[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.