[pseudosavant]

I hope these ARM chips are Apple-level ARM designs. Apple has an ARM license that allows them to completely design their own cores. Only Apple's ARM designs have cutting edge performance. Everyone else (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) uses stock, or nearly stock, ARM designs off-the-shelf that, performance-wise, aren't at all competitive with AMD/Intel. I'd love a Surface Pro with an M1/M2 chip, but the Qualcomm ARM chips are dogs.

[brucethemoose2]

The problem with the current Qualcomm cores is that they are cheap and low power, but the new Nuvia cores should alleviate this.

...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.

Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.

Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.

[MenhirMike]

Didn't they also lose one of their key employees? That was arguably in 2019, before the M1 came out, so I don't know how much of an impact Gerard Williams actually had, but I do wonder if they can keep the team together.

(Edit: Just googled, Gerard Williams is now at Nuvia and in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple)

[brucethemoose2]

Yeah, and Nuvia (now Qualcomm) aren't the only ones who sniped them.

Apple's effort to make a good modem also reportedly failed, so its not like their chip team are miracles workers.

Not that I am skeptical. Apple has a long history of making good premium SoCs.

[pseudosavant]

This has probably been the biggest issue Apple has faced post M1. They've lost lots of top people to other companies trying to design performance cores like Apple's. That and their SoC development resources are spread across far more products than they used to be.

[huijzer]

Everyone keeps going on about ARM, but isn’t the difference mostly memory latency and throughput? Less waiting for memory means less wasted clock cycles. And probably also hardcore engineering in choosing the right tradeoffs? The x86 "penalty" seems to be mostly a few precent from what I’ve read. Yes x86 wastes some transistors on legacy instructions, but it doesn’t fully explain the year long difference between Apple and Intel and AMD. (Although AMD seems to catch up now and Intel also a bit with their HBM2 chips.) It’s also TSMC and Apple working together on designing a great chip.

[pjmlp]

First step is convincing Windows development community that Windows on ARM actually matters.

Until then, whatever Apple has over 80% of the worldwide desktop market hardly matters.

And after how UWP was managed, there aren't that many that care.

[dboreham]

Not so much an issue now: fewer native apps left, and current x86 emulation is great.

[pjmlp]

Yet you don't see anyone rushing to buy Windows ARM laptops.

[uxp100]

I suspect, based on almost nothing, a vibe perhaps, that this will be an iteration of the Denver core. Previous versions have not been amazing on power iirc, I don’t think they got major design wins with it. I think at one point (2010 ish?) they considered an x86 processor based on this core as well. How much it remains a dynamic recompilation based “software isa” that could be x86 or arm or risc-v I have no idea.