreeBSD for all my home computing needs in about 1998. Except for a brief dalliance with Windows 2k (which to this day I consider the best Windows release of all time) this continued until I bought my first Mac, an iBook running OS X tiger in about 2004/5 and I never looked back.

With OS X I got to have all the unixy goodness and utilities under the hood to play with but with a polished user interface and commercial software that Linux could only dream of having. Professionally I've worked exclusively with Linux in large datacenter deployments of servers.

I've literally spent the last 25 years of my life, both personally and professionally completely avoiding the use of Windows ?

 

[polyphenol]

True, but I think Apple really missed a trick when Windows 8 was released. That was a godawful mess of an OS with the most abysmal mish-mash of a UX in history. I don't know anyone who didn't hate it. I would shake my head in disbelief at it on a daily basis (the 'Charms' bar on a desktop OS - what a debacle).

I still can't fathom how it got out of the door. It was particularly horrible trying to control via remote desktop (or similar). For all its faults, Windows 10 was a blessed relief from 8 and 8.1.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

I cant see anyone at Dell worried over improving the XPS to using a non-intel processor over the success on the M1 processor. They seem to be fine.

Given that these Macs have only been out a few weeks you're not likely to see any kind of reaction from any competing company even if they were greatly concerned.

 

[JouniS]

That is the very true observation. All desktops are general purpose computers and for the vast majority of people, at home or at work, a completely unnecessary complication. Niche is the operative word meaning that very few will benefit from a general purspose machine. Laptops should be listed under phones and tablets.

Laptops and desktops are fundamentally the same, because they run a general-purpose operating system such as macOS and Windows. Pure consumer devices tend to use more limited operating systems such as iPadOS, Android, and Chrome OS.

"Niche" is an interesting word. Most people are outside any particular niche, but everyone belongs to at least a few niche groups. Even in computing context, I would expect that 30-50% of people still using general-purpose computers are in at least one niche user group.

If you do serious compute science you have a server some where with cheap RAM and CPU. How much GPU do you really need for displaying? I assume you mean GPGPU functionality which seen to be moved into coprocessors in the M1 such as the neural engine. Also the traditional GPU is under threat by the M1 heterogeneous architecture.

The traditional GPU already disappeared a long time ago. Today's GPUs are computers with a high level of data parallelism. Their use is still growing, as people are figuring out how to use them effectively in a wide range of tasks. Common tasks such as machine learning can be pushed special-purpose hardware (such as Apple's Neural Engine, Nvidia's Tensor Cores, or Google's Tensor Processing Units), but again 30-50% of GPGPU users are probably using them for niche tasks.

Computational science is normally done on remote hardware, but the people developing the methods and tools often have local hardware for abnormal situations. For example, I have 128 GB memory in my iMac, because it's convenient to be able to investigate problems in a local virtual machine. People working on numerical methods may have high-end consumer GPUs for similar reasons.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Windows 10 was a blessed relief from 8 and 8.1

And even then Windows 10 has massive issues with interface consistency, both cosmetic and functional. Eg: System tools and configuration:

1. Administrative Tools: These look and function like something from Windows from the NT days almost.

2. Control Panel: Other than icon updates and the optional grouping feature, this has been the same since Windows 9x and is the primary place for system configuration.

3. Settings App: Introduced with Windows 8, it is still not feature complete compared to control panel, has a totally different look and feel and for some reason they have not switched over to it despite having had more than 8 years to do so

I mean it's just insane that something so important has not been unified.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

I still can't fathom how it got out of the door. It was particularly horrible trying to control via remote desktop (or similar). For all its faults, Windows 10 was a blessed relief from 8 and 8.1.

I still remember RDPing into Windows Server 2012 for the first time and being absolutely shocked that Microsoft even used the "Metro" start screen on the server version of Windows, straight out of Windows 8.

 

[polyphenol]

And even then Windows 10 has massive issues with interface consistency, both cosmetic and functional. Eg: System tools and configuration:

1. Administrative Tools: These look and function like something from Windows from the NT days almost.

2. Control Panel: Other than icon updates and the optional grouping feature, this has been the same since Windows 9x and is the primary place for system configuration.

3. Settings App: Introduced with Windows 8, it is still not feature complete compared to control panel, has a totally different look and feel and for some reason they have not switched over to it despite having had more than 8 years to do so

I mean it's just insane that something so important has not been unified.

I agree but, in reality, I rarely have to go beyond Settings and use either of the other two interfaces. (Except inasmuch Settings itself actually takes you elsewhere.)

I used to find myself having to use the others frequently.

 

[Piggie]

And even then Windows 10 has massive issues with interface consistency, both cosmetic and functional. Eg: System tools and configuration:

1. Administrative Tools: These look and function like something from Windows from the NT days almost.

2. Control Panel: Other than icon updates and the optional grouping feature, this has been the same since Windows 9x and is the primary place for system configuration.

3. Settings App: Introduced with Windows 8, it is still not feature complete compared to control panel, has a totally different look and feel and for some reason they have not switched over to it despite having had more than 8 years to do so

I mean it's just insane that something so important has not been unified.

Yes, I totally agree with you regard this.
It's very tricky, but I kinda think I know the reason why (a bit)

Windows is trying to be everything to everyone.
It wants to present a very nice, pretty, but limited set of adjustments to the average home user.

But, at the same time, when in the business world it's wanting to present professionals who have done years of serious training the full set of tools/adjustments to the finest level, hence why when you dig down beyond the pretty front consumer end, the old more serious design is still in there.

It does make sense really as the last thing a professional wants is some dumbed down, but pretty looking settings page.

The other option would be for all the old/professional stuff to be locked away from the consumer as opposed to being able to click on things.

It's a bit like TV's
Most people don't know there are and have been for years tech/settings pages which you can get to via some special button/remote combination which gives you access to all sorts of things only the factory or service engineers should ever see.
The consumer should never see these settings or mess with them.

So a bit like Windows there are two things. The nice dumbed down stuff and the tech don't touch stuff.
Pretty much like Windows, but as I said, in Windows it's not locked away in secret from the consumer.

 

[pshufd]

Yes, I totally agree with you regard this.
It's very tricky, but I kinda think I know the reason why (a bit)

Windows is trying to be everything to everyone.
It wants to present a very nice, pretty, but limited set of adjustments to the average home user.

But, at the same time, when in the business world it's wanting to present professionals who have done years of serious training the full set of tools/adjustments to the finest level, hence why when you dig down beyond the pretty front consumer end, the old more serious design is still in there.

It does make sense really as the last thing a professional wants is some dumbed down, but pretty looking settings page.

The other option would be for all the old/professional stuff to be locked away from the consumer as opposed to being able to click on things.

It's a bit like TV's
Most people don't know there are and have been for years tech/settings pages which you can get to via some special button/remote combination which gives you access to all sorts of things only the factory or service engineers should ever see.
The consumer should never see these settings or mess with them.

So a bit like Windows there are two things. The nice dumbed down stuff and the tech don't touch stuff.
Pretty much like Windows, but as I said, in Windows it's not locked away in secret from the consumer.

You kind of had that in the 90s with Windows NT vs Windows 9x.

 

[The_Interloper]

I still can't fathom how it got out of the door.

Because of terrible leadership. Steve Ballmer was desperate to halt the decline of Windows PCs in the iPad age; Microsoft had compltetely missed the boat on mobile and envisioned a touch interface and new form factors as the savior of Windows.

He went "all-in", rushing 8 out of the door when they should have stepped back to figure out how this would work on non-touch environments. It was blind panic, a fever dream of an OS in a time when Android and iOS were swallowing up market share for casual computing. The PC in every home became a smartphone in every pocket.

The whole disaster led to the Satya Nadella era and Microsoft's reimagining as a cloud and Enterprise company, and Ballmer's legacy will forever be viewed with disdain.