[stingraycharles]

This thread is almost 1:1 identical to when Apple released their own silicon. This has the potential to be a worthy competitor for the Windows ecosystem, precisely because of NVidia’s moat as the grandparent pointed out.

Microsoft pulls in their weight as well, so this seems like it has a decent chance of getting industry support.

[selicos]

If you can get desktop RTX 5070 performance, oodles of (v)RAM, and minimal power usage out of a thin and light mobile device it's a win. This is change. If you can afford it.

[Shitty-kitty]

Yes, there is a chance but it could also turn into another Itanium. Just because it is a superior product and backed by giants, doesn't necessarily guarantee success.

[Rohansi]

Not sure how it's comparable to Itanium at all? ARM is not a new architecture. It's not even a new architecture for Windows.

[branko_d]

Itanium was arguably not superior. The assumption behind it (that the compiler can bring order to the chaos) was wrong, making it slower, more expensive, and less efficient than x86 in real-world scenarios.

[wslh]

That said, Apple still deserves a lot of credit. They had a 5+ year edge, especially around the vision of tightly integrating the NPU and unified memory.

[stingraycharles]

I think they have a longer lead, considering how long they’ve been making iPhone A-style processors. Migrating the desktop ecosystem to it was only the logical next step.

[Shitty-kitty]

Like gaming consoles they calculated that unified memory will be cheaper for them in the long run. The funny thing is that while it gave them a unintended edge on local A.I, the "cheaper" calculation, didn't work out so well for them.

[fragmede]

In what way hasn't it worked out for Apple? Some of their products are totally sold out.

[Shitty-kitty]

They are limiting sku's on everything but highest end. The ramocalips is hitting high end RAM, especially hard.

[russelg]

Even on the highest end, the M3 Ultra at 512gb RAM doesn't exist anymore :'(

Actually, I went to the Mac Studio configure page on Apple.com and you can't do higher than 96GB now...

[noodletheworld]

Yeah but like, Apple put Rosetta 2 out and it was damn good.

Vendors didn’t have to do shit to support the platform, they just got better performance if they did (like factorio).

There is something of a difference between “all your stuff will still work, at comparable performance” and arm windows which (as evidenced by all the vendor promises) you can’t really currently say with prism.

I would describe prism as “surprisingly rubbish considering they had an example of how to do it right” and “your app probably doesn’t run because of drivers or some ??? compatibility thing”.

Am I misremembering? I remember being blown away by Rosetta.

Prism… yeah. Toggle the settings. Disable jit. Disable FP. …bin laptop. Get an intel laptop.

[branko_d]

I think a lot of it is down to Windows, not Prism itself.

For decades, Windows made it too easy for games and even some application to install drivers. Windows games use drivers for anti-cheat (and historically for copy protection too). Neither Apple Rosetta nor Microsoft Prism can translate/emulate drivers, but since drivers have been much more prevalent on Windows, now Windows has a much biggest compatibility problem.