[webmobdev]

The article claims 100's of Apple's CPU engineers have left to join other start-ups. And thus Apple's ARM cpu development is stuck. If true, this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus. It'll certainly be interesting to see if people are still attracted to the next generation of ARM based Apple laptops and desktops if they aren't as good as Intel / AMD CPUs, given the current limitations of Apple ARM cpus (non-upgradeable SoC that fully supports only one OS). (But I find it hard to believe that Apple doesn't have some contingency plan for this - like I said, Apple has bet their future on ARM processors, and the tightly closed systems that they can build with it is every Apple CEO's wet dream).

[zibzab]

This is exactly the kind of risk people warned about.

You cannot do everything in-house and think you can always be better than every other company in the world. One bad year in one department and your competitors will eat your market share.

[poisonborz]

No, this is exactly the opposite. If you lock in your users in an ecosystem that's compatible with exactly nothing outside, they will happily eat your marginal updates for years. Even if problems would endure, Apple can plan calmly, as the switch would be much more costly for its customers.

[rbanffy]

I'd say it's too soon to call the updates marginal. This is a process improvement with some, small, architectural improvement. You can't pull an M1-level improvement on every generation.

[pjmlp]

They managed to do that the first time for about 20 years, then had to be rescued.

Now they have enough money to do that more than just 20 years, but nothing lasts forever.

[mycall]

With the cash Apple is holding, I have zero doubts they will be perfectly fine.

[rbanffy]

> non-upgradeable SoC

That doesn't seem to be slowing down sales of laptops and minis, or phones. Memory is tightly packed, but that's for SoC size - the processor tile talks to the memory via a DDR4 bus on the SoC board and can easily talk to memory across the motherboard. I'd bet on that for future ARM-based MacPro's and upgradable iMacs.

Making a socketed M1/M1X/M2/M2X is a matter of packaging, IF Apple wants it: they are not in the general CPU market. There may be some market in upgrading CPUs in the MacPro's, but I doubt it'd justify the investment.

> that fully supports only one OS

That's not really a problem for Apple - they chose to base all their offerings on a portable OS for a reason. The current system we call MacOS was ported to run on 68K, x86 (under NeXT for 32-bit, under Apple 64-bit), HP-PA, SPARC, PPC, ARM (both 32 - as iOS - and 64-bit).

All in all, the roadmap for beefier M's is clear - a wider backend, ISA extensions for common workloads (one of the reasons the M1 performs so well), and a larger reorder buffer (another reason the M1 performs so well) to keep the wider backend well fed.

[webmobdev]

> That doesn't seem to be slowing down sales of laptops and minis

It did and that's why Apple themselves had to backtrack when the Mini with the soldered RAM and SSD failed to sell as much as anticipated. (That's why the next version had swappable RAM, and not soldered).

All things being equal, people will always choose the device that is more easy to repair and upgradeable.

Apple has 2 things going for the M1 devices:

- They are priced cheaper to make the hardware attractive.

- They offer similar performance to AMD CPUs (with the advantage of lower power consumption.)

Both these factors help overcome the obvious deficiency - that the hardware is not upgradeable or repairable and the system software is limited to one OS. If Apple's ARM processors cannot keep up with AMD / Intel / other ARM cpus, both hardware and software limitations become glaring. And Apple is left with only the price advantage. (And we all know that Apple doesn't play that game as it isn't interested in the low margins market).

[rbanffy]

> - They offer similar performance to AMD CPUs

Apple doesn't use AMD and there is no supported AMD machine that can run macOS.

I like my AMD-based Linux box, but, if I want macOS, that's not going to solve my needs (it won't, for instance, run Xcode)

[webmobdev]

Apple's loss, I'd say. AMD Macs would sell like hot cakes.

[ginko]

>this is bad news for Apple as they have bet their entire future on ARM cpus

I'm sure Qualcomm & Co. would happily help them out if they're in a bind with their own design.

[webmobdev]

I meant their own ARM cpus. If they have to turn to someone else they lose the price advantage, in which case it doesn't make sense to run their own CPU division to manufacture CPUs.