Will Intel and the others catch up to match M1

[pshufd]

Intel? Probably not. They're main issue is the current animosity within their own company. Unless a CEO can come in and enforce some order or at least basic civility they're not gonna see much progress. x86 and their troubles with advancing node shrinks are less of a problem than that.

AMD? Maybe. Zen3 puts up a damn good fight against the M1 and still makes the case for x86. If AMD can keep up the pace with IPC we'll see them match step with Apple I think. If not, then they'll be in a position to dump x86 and run ARM or RISC-V APUs similar to the M1.

Others: NVidia and Qualcomm have already announced intentions to bring ARM to laptops and desktops. They smell blood in the water. Samsung can't help copying Apple, so I'd expect them to try their hand eventually, seeing as they own their own fabs. We may see other players join in too, since most companies are fabless anyway, and there's always room at the bottom end for $200 laptops and $100 chromebooks.

Eventually, yeah. Others will catch up with the M1, that's just how technology progresses. Apple's got a solid lead for awhile I think though.

There's the separation of the OS, chips and hardware though which makes coordination harder.

I do not think that Apple will be standing still either.

I would love a product that has something like 20 efficiency cores, basically a device with insane battery life.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

And how does that relate to the problem or reliability that I discussed? My windows boots in ~10 seconds so I honestly can't see a single problem of any possible kind related to boot speeds with it. And booting ubuntu - who cares, exactly? It is a well-known fact that UNIX systems are lighter than windows. Again, who cares if your hardware is fast and everything boots and loads quickly on windows? I've had zero crashes of the whole system in 2 years and with my mac I've had several absolutely random kernel panics in 7 months that shut down my laptop without warning and without explanation. That is unacceptable. Booting a few seconds slower is acceptable. Random shutdowns are NOT acceptable. And honestly, if M1 macs turn out to have the same problem they will be just as unacceptable for anyone who expects, you know, actual reliability and needs to depend on their system to work and not wipe out their work at random.

If M1 macs prove to have solved this issue entirely, then hats off to them. But this remains to be seen.

And what was causing the kernel panics? One machine with a history of kernel panics is not enough to condemn a whole operating system.
I can generate a kernel panic and crash Big Sur by running version 15 of Parallels. That isn't Apple's fault. It's the fault of running software that isn't up-to-date.
Kernel panics can also happen if you have a RAM chip with a dodgy bit, or insert a flash drive that is failing. All of these types of failure can happen on any OS.
I once had a computer that would fail, and fail regularly when compiling a Fortran program with a particular line of code in it. It wasn't the fault of the OS, or the software, or the Fortran code. It turned out to be a faulty RAM chip.

My original point about speed was that overall Windows is slower than other OSs on booting up, installing software, upgrading software and running complex tasks. There are reasons for this, mainly because the Microsoft programming team have been concentrating on adding fripperies to Windows 10, rather than making it more secure (as Apple has been doing through Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur) or improving its performance (as Ubuntu has been doing through versions 18.10, 20.04 and 20.10). Other software teams have been working on improving their OS, but not Microsoft.

ArPe mentioned that Windows was faster than macOS at SMB. This is true. Each OS stream has its native networking protocal. Linux/Unix has NFS, Apple has AFP and Windows has SMB. Each OS uses their own protocol faster and more efficiently than the others.
I have an in-house server set up serving the same volumes via NFS, AFP and SMB. I get best performance with Windows when using SMB. I get best performance with macOS when using AFP, and I get best performance with Linux when using NFS. As you would expect.

 

[pshufd]

And what was causing the kernel panics? One machine with a history of kernel panics is not enough to condemn a whole operating system.
I can generate a kernel panic and crash Big Sur by running version 15 of Parallels. That isn't Apple's fault. It's the fault of running software that isn't up-to-date.
Kernel panics can also happen if you have a RAM chip with a dodgy bit, or insert a flash drive that is failing. All of these types of failure can happen on any OS.
I once had a computer that would fail, and fail regularly when compiling a Fortran program with a particular line of code in it. It wasn't the fault of the OS, or the software, or the Fortran code. It turned out to be a faulty RAM chip.

My original point about speed was that overall Windows is slower than other OSs on booting up, installing software, upgrading software and running complex tasks. There are reasons for this, mainly because the Microsoft programming team have been concentrating on adding fripperies to Windows 10, rather than making it more secure (as Apple has been doing through Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur) or improving its performance (as Ubuntu has been doing through versions 18.10, 20.04 and 20.10). Other software teams have been working on improving their OS, but not Microsoft.

ArPe mentioned that Windows was faster than macOS at SMB. This is true. Each OS stream has its native networking protocal. Linux/Unix has NFS, Apple has AFP and Windows has SMB. Each OS uses their own protocol faster and more efficiently than the others.
I have an in-house server set up serving the same volumes via NFS, AFP and SMB. I get best performance with Windows when using SMB. I get best performance with macOS when using AFP, and I get best performance with Linux when using NFS. As you would expect.

Most of the panics on macs in my experience were due to video issues. The solution was to replace the motherboard. We've had a fair number of these over the years.

 

[thekev]

Others: NVidia and Qualcomm have already announced intentions to bring ARM to laptops and desktops. They smell blood in the water. Samsung can't help copying Apple, so I'd expect them to try their hand eventually, seeing as they own their own fabs. We may see other players join in too, since most companies are fabless anyway, and there's always room at the bottom end for $200 laptops and $100 chromebooks.

Eventually, yeah. Others will catch up with the M1, that's just how technology progresses. Apple's got a solid lead for awhile I think though.

Good. I happen to find Neon quite a bit more sensible than the weird splintering of AVX specifications. Helium adds some digressions, but it's at least clear where it's aimed.

 

[pshufd]

Good. I happen to find Neon quite a bit more sensible than the weird splintering of AVX specifications. Helium adds some digressions, but it's at least clear where it's aimed.

Are these all Chromebooks? Will they get major software vendors to port to their platforms? Once nice thing about Windows - just about everything is there.

 

[thekev]

Are these all Chromebooks? Will they get major software vendors to port to their platforms? Once nice thing about Windows - just about everything is there.

We shall see. At the very least, it's interesting to me. Simple ISAs are a good target for DSLs in particular. I would imagine optimizing something like Halide for Neon is easier. Widespread support for AVX compared to Neon seems like it's more due to ubiquity. We don't really have a lot in the way of dev boxes supporting Neon, and trying to test via QEMU or similar is just terrible.

 

[SteveJUAE]

I doubt that Windows will lose much marketshare. Majority of the computers in the world is in the enterprise, and even many are still on legacy Windows 7 or older. And they are all entrenched in the world of Windows servers/Active Directory. Considering Apple doesn't seem to be touching the enterprise market anymore (no more Xserve, etc), I don't think Apple will become the majority anytime soon.

Even in the consumer space, majority of the laptops in the world are the low end laptops, those $500 or under. Apple is not in that space, so these consumers won't suddenly be willing to spend double for a laptop.

But Apple will definitely take a chunk in the premium space, as usual (same thing with smartphone market). People already spending $1500-$2000 on a laptop will cringe looking at the stagnant performance of wintel's offerings, and they might switch to Macs.

What chunk Apple may or may not take in the premium market is a tough call

The very people who buy in this price bracket have already been alienated by lack of dual monitor, external GPU and 90% of the worlds software, now no bootcamp

It's not like Tiger lake latest mobile chip releases are too shabby, maybe 10-20% down on single/muilti core benchmarks, comparable read/writes and better openCL on a mobile chip with just 4 cores that also have instant on and 12 hours plus endurance

For many W10 users the gains vs the sacrifices and alienation and limited options even on screens 120hz/OLED

I think many over estimate the appeal of Apple M1 for dedicated Apple users to the preferences and choice for W10 users

Samsung little Book S with arm that's been out for a year needs to step up for sure but then it is at the lower end of pricing and if MS get the 64bit support sorted will help

Interesting times for sure but a bit over hyped with some of these silly comparisons we see IMO

 

[pshufd]

What chunk Apple may or may not take in the premium market is a tough call

The very people who buy in this price bracket have already been alienated by lack of dual monitor, external GPU and 90% of the worlds software, now no bootcamp

It's not like Tiger lake latest mobile chip releases are too shabby, maybe 10-20% down on single/muilti core benchmarks, comparable read/writes and better openCL on a mobile chip with just 4 cores that also have instant on and 12 hours plus endurance

For many W10 users the gains vs the sacrifices and alienation and limited options even on screens 120hz/OLED

I think many over estimate the appeal of Apple M1 for dedicated Apple users to the preferences and choice for W10 users

Samsung little Book S with arm that's been out for a year needs to step up for sure but then it is at the lower end of pricing and if MS get the 64bit support sorted will help

Interesting times for sure but a bit over hyped with some of these silly comparisons we see IMO

My company started offering the option of Lenovo or MacBook Pros about five years ago so most of the work-computers are macOS. Google offered the same before that and most people choose macs so that you can work on macOS, Windows or Linux. IBM did a COO on computers and determined that the TCO of Apple Computers was lower than that of Windows computers.

My son's organization is macOS based as - these seem common in the biotech world.

 

[SteveJUAE]

My company started offering the option of Lenovo or MacBook Pros about five years ago so most of the work-computers are macOS. Google offered the same before that and most people choose macs so that you can work on macOS, Windows or Linux. IBM did a COO on computers and determined that the TCO of Apple Computers was lower than that of Windows computers.

My son's organization is macOS based as - these seem common in the biotech world.

I'm not sure what this means there are plenty of examples either way and there is no denying 90% of the world runs on Windows based platforms

In my own personal experience:

My wife was the PA to minter of education number of Mac used in all Uni's 0

My son is a lecturer in a leading Uni number of Mac's used 0, number of Ipads 1, his, for faculty, for students negligible Apple presence

I work in heavy engineering number of mac's used 0

I do not think these personal observations carry any weight, my ones or yours the bottom line is MacOS is a minority globally

Even by Apples own metrics the number of professionals using professional software on a regular basis is a very low % of a minority

We should not get carried away by our enthusiasts nature here and IRL

I have bought my fair share of Apple products over the years for my family and now only my eldest persists with his Ipad/Iphone his work and home computing is Windows based. I have gifted him and my other children MB's for over 15 years until there late 20's, finally they buy their own

As I said previously interesting times

 

[pshufd]

I'm not sure what this means there are plenty of examples either way and there is no denying 90% of the world runs on Windows based platforms

In my own personal experience:

My wife was the PA to minter of education number of Mac used in all Uni's 0

My son is a lecturer in a leading Uni number of Mac's used 0, number of Ipads 1, his, for faculty, for students negligible Apple presence

I work in heavy engineering number of mac's used 0

I do not think these personal observations carry any weight, my ones or yours the bottom line is MacOS is a minority globally

Even by Apples own metrics the number of professionals using professional software on a regular basis is a very low % of a minority

We should not get carried away by our enthusiasts nature here and IRL

I have bought my fair share of Apple products over the years for my family and now only my eldest persists with his Ipad/Iphone his work and home computing is Windows based. I have gifted him and my other children MB's for over 15 years until there late 20's, finally they buy their own

As I said previously interesting times

Reasonable because of pricing. But back around 2011, I recall that Windows had 94% of marketshare and Apple had 80% of the profits from laptops. And higher prices generally mean lower marketshare. But Apple still sells a lot of units. There is a Teacher's thread here and they're pretty excited about being able to run Zoom classrooms without the fans spinning up.

Also, Apple sold far fewer iPhones in Q3 but their revenue was flat as iPads and Macs made up for lower iPhone sales due to a later introduction. Do we get a surge in M1 sales to teachers and workers as we go back into lockdown given the much better thermals of M1?

 

[warp9]

Funny how my windows 10 laptop had zero of these over two years and you know, never endangered my work to the point where my machine simply shuts down, loses unsaved progress and then takes a minute before it can even start again.

Funny how Windows 10 now reboots and loses all your work on purpose just to get updates in. Every registry hack, gpedit workaround, etc. is always reversed and locked on the next major Windows update. Unless you have Win10 Pro on a domain, this is your life now.

Random shutdowns are NOT acceptable.

Literally what happens when you use Windows, and it's by design.

Microsoft is actively hostile towards it's users and it's the number 1 reason why I'm leaving Windows behind for good this year. Reason number 2 is I have not encountered a single kernel panic or crash on macos in 3+ years of active game dev, coding, and graphic design. I also don't see these forums filled with people with that problem either so I'm going to say, it's your experience that's the outlier here.

 

[pshufd]

Funny how Windows 10 now reboots and loses all your work on purpose just to get updates in. Every registry hack, gpedit workaround, etc. is always reversed and locked on the next major Windows update. Unless you have Win10 Pro on a domain, this is your life now.

Literally what happens when you use Windows, and it's by design.

Microsoft is actively hostile towards it's users and it's the number 1 reason why I'm leaving Windows behind for good this year. Reason number 2 is I have not encountered a single kernel panic or crash on macos in 3+ years of active game dev, coding, and graphic design. I also don't see these forums filled with people with that problem either so I'm going to say, it's your experience that's the outlier here.

I think that Microsoft has gotten better on updates but my workflow is that I shut down my main programs at the end of the workday and start them up the next work day. So updates haven't been a problem for me. I also do a lot of stuff on the cloud so I am less inclined to lose work. But I can understand if it's a problem for you.

It's probably something that Microsoft should fix for those who need it.

 

[hugodrax]

What is holding back progress in the x86 world is Windows. The problem is Microsoft Windows is a huge mess under the hood, with Layers and layers of Cruft to Jury-rig things in order to support 16bit apps from 1989.

This is why its difficult for Windows to run well on ARM CPUs and Unlike Apple they can't turn on a dime with so much junk in the trunk.

 

[dukebound85]

Apple has stuck with Intel for nearly 20 years now. The main reason for moving away is that Intel have not been able to make significant improvements in their CPUs for a few years now. Just as they moved from 68k to PowerPC, then to Intel, now they are moving to ARM.

As for Windows, it needs to be chucked out and rebuilt from scratch, just as Apple did when they moved from System 9 to OS X. It's just that Apple has a two-decade head start on Microsoft, which now has 20 more years of backwards compatibility to work around.

I remember in the mid 1980s Microsoft saying that they would migrate from MS-DOS to some form of Unix. They may finally be getting around to doing so.

20 years? intel macs came out in 2006....

 

[pshufd]

What is holding back progress in the x86 world is Windows. The problem is Microsoft Windows is a huge mess under the hood, with Layers and layers of Cruft to Jury-rig things in order to support 16bit apps from 1989.

This is why its difficult for Windows to run well on ARM CPUs and Unlike Apple they can't turn on a dime with so much junk in the trunk.

Rearchitecting large software projects is a lot of work and is often considered internally as maintenance work, rather than feature-work. Feature-work ideally sells more licenses and wins you more engineering brownie points. So it can be hard to motivate your people to do cleanup work. It also moves out features which may delay revenue.

It's an investment though as it means less maintenance work and spaghetti down the road.

 

[warp9]

I think that Microsoft has gotten better on updates but my workflow is that I shut down my main programs at the end of the workday and start them up the next work day. So updates haven't been a problem for me. I also do a lot of stuff on the cloud so I am less inclined to lose work. But I can understand if it's a problem for you.

It's probably something that Microsoft should fix for those who need it.

Shutting down overnight may work for you but engineers and scientists require multi-day processes to run uninterrupted.

The Windows forums are filled with threads from lawyers, accountants, writers, engineers-- all of them are losing work from Windows rebooting out from under them. Some researchers in those threads have lost days worth of computation because of it. It's happening during Active Hours too. One person got up to get a glass of water and came back to find all of his open files shut down and Windows installing updates.

The only solution is setting up a domain but that's not always an option. There's a lot of talk over there about leaving Windows for good and switching to Linux or macos.

 

[Gerdi]

Intel and AMD might be able to catch up, if they abandon x86. However it is not realistic to assume that you can get the same efficiency and performance with the x86 ISA.
X86 ISA just inherently has too many issues in order to be competitive.

 

[pshufd]

20 years? intel macs came out in 2006....

I think that Apple wouldn't have been happy with Pentium 4s in their laptops. In a way, we have AMD to thank for getting Intel to move to a new architecture from NetBurst.

 

[pshufd]

Shutting down overnight may work for you but engineers and scientists require multi-day processes to run uninterrupted.

The Windows forums are filled with threads from lawyers, accountants, writers, engineers-- all of them are losing work from Windows rebooting out from under them. Some researchers in those threads have lost days worth of computation because of it. It's happening during Active Hours too. One person got up to get a glass of water and came back to find all of his open files shut down and Windows installing updates.

The only solution is setting up a domain but that's not always an option. There's a lot of talk over there about leaving Windows for good and switching to Linux or macos.

The approach in my former workplace was Cloud Development Servers. So you received a cloud servers and you used VNC or Sun Global Desktop to get to the system to do your development. So the development servers were up all the time and you could connect or disconnect to your server anytime you wanted to. This provides for professionally managed backup, redeploying to another server if you need more resources, etc. It also allowed for allocation of scarce resources as needed. So if you need an HP-UX system, you put in a request and get a machine when one is free, and then you get it for a certain period of time.

This means that you don't need a strong client system do do heavy work as heavy work is done on the cloud.

 

[thekev]

Apple has stuck with Intel for nearly 20 years now. The main reason for moving away is that Intel have not been able to make significant improvements in their CPUs for a few years now. Just as they moved from 68k to PowerPC, then to Intel, now they are moving to ARM.

As for Windows, it needs to be chucked out and rebuilt from scratch, just as Apple did when they moved from System 9 to OS X. It's just that Apple has a two-decade head start on Microsoft, which now has 20 more years of backwards compatibility to work around.

I remember in the mid 1980s Microsoft saying that they would migrate from MS-DOS to some form of Unix. They may finally be getting around to doing so.

Intel has likely been at the mercy of their customers on some of this stuff. I can't imagine they wanted to retain x87 compatibility this many years, considering that they told people to stop using it around 2000.

 

[pshufd]

Intel has likely been at the mercy of their customers on some of this stuff. I can't imagine they wanted to retain x87 compatibility this many years, considering that they told people to stop using it around 2000.

I forgot about those instructions. I think that modern compilers use SIMD instructions for FP operations these days.

 

[pshufd]

20 years? intel macs came out in 2006....

My PowerMac is sitting behind me (it's my iPhone/iPad charging table) and I do recall buying it around 2004 or 2005.

 

[warp9]

The approach in my former workplace was Cloud Development Servers. So you received a cloud servers and you used VNC or Sun Global Desktop to get to the system to do your development. So the development servers were up all the time and you could connect or disconnect to your server anytime you wanted to. This provides for professionally managed backup, redeploying to another server if you need more resources, etc. It also allowed for allocation of scarce resources as needed. So if you need an HP-UX system, you put in a request and get a machine when one is free, and then you get it for a certain period of time.

This means that you don't need a strong client system do do heavy work as heavy work is done on the cloud.

That's really good. I'm a big believer in the cloud for things like this. I've just been waiting for bandwidth to catch up to my insane need of lossless dual hd screens (vfx).

 

[pshufd]

That's really good. I'm a big believer in the cloud for things like this. I've just been waiting for bandwidth to catch up to my insane need of lossless dual hd screens (vfx).

Working on the cloud requires a lot of bandwidth.

Watching sports in the office during work hours was frowned upon as it could slow down work.

 

[KPOM]

Intel has likely been at the mercy of their customers on some of this stuff. I can't imagine they wanted to retain x87 compatibility this many years, considering that they told people to stop using it around 2000.

x87 co-processors.