[ben-schaaf]

AMD is making a bigger dent in Intel than Apple ever will. Apple doesn't even have 10% of laptop marketshare whereas AMD are currently at 20% for laptops and on a steady climb. Not to mention both the desktop and server markets where AMD is doing even better. So unless you think the whole PC world is going to switch to macOS or there exists another company capable of competing with AMD using ARM, we're not going to see a whole lot of change.

[rsynnott]

> or there exists another company capable of competing with AMD using ARM

There's a very long history in consumer computing where the industry as a whole tries something, executes badly, says "ah well, we tried" and kind of gives up on it, then Apple does it well, then the industry notices "oh, it's possible" and does it well.

Obvious examples: Smartphones: WinMob/Symbian, then years later iPhone, then almost immediately after Android (with WinMob and Symbian quietly dying)

Personal media players: Creative Nomad et al, then iPod, then lots of stuff.

Ultrabooks: A variety of unusable hideously expensive compact PC laptops going back to the 90s and mostly abandoned by the late noughties, then MacBook Air, then every PC manufacturer makes a MacBook Air clone.

ARM computers: Surface RT (ridiculously slow, no software support), modern ARM Surface (expensive, slow, poor software support), M1 (good), ???

Not to say it's inevitable, but once Apple shows it can be done, history suggests that it will be done. Possibly complicated by the chicken and egg problem here; Microsoft needs Qualcomm to make good laptop chips to invest much in ARM Windows, while Qualcomm needs Microsoft to make good ARM windows to invest much in good laptop chips.

[klelatti]

This is a really interesting point. I wonder if there is another route though. If we assume that Intel (for process reasons) are out of it, then could AMD produce an 'x86 version' of the M1 on TSMC 5nm using Zen3 and successors which would help other firms compete with Apple.

I guess the extent to which M1 is great because its ARM isn't clear - there are some advantages in instruction decoding, having bigLITTLE etc - but the impact of all these together hasn't been quantified. Plus there is the deeper integration with Apple's software.

[rsynnott]

> then could AMD produce an 'x86 version' of the M1 on TSMC 5nm using Zen3 and successors

I mean, they could, but the A12Z in the devkits, produced on TSMC's 7nm process, also showed very impressive results. It's not clear how much gain the M1 is getting from 5nm, but I'd be _extremely_ skeptical that it's the whole story, especially given limited improvements between the directly comparable A13 (7nm) and A14 (5nm, some microarch changes).

> Plus there is the deeper integration with Apple's software.

This is relevant to some OS niceties (eg the disconcertingly instant wakeup and resolution shifts) but should have no bearing on, say, SPECInt2017.

[klelatti]

Agree that they couldn't match - but if they got within say 15% on performance and battery life would that be good enough?

I think the software integration goes a bit further than wake-up etc e.g. they seem to have speeded up handling of reference counting through architectural changes (not sure I could explain how though and even Apple's software engineers seem a bit in the dark!)

[rsynnott]

> but if they got within say 15% on performance and battery life would that be good enough?

I mean, depends what you mean by 'good enough'. It would, obviously, be good for AMD; I don't see that it would make it competitive in perf per watt terms, though.

> e.g. they seem to have speeded up handling of reference counting through architectural changes

They have, but that wouldn't be relevant to (most) synthetic benchmarks, I wouldn't have thought. SpecInt2017 won't be doing much if any reference counting, for instance :) The M1's advantage in ObjC and Swift should be expected to be even greater than its advantage in 'normal' (ie C) code, but beyond refcounting microbenchmarks I don't think there are many tools to demonstrate that (and the vast bulk of performance-sensitive code running on MacOS is C/C++ anyway).

[TMWNN]

>Ultrabooks: A variety of unusable hideously expensive compact PC laptops going back to the 90s and mostly abandoned by the late noughties, then MacBook Air

PowerBook 100 before the Air. 12" PowerBook G4, too.

[adkadskhj]

I don't think the implication was that Apple itself is killing Intel, but rather that ARM is - this is just the first step in what many see as a trend that will have Intel scrambling.

[klelatti]

Broadly agree with a few caveats:

- If this gives Apple a major competitive advantage at the higher end (where presumably most of the margins are) then we may see some moves to try to compete with Arm based machines.

- A lot will depend on where MS takes ARM Windows - could MS do a competitive Rosetta style layer to give backwards compatibility?

- Much less lock-in in servers - eg AWS Gravitron and Ampere.

[rsynnott]

> If this gives Apple a major competitive advantage at the higher end

Whatever about the highest end (really have to wait for the M1X or whatever to evaluate that), it clearly gives Apple a _huge_ advantage for the $1000-ish ultrabook market; battery life. There's simply no thin-and-light to rival the M1 MacBook Air's battery life without very severe compromises. I think the market will have to respond to that, or just cede most of the ultrabook market (which is significant).

I doubt the industry really cares all that much about the 45W 15" laptop market; no-one buys them. Mid-range ultrabooks, though, are a good combination of margin and volume.

[AnonC]

A tangential correction: it’s AWS Graviton (one “r”), not Gravitron (two “r”s). I used to misread it as Gravitron too initially.

[klelatti]

Thanks - I think I've built muscle memory for Gravitron now which is very unhelpful!