[brokencode]

Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.

It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.

[whynotminot]

> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.

Right, and the guys who learned all the hard-won lessons along the way walked out the door to start a company, bringing along expert knowledge of Apple's designs and processes. And then Qualcomm bought them.

So on a surface level it seems implausible that QC could produce such a chip. But when you zoom out and go "oh, Qualcomm effectively bought Apple's senior chip engineers" it starts to make more sense.

It would be like if Qualcomm's top modem engineers started a company, which Apple bought. And then a couple years later Apple's long-running modem project mysteriously turned a corner and was ready to launch an exceptional modem. Like yeah, no kidding.

So yes, we need to see independent benchmarks and make sure it's not hype. But it's not so unbelievable that Apple's former top engineers could also produce a good a chip for another company. There's nothing magical about the Apple office--it's the engineers.

[brokencode]

Engineering something as complex as a CPU is a long process regardless of how smart and experienced your engineers are. I mean, you can certainly speed it up with great talent, but there is still long and hard work to do with any difficult engineering challenge.

I’m not saying there’s something special about Apple other than the scale of their investment over a long period of time.

It’s the same deal for Qualcomm and their 5G modems. Apple no doubt has hired many talented engineers to make a custom 5G modem. But Qualcomm’s modem is still the best one around. It’s hard to catch up because Qualcomm has been investing heavily in that space for a very long time.

Again, that’s not to say Apple won’t ever catch up. Just that I wouldn’t expect that their first effort will be better than Qualcomm’s modems.

[whynotminot]

Nuvia has been working on this tech for years before being snapped up by Qualcomm. And before that, those same engineers had worked on Apple silicon for years. Why do you keep thinking this is an overnight thing?

[stouset]

For starters, the claim that they were working on high performance computing before getting bought.

Taken at face value, that story is hard to reconcile with a sudden pivot to mobile.

[whynotminot]

To be fair it’s a bit of a myth that only mobile cares about efficiency and thermal management. It is definitely a factor for HPC and server too.

Apple scaled iPhone first designs up to the M* Ultra chips. Going from HPC to a mid wattage laptop is definitely serious work, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Especially with ARM.

[stouset]

Apple clearly iterated on that process over the course of a decade and multiple generations of chips, eventually achieving that outcome.

[spamizbad]

Is the assumption here Apple has developed a business process for building best-in-class CPUs while treating its engineering workforce as fungible commodities? If so they've succeeded in doing what Intel has been trying to do for decades.

[SekstiNi]

> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.

Given that they were confident enough to leave and start their own company, I'm not sure this is true. Indeed I wouldn't discount the value of high talent density.

> I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.

They have shown real hardware demos [1] to reviewers already, and the numbers look solid. Obviously there are no comparisons vs M3 yet, but it seems promising.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-e...

[brokencode]

That Anandtech article was full of caveats about how the benchmarks are not typical and about how comparisons are not easy at this point.

Again, it seems promising, but we’ll find out a lot more once a product is actually released that can be fully benchmarked and reviewed.

[crest]

Not one or two Geniuses, but a really good team. They lost supposedly key members of that team which threw them off track. An organisation can recover from this, but it takes time and money. Not everyone likes to work under Apple-like working conditions towards Apple's goals.

[ASinclair]

> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first

Doesn't that also describe what Qualcomm has been doing?

[brokencode]

Sure, but they’ve been behind the whole time. It’s not like they’ve been trading blows each generation with Apple.

If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product.

Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.