Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/apple-silicon-the-passing-of-wintel-79a5ef66ad2b <comment><USER2> This is very bad for the US semiconductor industry. Intel is the only US company with state of the art fabs in the US.[1] (Global Foundries 14nm fab in East Fishkill, NY, formerly an IBM fab, maybe. It's owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and is being sold to ON Semiconductor.) Intel is profitable because they have high margins on x86 family parts. That margin will now start to drop as Intel faces competition from commodity ARM processors.

The US already lost the DRAM industry, the disk industry, the display panel industry, most of the small component industry, and the consumer electronics industry. In ten years, the US won't be able to make electronics in volume.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants)

<comment><USER3> I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel _really_ wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs.

They've managed to change direction in the past. They were all-in on Itanium and NetBurst until the Opteron showed up. They then kicked both to the curb and went all-in on the Pentium-M/Core microarchitecture.

Intel would be foolish to ignore the ARM market if for no other reason than the server market has started to change their focus on ops/watt rather than just ops/dollar. A 64 core ARM uses less power than a 64 _thread_ Xeon with comparable performance.

That means the lifetime cost of that ARM chip will be much lower than the Xeon since it'll cost less to power and cool it (and the datacenter). Lower power requirements can also change the calculus of datacenter siting.

I don't see Intel getting to ARM ops/watt levels with their x86 designs. The Lakefield designs are promising but the "big.LITTLE" core configuration is more useful in mobile applications than servers.

Intel losing out to ARM designs is really Intel's choice at this point.

<comment><USER4> It's crazy that Intel owned the best ARM design 15-20 years ago (Xscale) yet sold it a year before the iPhone shipped. Intel actually turned Apple away when they wanted an ARM SoC.

Both Intel and Microsoft made some kind of categorical error in 1995-2005 in assuming that their dominance was tied to a particular programming interface. Intel clung to the x86 instruction set while Microsoft operated on a "Windows everywhere" mindset, first pushing Win32 and then .Net.

Wintel seems finally dead, and good riddance.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Intel clung to the x86 instruction set

Itanium launched in 2001 (per Wikipedia); if anything, I'd say they overestimated how readily they could ditch x86. Of course, it might be that replacing x86 was a good idea and it was just that Itanium sucked (I'd accept that possibility, given the whole "needs a smarter compiler than exists" thing). But I _do_ agree with the general feeling that Intel and MS both overestimated how solid/entrenched they were.

<comment><USER5> I think AMD killed Itanium. I think Intel's plan was to leave x86 forever stuck at 32- bit and have Itanium be the natural upgrade path as computers started running into the 4 GB limitations. I think it would have been a nice transition story.

However, when AMD released AMD64 it killed this strategy. You could now buy a chip that natively ran x86 32 bit at full speed, plus be able to run code that could address more than 4 GB of RAM.

Once AMD64 came out, Itanium was a dead architecture.

<comment><USER6> "...as computers started running into the 4 GB limitations..."

You mean 64 GB limitations? 32-bit x86 could handle that much, and I'm sure it would have without AMD64.

<comment><USER7> Didn't that require PAE and all sorts of workarounds, all for a not-that-great experience?

<comment><USER6> No workarounds required if it's enough just to have a lot of up to 3 GB processes (arbitrary, upper 1 GB was typically reserved for the kernel and memory mapped peripherals/IO, like GPU, USB, SATA). Of course if a single process wanted to access more, that would have required remapping or multi- process approach. Or special hacks like Windows AWE [0].

All in all, not ideal, but I'm sure we would have managed with it a bit longer.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Windowing_Extensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Windowing_Extensions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Apple_ is competitive with Intel. Not ARM in a more general way. So I don't really see how Intel could magically produce a vastly better microarchitecture by retaking an ARM license... Especially since the microarchitecture is _not_ completely independent from the ISA, and Intel is a specialist of x86, not ARM. So it would take a huge time to reach the same level.

And that would not fix their process either...

Plus to be competitive on perfs Apple is using some tricks (larger page size => huge impact on L1) that are maybe difficult to apply to Windows, given the Windows ARM ecosystem already exists (even if no very striving for now).

Also MS is attempting a somehow closed ARM hw ecosystem, so that's not a full replacement for x86.

To finish what to compare to is currently likely to be AMD, not Intel.

So I think x86 is here to stay, or at least that's not the Apple switch that is going to initiate a revolution.

<comment><USER9> > So I think x86 is here to stay, or at least that's not the Apple switch that > is going to initiate a revolution.

It will, indirectly. When MacBooks offer 1.5x the performance at 2x the battery life, people using Windows or Linux will start to demand similar devices from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc;

It makes me the saddest for AMD. They've just clawed back a few victories from a decade of loss, and starting within 5 years that will hardly matter.

As for the customer: this will be an amazing time, especially if we will finally get some standardization around ARM SoCs. Apparently every single one of them (at least phones) does their own little boot quirks, instead of their being a unified BIOS or EFI or whatever to guide it all.

<comment><USER8> > It will, indirectly. When MacBooks offer 1.5x the performance at 2x the > battery life, people using Windows or Linux will start to demand similar > devices from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc;

Well, people can demand that, but if only Apple knows how to design the chips, and given they will not sell them to competitors...

<comment><USER10> Users don't want chips they want systems and the way people will "demand" them will be by buying Apple. Dell and Lenovo will have to come up with something or cede market share.

<comment><USER11> Where I come from, people won't certainly be rushing to buy Apple with 300 euros as minimum wage and 1000 euros on average for regular IT job.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but neither are they now so it makes no difference to Apple.

<comment><USER11> Which makes the whole point of the article meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's true that Intel (note, I'm a former employee) has had a mixed track record in creating new businesses outside of desktop and server chips. However, I'd like to point out a few things.

1\. When Intel released HT as a way to recover 15% idleness in CPUs, the Linux scheduler took a while before it realized it should schedule work on all _full_ cores before assigning something to a hyperthread.

2\. Intel has been adding specialized SIMD vector operations, and wide vector operations, yet popular compilers like GCC were really slow to take advantage of them. One or two blog posts a month will hit the HN front page about inlining assembly or using specialized math APIs like the Intel MKL to extract performance from the cores you're running on.

Apple can add neat blocks like audio, low power video playback, always-on processor, and neural engine because they also release the software APIs for it. Maybe that's Intel's sin. They never realized how hands-off the white box industry needed to be to stay alive and relied too much on OSS developers to fuel general-purpose Linux performance outside of large HPC computers. Intel made add-on things, people didn't use them, and now Intel is perceived as the company that can't innovate.

<comment><USER13> > the Linux scheduler took a while before it realized it should schedule work > on all full cores before assigning something to a hyperthread.

According to statistics maintained by LWN [1], Intel was the number #1 employer of Linux kernel developers in the latest kernel, and has been for a while. If you go back into previous years, Intel was not always as high up, but even back in 2007 (when LWN started tracking this) they were in the top 5-10 (depending on how you count it.)

Intel released HT way back in 2002. I don't know how active Intel was in Linux kernel development back then. But what Intel was or wasn't doing 18 years ago probably isn't very relevant to the question of Intel's current performance.

[1] [https://kernelnewbies.org/DevelopmentStatistics](https://kernelnewbies.org/DevelopmentStatistics)

<comment><USER14> I'll borrow the old BSD/linux saying about intel is a group cpu makers writing an OS Where Apple is and OS maker that designed a cpu

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Gassée is focusing on the wrong things. "Thermal envelope"? Bah.

In the block diagram of the SoC for the new Macs, Apple very clearly signaled what they are doing. They are working towards Steve Jobs's long-term vision.

Onboard "advanced audio processing", "enhanced camera", "neural engine", "AI processing": this is about making Macs that support development of the next generation of software for iPhones.

Mobile phones right now are stuck. Apple wants to make them more useful to their users, and the way to to that is to make them context aware, continuously listening and occasionally looking around. so the phone knows what's going on.

Context-aware phones is what this is about. "Siri, write minutes of the meeting we just had, and email them to everyone."

Users will never accept a phone that's continuously uploading everything in their lives to Apple's servers (or anyone else's), so all of this capability _has to be on board the device_.

Intel is incapable of making a SoC that will support this, and no-one else has the capacity, so Apple has to do it themselves. (Also, Apple wants to keep the IP to themselves.)

<comment><USER16> If they wanted those extra things available on x86 macs, they could just stuff them in an accelerator chip.

<comment><USER17> That's an incredibly costly and inefficient approach. You used to be able to get x86 add on boards for Macs back in the late 80s and early 90s, but they cost a fortune and were incredibly clunky.

<comment><USER16> That's not a comparable thing. Putting specialized functions in their own chips is completely normal, and only a problem if they need really deep integration with the host CPU, or efficiency or size are extremely important (iPhone: sure. laptop, not so much), so I don't think those are a primary concern for the move to ARM laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why Intel did not buy ARM is something that puzzles me...

In 2016 ARM sold to SoftBank for $31B.

In 2016 Intel had a market cap of ~$170B and about $17B cash on hand. I'm no M&A analyst but surely given their fundamentals at the time Intel could have bought ARM without financial difficulty, no?

If even Facebook can look two steps ahead and pay an eye watering $19B for WhatsApp couldn't someone in the C-level at Intel could have seen that owning ARM would have been a jolly good strategic purchase - or am I missing something?

<comment><USER19> The conversation was a non-starter due to antitrust laws. Intel has wanted to purchase both ARM and NVIDIA for at least a decade.

This is according to the internal rumor mill at Intel Labs circa 2010, so take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER20> I can see why buying ARM would be a problem for antitrust laws but I don't see why it would be the case for NVIDIA. It seems that ATI/AMD were a stronger competitor to NVIDIA on the GPU side that they were to Intel on the CPU one.

<comment><USER21> Intel had (or still has?) the biggest share on the graphics market as every intel cpu had (has?) an integrated gpu. So by definition of market share the largest supplier wanting to buy the second one is an antitrust problem. It does not matter that intels graphics cores are much worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A big problem with the thesis of this story: no one else has ARM SoCs as fast as Apple's. The highest end Android phones available get smoked on performance by the 3-year-old iPhone 8:

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/15603/the-samsung- galaxy-s20-...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15603/the-samsung- galaxy-s20-s20-ultra-exynos-snapdragon-review-megalomania-devices/7)

The tablet situation doesn't look much different.

Who's going to design equally capable SoCs for Windows portables? Doesn't look like it's going to be Qualcom or Samsung.

<comment><USER23> Does single thread CPU matter? It's been facing marginal returns for years. Most of the growth in computing power expansion is in chiplets, GPUs, and TPUs.

The real question is mobile GPUs, and whether NVidia or AMD want to step into that market. On the desktop, Ampere and RDNA2 absolutely crush Apple's offerings, Apple is multiple generations behind. However this is at the expense of not really carrying too much about TDP. The real question is can NV or AMD squeeze a cut down version of their architectures into a SoC thats power competitive.

That is, I might be willing to buy an AMD "Fusion" that has a Ryzen and RDNA2 architecture in it, even if it is a severely cut down version, over a MacBook if the battery life is reasonable.

<comment><USER20> AMD has a deal with Samsung to integrate their GPU technology with the Exynos line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not so long ago, we had this at HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5587283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5587283) ("The rise and fall of AMD...")

With comments like these:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5588069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5588069) ("I could go on and on about all the reasons I believe AMD went down the tubes... but I think a lot of it reduces to the disfunctional corporate culture alluded to in this piece.")

Guess what happened with AMD? So I suggest waiting with the obituaries, at least until Apple actually has a working system a normal person can buy, and until Intel/AMD shows us their response.

The entire idea behind the obituaries is that Apple's whatever will be so performant that ordinary PCs will switch on mass. This misses a few things:

A) Where will the PCs get their ARM chips from? Not Apple, and non-Apple ARM is still obviously inferior to x86. Intel/AMD will rather keep their x86 monopoly, so it's in their interests to keep producing x86 as long as it's competitive even just against non-Apple ARMs.

B) The typical Desktop/Laptop user doesn't care that much about performance anymore - not as much as they care about running their favourite apps. x86 has a huge lead here.

All it takes is for Intel/AMD to stay/become slightly competitive with whatever Apple put out, and Apple will stay in their silo - which actually wouldn't bother Apple Inc. at all; They always ran their own ecosystem.

C) Really, CISC/RISC doesn't matter that much. Apple's advantage (if there's one) would be a result of other architectural decisions, we should ask ourselves if there's anything preventing Intel/AMD from copying those decisions.

<comment><USER25> _The entire idea behind the obituaries is that Apple 's whatever will be so performant that ordinary PCs will switch on mass_

It doesn't need to and is unlikely to happen en masse. Apple creaming off the most valuable consumers is a problem for everyone else. You can see that in the smartphone market where Apple dominates the profits.

<comment><USER24> PC makers switching to ARM was the thesis of the linked post.

Regarding your thesis:

'Creaming off most valuable consumers' somehow didn't stop Huawei, Samsung, etc. from being huge profitable enterprises. Partly because it's not quite true (Apple has a position in some countries, in others it might as well not exist), partly because there's more to things than a benchmark comparison (Apple survived for a long time when _Mac_ processors were inferior), and partly because we'll see a response from Intel and AMD. It's going to be an interesting few years in this sector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is it really the _x86 architecture_ that's driving costs up and not core micro architecture and process? From where I sit, what we're actually seeing is a 7nm (and impending 5mn) TSMC _process_ destroy the old 14nm process Intel has been hung up on for too long. I mean that's a square increase in density right there. If Intel could fab a 7nm chip right now, I'm pretty sure it would compete in the power department with any arm chip on the market. Just look at the latest Ryzen 4800U. It's a 10w 7nm x86_64 chip that outperforms the a12z. I don't want to downplay the proliferation of ARM we've seen lately due to the smartphone market, and having another architecture is good thing. But I'm not convinced the author isn't scapegoating x86.

[https://gizmodo.com/so-just-how-powerful-are-apples-new- lapt...](https://gizmodo.com/so-just-how-powerful-are-apples-new-laptop-chips- gonna-1844134011)

<comment><USER27> I think that Gizmodo article is getting it very wrong. They keep talking about "the A12Z intended for the Mac", but AFAIK there is no "A12Z intended for the Mac". When Apple switched to Intel their TDK used a Pentium 4, yet no Mac ever shipped with a Pentium 4 (besides the TDK itself, if you consider it a Mac).

The ARM TDK is basically an iPad Pro running macOS, without a screen and with extra ram. A12Z themselves are just re-binned A12X (with just one extra GPU core activated), processors that are nearly two years old.

No way Apple is shipping that in their first MacBook ARM...

<comment><USER26> >No way Apple is shipping that in their first MacBook ARM...

No doubt. However, I don't think the article is so much "getting it very wrong" as it is working with what they've got. We've seen what a 10-18 watt soc from apple can do in the iPad. And it's pretty cool. But the point is it's not truth defining jaw dropping revolutionary. We can look at what AMD is selling right now. It's also pretty cool and starting to turn some eyeballs. It's very unlikely Apple is going to release something that outright spanks the status quo. So my expectations are that whatever Apple releases will be competitive with what we currently see from AMD and, maybe, with what we'll see later this year. That's all. I'm skeptical that the shift to ARM is the crux of the matter, is all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Longer term this will also likely accelerate servers running on ARM. Writing software on ARM laptops that are deployed to production servers running on x86 servers will start to cause a host of new challenges. The switch to running ARM in production will have many advantages for developers and will likely be very attractive to cloud providers (AWS, Azure) as the costs of electricity for these servers may be significantly less.

<comment><USER29> If there was an actual energy efficiency advantage -- i.e. less power consumed for the same amount of work -- Google would already be 100% on ARM. Why do you think they would leave that on the table?

I realize the situation changes every time a new CPU comes out, but I have never personally seen a _real_ workload where ARM won on energy efficiency and had reasonable performance. Tests like [1] and [2] showing x86 having an orders-of-magnitude lead on database performance vs. AWS Gravitron2 should give you serious pause.

1: [https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI- GRAVITON...](https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI- GRAVITON200&sha=c954e23&p=2)

2: [https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI- GRAVITON...](https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2005220-NI- GRAVITON200&sha=0c9b11b&p=2)

If you're wondering why ARM needs to have both competitive performance _and_ energy efficiency, see Urs Holzle's comments on wimpy vs. brawny[3].

3: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36448.pdf)

<comment><USER30> >Google would already be 100% on ARM

Google is laggard when it comes to server tech. Amazon and others have leapfrogged them.

<comment><USER29> That's pretty silly. What makes you say this? There are large groups at Google responsible for buying every computer there is and evaluating the TCO thereof. With operating expenses exceeding two billion dollars per _week_ , they have a larger incentive to optimize their first-party power efficiency than anyone else in the business. I'm fairly certain their first-party workloads (search etc) are the largest workloads in the world.

<comment><USER31> I don't think they would switch even if they could in the near future.

The poster above says that Amazons "leapfrogs." They question is "leapfrogs where?" The fact that ARM cores cost 100+ times less than Intel, and are n times more power efficient was well known for the whole eternity.

What people don't get is that you get the whole platform on x86, and ARM is a very, very DIY thing, even if you are a multinational with lots of money on RnD.

<comment><USER29> > I don't think they would switch even if they could in the near future.

They've already brandished their ability to port their whole product from x86 to POWER[1], and deploy POWER at scale if they need to[2]. My personal interpretation of these announcements is they are made with the purpose of keeping their Intel sales representatives in order, but the fact that you don't also see them or anyone else brandishing their AArch64 port should tell you something.

1: [https://www.cnet.com/news/google-acquires-a-taste-for- ibms-p...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-acquires-a-taste-for-ibms- power8-processors/)

2: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/headed- into-its-fifth-year-openpower-has-momentum-into-the- power9-generation/#5c2a7e0978a8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Furthermore, Apple doesn't buy the expensive Xeon chips, used in millions of > Cloud servers, that represent a growing proportion of Intel's revenue.

While Apple is not traditionally considered a HyperScaler ( Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Alibaba etc ), their own Datacenter is still pretty big. You would be using it when you are using Siri and iCloud. And they use Xeon.

> _Margins_ will inevitably suffer as the ARM-based SoC field is filled with > sharp competitors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, sure to be joined by arch- > enemy AMD and others, all ushering in a new era of PCs.

That _is_ the problem. It isn't ARM vs x86. Nor Intel's Fab vs TSMC ( Although they are part of the equation ). It is their _Margin_.

Intel is not willing to risk their current healthy margin. And there is nothing inherently cheaper with ARM design. Intel could have lower their x86 Chip with less Margin to compete. In that case the compatibility of x86 with slightly higher premium will be able to fence off any ARM attack into PC market.

In the short term everything will still be fine for Intel. The market moves very slowly unless you are Apple which control everything in their stack. But in the long term the unit economics of x86 chip with current Intel's margin stand zero chance to compete. Unless Intel's Fab does some miracle and suddenly leap ahead of TSMC by a generation. Which as far as I can see there is zero chance happening in the next 5 years. Further out we will have to wait and see.

That is of course assuming the cost of running those Fab and their Tech being equal. Which we know that isn't the case.

And I haven't even mention AWS Graviton 2. I would not be surprised if Graviton 3 is already sampling.

<comment><USER33> PC market is minuscule compared to mobile, stagnating , slowly declining and has a long refresh cycle. Not exactly a market you want to be in and be excluded from the larger market.

Even worse for Intel, most computers over $1000 are Macs leaving Intel with the low end.

<comment><USER32> >Not exactly a market you want to be in and be excluded from the larger market.

I am not sure what you are trying to suggest.

You either go in to the bigger market and complete with lower margin. Or you stay within the market with margin and milk it for as long as you could.

<comment><USER33> AKA "The Innovators Dilemma".

[https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies- Cause...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Cause- Great/dp/1565114159)

The solution?

[https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating- Sustaini...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustaining- Successful/dp/1422196577)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Apple Silicon-powered Macs will be better than Intel-based laptops, at least after a few product cycles. I say "better" in terms of performance/watt.

But will their margin of superiority be large enough to cause the seismic shifts in Windows/x86 land that this article suggests?

I'm not sure.

If Apple's laptops are 25% or perhaps 50% better, I'm _really_ not sure that's enough to cause a major upheaval.

I think we will wind up in a middle ground different from the upheaval JLG suggests.

We are already at a place in which your average laptop is "good enough for most people"; being 25%-50% better than "good enough" is a nice _competitive advantage_ but that's not going to necessarily turn the world upside down.

\- "Power users" will appreciate the CPU improvement. At this point, that essentially means video editors. It would mean gamers, but Macs still won't be the first choice for gaming.

\- "Extremely mobile users" will appreciate battery improvements. However, I suspect most laptop users use them chained to a desk most of the time anyway. I would _love_ 50% more battery life, but it's not really actually that much of a factor for me personally.

\- "Cheap laptop buyers" won't be buying Macs anyway as Apple (wisely) doesn't seem like it wants to play in the sub-$1000 space. Though... maybe it will now.

<comment><USER35> Your last paragraph and your fourth paragraph are the big upheaval.

If you ask me, Apple is going to make a ~$700 passively cooled (sealed like an iPad) MacBook Air with similar/better performance to the current model.

Most importantly, it will have the same build quality and "expensive" feeling.

Sure, there are plenty of laptops now with similar build quality to Macs, but none of them are actually cheaper than a Mac. Load up a ThinkPad X1 Carbon or XPS 13 with a high DPI display and comparable specs and you'll see what I mean.

But now you're going to have Apple saving $200 compared to _every other computer_ by not giving Intel a dime. The A13 chip is a $10 line item in the component cost of an iPhone.

This barely even costs Apple R&D money since it was already a part of the much larger iPhone and iPad business.

Literally nobody will be able to touch Apple on the value end of the spectrum unless they go into bargain basement territory. Are customers going to buy a $600 plastic 1080p laptop with big fans, keyboard deck flex, and 5 hour battery life or will they buy a $700, thin, fanless, retina aluminum Mac with the same performance, 10 hour battery, and a much better fit and finish?

If this all sounds a little unrealistic, I've got an iPad Air to sell you!

<comment><USER34> I hope and _pray_ (to the extent that an atheist can pray) that this is what will happen.

There is zero question in my mind that Apple can do what you say, for the reasons you say.

The only potential obstacle is institutional will. You would now have a larger overlap between low-end Macs and the higher-end iPads. In _my_ opinion, this is not a problem because I don't view those product lines as conflicting. But does Apple?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > This leaves Intel with one path: if you can't beat them, join them. Intel > will re-take an ARM license (it sold its ARM-based XScale business to > Marvell in 2006) and come up with a competitive ARM SoC offering for PC > OEMs.

I find this path unlikely and it depends on Intel's foundries not falling further behind TSMC. The most likely path is to compete on price-per- peformance (i.e. slash prices and internal costs) rather than performance-per- watt.

<comment><USER31> What this discussion lacks is the acknowledgement of just how titanic Intel is.

It is pretty much the biggest semiconductor company out there, focusing solely on 3-4 main product lines.

The most surprising is them under-performing so much while them having resources comparable to the next few competitors combined.

It is not only their fabs that got an arrow to the knee with 10nm.

Their newest microarchitectures deliver tiny IPC gains in comparison to AMDs products even on comparable nodes, while having significantly more transistors per core.

Tiger Lake throws 40-45% more transistors, and only gets 10% IPC gain at max, and the rest of performance gains come from better thermals.

<comment><USER37> I think you have some salient points there.

A few years down the line, Intel will look back and thank AMD for their decision to spin off GF and go with TSMC with Zen 2.

EYPC and Ryzen are keeping the x86 arch relevant until Intel is able to catch up on their next-gen process nodes.

AMD may be eating Intel's market share for lunch in a few markets, but in the long term keep ARM far enough away for it to be a niche player, both in the server space and the laptop space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's not apple that matters here. At all. Ever since they took ARM in house for their devices it's clear they don't want to be dependent on another corporations chip design.

What this misses, gravely I think, is that from the armchair CEO angle, I would want to go after _Qualcomm_

They're the biggest vendor in this space for mobile as far as I can tell. All the major Android vendors use them, including in high end devices, and they're apparently incredibly hard to work with from what I understand. This would be the way in for them to muscle into the ARM market but supplanting Qualcomms dominance.

That would make more sense to me if I was running Intel. Then again, they ditched their cellular unit so it seems this might be questionable all together

<comment><USER39> Apple doesn't want other vendors using their CPUs.

<comment><USER38> > Apple doesn't want other vendors using their CPUs.

Exactly my point, in so far as what I said: Apple's never going to be Intels customer for CPUs once they the last Mac requiring Intel CPUs is no longer supported. That's a dead market.

Qualcomm on the other hand, is ripe for some real competition. If Intel wants to swing big into the ARM CPU game, they should look to dethrone Qualcomm. Apple is pretty much irrelevant here. That's been clear since they brought all their CPU designs in house

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> To add to JLGs points, a top of the line 2020 MacBook Air that sells for $1,450

[https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air- early-2020-in...](https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air- early-2020-intel-core-i7-1060ng7-1-2-ghz-4-cores)

Is significantly slower than a $400 iPhone SE in single core, and only slightly faster in Multi-core.

[https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-se-2nd- gene...](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-se-2nd-generation)

The entry level $900 MacBook Air is 30% slower in single and multi-core than an SE:

[https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air- early-2020-in...](https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air- early-2020-intel-core-i3-1000ng4-1-1-ghz-2-cores)

Now imagine next years MacBook Airs running the next generation A14 processors on a 5 nm process instead of 7 nm, with much more thermal head room than a phone, with far faster integrated GPUs than Intels, and with functionality like T2 integrated in the SOC. And using processors that are at least $100 cheaper.

It's mind boggling to think of how much faster they will be, how much longer their battery life will be, and that they likely will be even cheaper.

<comment><USER41> > Is significantly slower than a $400 iPhone SE in single core, and only > slightly faster in Multi-core.

Geekbench is super misleading because they do things like include benchmarks which are hardware-accelerated on the CPU in the iPhone but not the Intel ones. The weak little low power CPU in the Air is also hardly the fastest single thread Intel processor, much less multi-core, so I don't know what they're planning to do on the desktop.

> Now imagine next years MacBook Airs running the next generation A14 > processors on a 5 nm process instead of 7 nm

But then it's competing with not only whatever Intel manages to come up with in the meantime but also AMD processors on the same 5nm process.

> with far faster integrated GPUs than Intels

But, again, faster than AMD's? Or what Intel will have at the time, given that they're now developing discrete GPUs and will have that in house to improve their iGPUs?

> And using processors that are at least $100 cheaper.

Which Apple has no incentive to give to you instead of putting in their own pocket, especially if what they offer is actually better.

> how much longer their battery life will be

"Much more thermal head room than a phone" and "much longer battery life" don't go together, they're a trade off against one another.

The amount of hype around this is getting to a level that people are going to be very disappointed if it doesn't live up to it.

I'm waiting for some independent third party benchmarks before getting so excited. And not the first ones which were given early access in exchange for favorable skewing.

<comment><USER42> >Geekbench is super misleading

SPEC is the industry standard for comparing performance across platforms.

>Last year I've noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4)

<comment><USER41> So now we've gone from being "significantly faster" to being as fast on integer, slower on floating point and slower on threaded applications. Which seems a lot more plausible, but now where's the argument that this is going to be a marked improvement rather than a lateral shift with a huge transition cost?

<comment><USER42> This is a comparison of an iPhone part to a laptop/desktop part. The iPhone part doesn't have anywhere near the same power budget, nor does it have active cooling. The SPEC benchmarks take a couple of hours to run, so cooling is definitely a factor.

Apple's laptop part will be the first time they have a level playing field on both.

The Apple laptop part is also going to have a process node advantage. It will be built on TSMC's 5nm node while AMD is sticking with an enhanced version of TSMC's 7nm node and Intel will still be on 10nm.

The word was that Apple's entry level laptop part will have 8 next generation Big cores and 4 next generation little cores, which is quite aggressive for an entry level laptop part. The A13, in comparison, only has two big cores.

We'll see how Apple's laptop chip fares when it ships.

<comment><USER41> > The iPhone part doesn't have anywhere near the same power budget, nor does > it have active cooling.

This is much less of an issue for single thread performance because a single thread isn't going to exhaust an 8-core CPU's full power budget anyway, or if it does it's by boosting to very high (i.e. less power efficient) clocks which only give a few extra percent more performance. The main thing the extra power budget gives you these days is the ability to have more cores, which x64 processors already have.

> It will be built on TSMC's 5nm node while AMD is sticking with an enhanced > version of TSMC's 7nm node and Intel will still be on 10nm.

AMD already has 5nm processors on their roadmap. Apple might release theirs first, but having a modest advantage for a few months until your competitors release their next design isn't especially groundbreaking. It's basically the expected state of affairs when companies compete with each other and neither has a clear advantage -- the one released most recently is a bit faster and then soon the competitor has a release and it goes back the other way.

<comment><USER42> What is on your future roadmap doesn't matter at all, if it's not going to ship in time to compete with your rivals in the current generation.

In the next generation, Apple is going to gain a process node advantage, and level the playing field for the first time in respect to power and thermal envelope.

Given that they were already in the same ballpark as Intel and AMD without any of those advantages, we're in for a sea change.

<comment><USER41> > What is on your future roadmap doesn't matter at all, if it's not going to > ship in time to compete with your rivals in the current generation.

The point is that "current generation" doesn't work like that. If AMD releases Zen3 on 7nm and Zen4 on 5nm and the ARM Macs arrive half way between one release date and the other, which one do you want to compare them to? Neither would be strictly "fair" because one or the other would have an advantage of several months of advancement one way or the other. But doing all of this just because they couldn't wait a few more months for Zen4 doesn't make much sense.

We're not going to really know until ordinary people can get it in their hands and benchmark it.

The whole thing strikes me as Apple seeing Intel stagnating and starting a long-term process in motion several years ago which was too far along to stop by the time AMD brought competition back to the market again.

<comment><USER42> >If AMD releases Zen3 on 7nm and Zen4 on 5nm and the ARM Macs arrive half way between one release date and the other

Zen 3 and Apple's laptop chips are both due in the fourth quarter of this year.

Apple is going to have a process node advantage at least until Zen 4 ships, which definitely will not happen only a couple of months after Zen 3 ships.

However, despite Apple having a better hand to play than AMD or Intel for the first time, I agree that the proof is in the pudding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Some serious mental leaps taking place here, well done. I take issue with the assumption that Apple's behavior in the (increasingly incredibly niche) MacOS ecosystem will somehow change Microsoft's strategy in any way. This may be the passing of Mactel, but I doubt Wintel is going anywhere anytime soon.

<comment><USER33> Microsoft changed strategy with Windows 8 trying to make it tablet friendly because of the iPad (even though it shouldn't have) and the entire reason behind the Surface line was because other OEMs could only make cheap commodity computers that didn't compete with Apple on the high end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> From the guy who thought the AT&T Hobbit was going to take over the industry.

<comment><USER44> Keep prophetizing, one day you nail it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interesting read and the aspect that we may see ARM desktops become more common, based upon Microsoft making more an effort for their ARM support is also credible - only recently saw Windows 10 running natively upon a Raspberry Pi4 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTT8GlsqXs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTT8GlsqXs8)

Equally the Linux desktop offering have advanced and by that, more palatable for the average user for a desktop.

Certainly when it comes to most desktops in business, something that can open word and email and odd spreadsheet and powerpoint, that's the bulk of usage right there. Small lower power usage alternative like Rpi4 would do those jobs fine as for most users. So Apple may actually shift that cultural hurdle that prevails in business, maybe.

<comment><USER46> There's already the Microsoft Surface Pro X that uses ARM. It also has a translation layer of some sort like Rosetta that allows you to run x86 (but not x86_64) Windows programs on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As much as I like Apple products this is wishful thinking, outside North America and a couple of tier one countries, Apple is nowhere to be found unless one belongs to a rich family that happens to bring an Apple device from the outside during a business travel.

</comment><comment><USER47> Gassée actually significantly understates the power consumption difference between the Intel chip in his MBP and an iPad Pro. MBP 13s sustain around 35 watts of power indefinitely. An 12X sustains only around 10 watts.

<comment><USER48> Yes, but I read this:

> think faster, svelter laptops actually lasting 10 hours on a battery charge.

...and I instantly think of HP's Envy x360 w/Ryzen 4500U pulling almost 14 hours of battery life in productivity tests.

I Apple wants to stand out, it will have to push closer to 20hs on a charge. Not saying they can't, saying it'll be a stretch. And great if they pull it.

<comment><USER49> I'm mainly a Mac user, but recently bought one of these Ryzen laptops. The performance is amazing, especially for a low end / "budget" laptop.

<comment><USER48> I'm not sure Apple will be able to exceed Ryzens[0] performance (as perceived by the user). They could get to match it, and of course having tighter integration between hardware and OS will give them opportunities to optimize and tune beyond what Windows and Linux can do having to support a wider range of hardware.

[0] I'm considering Zen 2 "the best performing x86" (with a small grain of salt). If Intel wants to take that crown with Tiger Lake I'm all for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> is there a possibility that Apple starts gaining such a lead that none of the others are able to catch up. Could we all be running Apple hardware in say 7 years because the rest never could match the performance of Apple silicon, due to the late start?

like what are the odds of qualcomm today matching the A12 in 5 years even?

<comment><USER51> Highly doubt it - even though apple is a giant you can't underestimate everyone else who are also massive giants. Qualcomm until now may had no real reason to step out of its incremental performance increases with every generation since almost everyone on Android camp uses its SoC's for their flagships anyway. Similar to how Intel has been slowly pushing small gradual upgrades to their to CPU's until AMD managed to do something better and now we see Intel pushing more cores than before to catch up.

<comment><USER50> Im truly ignorant on this. Who is Qualcomms competition ? given that all android phones are running just their chips, whats their incentive to catch up to Apple when they can just waddle along their current path.

<comment><USER51> Apple taking over the arm laptop market is now their competition. Qualcomm was to gain big if Windows on ARM took off and chewed off a part of the x86 marketshare, but as the author of the parent comment suggested there's a chance apple could leapfrog everyone and they won't be able to catch up meaning less windows devices. qualcomm would be at loss.

<comment><USER50> thank you for explaining. Im also the original commentator lol.

I still worry about us entering in to a monoculture.

<comment><USER51> Sorry missed that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> In the meantime, can anyone recommend a desktop workstation-like device to start seriously playing around with daily driving ARM? Something more powerful than an rpi4 but with good open source support.

<comment><USER53> Pine64 is working on a great set of devices:

[https://www.pine64.org/](https://www.pine64.org/)

For the workstation they don't have anything much above a RPi4 but they have an interesting MiniITX form factor for a 7-way cluster and are even working on an IP camera. Really cool set of devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I don't see how Windows would be able to compete on ARM TBH. Nobody is even close to the performance of Apple chips, and that gap is likely to grow over time as Apple piles on more and more specialized compute and takes full advantage of its vertical integration - something Microsoft cannot do. It's really nice to have a fairly restricted set of hardware to develop for. It's really nice to be able to just know that e.g. all your devices have a TPU, and a certain amount of GPU compute bandwidth, and certain hardware codecs, etc. On the Windows side this will never be the case unless Microsoft magically commits itself to chip design the same way Apple did, but even under the best of circumstances this will take a decade or so. Android is similarly handicapped.

Intel will be fine for at least the next decade. Businesses will still run on Intel, as will cloud. They'll figure out their process trouble and retake the performance crown again from AMD, although by a narrower margin. All of this has happened in the past. This is due to one simple truth: businesses couldn't give less of a shit what hardware their software runs on, and moving everything to ARM is so expensive, it's not going to happen for existing apps.

Most of us here would have a bout of OCD knowing we're not using the latest and greatest thing, but businesses don't have such a problem.

</comment><comment><USER55> x86 and it's ancestors eating the markets of [iAPX 432, Itanium, i860, i960] has taught a lesson in the value of an install-base in the server and desktop market. Let's see if history repeats itself?

Apple has never seemed to really be into the concept of backward compatibility; but historically the rest of the industry has been.

Whatever happens, I'll bet it won't be boring.

</comment><comment><USER56> So, because Apple is moving their general computing devices to ARM-based CPU/GPU, the whole world is going to do the same, Intel will die and world peace will be achieved?

Hold your horses. No one even knows how it will perform, how Rosetta 2 will perform and if Intel is not going to hit back as it did with Qualcomm and Microsoft.

Seeing is believing, after all.

<comment><USER40> It's already clear they will be significantly faster, mobile battery life will be significantly longer, and Apple Silicon will be significantly cheaper than I86 processors. The A12 and A13 already demonstrate this in much tighter thermal packaging than MacBooks or iMacs, and they use last generation process size.

And Rosetta 2 has already been benchmarked, and the results were amazing even on a two year old iPad processor.

Intel has nothing to hit back with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Does anyone know if Microsoft has (or is working on) something similar to Apple's Rosetta emulation system? It seems to me this is the critical component that allows a transition to ARM to actually go forward without having to wait for every last developer to port their applications over.

<comment><USER58> The ARM Surface Pro X took a sort of opposite approach to Apple in several ways.

Rosetta: usually recompiles once ahead of time, only supports 64-bit

Microsoft: seems to recompile on the fly, only supports 32-bit

Also notable is the fact that the leaked benchmarks show the A12Z is generally faster when emulating an Intel CPU with Rosetta 2, than the Surface Pro X is when running natively, and the A12Z isn't even Apple's real desktop cpu, it's just what they had on hand from the iPad (!)

<comment><USER59> And A12Z is a two year old A12X rebranded (they literally just enabled a GPU core turned off before for yields), using the exact same die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> One Question: Why are they using the word "Apple Silicon" instead of "ARM" ?

Is this marketing move?

<comment><USER61> Marketing, probably, but also accuracy. Apple integrates a bunch of specialized co-processors as well. They want you to think of this, and the Arm bit, as one unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is wishful thinking. ARM was invented during the 1980s so is 'old' too. Intel tried to move from x86 with Titanium but that failed and AMD released the x64 extensions eventually causing Intel to put the full effort into those extensions too. Intel is moving to hybrid CPUs with Lakefield so the mixture of energy efficient and high powered isn't restricted to ARM anymore. Most people in business simply won't mix x86 and ARM binaries on Windows so they're going to be one field or the other. Those same people want to run those Windows tools at home too. ARM Macs will be a niche product for those looking to spend excessively.

<comment><USER63> > This is wishful thinking. ... Most people in business simply won't mix x86 > and ARM binaries on Windows so they're going to be one field or the other. > Those same people want to run those Windows tools at home too. ARM Macs will > be a niche product for those looking to spend excessively.

I think this ignores the historical reasons for x86 success. Intel made their bones by crushing Unix boxes and mainframes with high volume x86 parts. PC CPUs were the highest volume microprocessor for decades, and they leveraged that into making high performance, yet low cost server and workstations parts to buff up their margins.

Well, the tables have turned - ARM is far, far higher volume than x86 due to its ubiquitous use in smart phones. And ARM is going to do to Intel what Intel did to IBM, Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, etc. The problem is the same as it always has been: NRE (fixed costs) for new chips climbs ever higher and needs to be offset by even more volume to be acceptable to consumers.

ARM won that game in 2007. It's just taken this long before market forces and product maturity have forced Intel's hand. To be fair, Intel may have staved off the inevitable for a few years without their well publicized 10nm production stall.

<comment><USER64> > The problem is the same as it always has been: NRE (fixed costs) for new > chips climbs ever higher and needs to be offset by even more volume to be > acceptable to consumers.

While this is certainly true for bleeding edge nodes, hasn't the NRE become significantly lower for mature process chips? I would guess that EDA tools and a greater availability of IP blocks would drive down the real dollar cost of designing your own ASIC on a node 1-2 generations back.

<comment><USER63> > While this is certainly true for bleeding edge nodes, hasn't the NRE become > significantly lower for mature process chips? I would guess that EDA tools > and a greater availability of IP blocks would drive down the real dollar > cost of designing your own ASIC on a node 1-2 generations back.

Honestly, I'm not familiar enough to have a nuanced opinion, but from what I understand, that's probably true.

However, in the battle for cloud VPS and PC CPU sockets, using a 1-2 generation old process doesn't appear to be a winning strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Intel has been behind before, and eventually the surges ahead. I honestly think that is going to happen yet again. For the next 5 years Apple's silicon might be the top, but in 10 years? I'm not so sure.

<comment><USER66> Apple has yet to show any silicon that scales significantly above laptop CPUs, which is not trivial. Their achievement as a from-scratch, independent vendor is surely impressive, but let's keep in mind that _all_ performance comparisons between the architectures so far are based on a single benchmark.

<comment><USER67> I may be mistaken, I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about hardware to say this with full confidence, but wouldn't the very low power and heat requirements of their laptop-CPU-competitive chips suggest that they have a lot of room to increase performance simply by increasing clock speed?

<comment><USER66> No, because voltage-frequency scaling is very non-linear (and process and design dependent) and designs often just have a "brick wall" they can't progress over.

For example, it was practically impossible to get Zen 1 CPUs over 4 GHz on air, not because they got too hot, but because they'd just crash almost immediately, regardless of voltage. Similiarly you can't push the current-est Intel generation beyond ~5.3 GHz, regardless of voltage. Current Zen 2 CPUs are highly binned, some bins cannot go beyond ~4.2 GHz, regardless of voltage and cooling, some can do 4.7 GHz.

<comment><USER68> The slowest operation on the entire CPU has to finish within a single clock cycle. This is basically a design issue. If you design your CPU for 6GHz then the slowest operation isn't allowed to take more than 0.17 nanoseconds. This gets harder the tighter the tolerances are but we can go way beyond what current CPUs run at. The reality is that power consumption/heat prevents us from running CPUs at 6GHz so we don't build CPUs that can run at these frequencies. The manufacturing process can also play a big role (some processes are more efficient at ~2.x GHz than 4.xGHz) but it's biggest impact by far is reducing power consumption to allow higher frequencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Just take a look at this 2013 HN comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5589410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5589410)

Kinda prophetic right?

</comment><comment><USER70> > Intel execs know they missed the Smartphone 2.0 revolution because of > culture blindness. They couldn't bear to part with the high margins > generated by the x86 cash cow; they couldn't see that lower margins could be > supported by unimaginable volume

Clayton Christensen'S Innovators Dilemma at work.

It's amazing how Apple with just 7% of market share can/could change the entire industry. They did the same with Flash(for the better) and this time with the PC. Interesting times ahead

</comment><comment><USER71> (1) Many comment writers on this site have been predicting the replacement of AMD64 with ARM in personal computers for about 12 years.

(2) Apple's announcement had no discernible effect on Intel's market cap, which, even after adjusting for inflation, is higher today than it has ever been except for an interval of about 2 or 3 years at the end of the dot-com boom.

(I used a CPI calculator, a market-cap chart and one of my eyeballs to estimate the duration of this interval.)

</comment><comment><USER72> I love how people like to talk about Apple vs Intel.

But Intel already had been beaten by AMD, and for the foreseeable future as well. Even on the mobile side, AMD has more performances with less power.

How will Apple stack up with AMD is the real question. This move is great for their low powered devices. But when it comes to The Pro devices, I'm sure they would have more performance for the next half decade if they just moved to AMD.

</comment><comment><USER73> Earlier discussions assumed some amount of cloud processing to cover for less powerful chips. Is that not the case?

<comment><USER74> Not needed now. My A12 equipped iPad has considerably more grunt than my i7 intel laptop.

<comment><USER75> >My A12 equipped iPad has considerably more grunt than my i7 intel laptop.

I know this meme gets brought up a lot, but has this claim been backed up by benchmarks that's _not_ geekbench?

<comment><USER76> Yes, SPEC, which is a real world suite of applications, like GCC: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max- re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review- unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4)

<comment><USER75> I was too lazy to collate the numbers together, so I found this comparison chart [https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/9lup3m/iphone_xs_sp...](https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/9lup3m/iphone_xs_spec_2006_integer_performance_compared/e79kikr/). The A12 looks faster in some cases, but not by much overall. It definitely doesn't support the claim that it has "considerably more grunt" than an i7.

<comment><USER74> Some comparison points. It's not all about hard benchmarks but what workloads you throw at the devices.

1\. The A12Z in my iPad has 2 more vortex cores than the base A12 and 4 more GPU cores.

2\. I'm comparing to _my_ laptop, a T470 with i7-7600U in it.

3\. _My_ (I did explicitly say that) laptop's modern equivalent, an i7-8565u, is dog shit compared to the iPad still and costs 100% more.

Some benchmarks if we need them:

[https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel- core-i7-8565u](https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-8565u)

[https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2898525](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2898525)

Now if you do any video processing on the ipad, it'll chunk through 4k like my Ryzen 3700X does if it's HEVC and barely even get warm, but that's the T2 ASIC in it.

The point being, if you compare a modernish "professional laptop" with an i7 in it, to an iPad, the iPad will rip it a new orifice.

ARM + ASICs for other functions (ML/security/codec) run rings around any general x86 CPU on performance per watt for sure.

Comparing as you did to a Xeon with 165W TDP is comedy but illustrative yes.

<comment><USER75> >Some benchmarks if we need them:

>[https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel- core-i7-8565u](https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-8565u)

>[https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2898525](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2898525)

My original question: " _but has this claim been backed up by benchmarks that 's not geekbench?_"

>Now if you do any video processing on the ipad, it'll chunk through 4k like my Ryzen 3700X does if it's HEVC and barely even get warm, but that's the T2 ASIC in it.

>ARM + ASICs for other functions (ML/security/codec) run rings around any general x86 CPU on performance per watt for sure.

Comparing hardware accelerated HEVC performance to software cpu performance isn't fair and is shifting the goalposts. If you're going by that logic you can also say that a snapdragon 865 (hardware rendering) has "considerably more grunt" a 64 core threadripper (software rendering). While we're at it, we can also compare A12 to intel/amd in other aspects, such as memory support, floating point performance, and sustained performance, all of which I'm confident A12 wouldn't do well in.

>Comparing as you did to a Xeon with 165W TDP is comedy but illustrative yes.

So? The xeon cpu also has 28 cores and 56 threads, whereas the A12 only has 2 "big" cores (the ones being benchmarked). Dividing 165 by 28 gets you to a more reasonable TDP of 5.89W per core.

<comment><USER47> This review[0] has SPEC2006 scores for the A12X in the iPad Pro 2018. The same review estimates the per core power at around ~4W.

This review[1] compares the SPEC2006 score of the A13 to high end modern desktop chips. The A13 is very close despite its power consumption being much lower.

[0]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad- pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad-pro-11-inch- review/4)

[1]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've always found it amazing Intel didn't make their own OS eventually software companies will try to to eat you.

</comment><comment><USER78> Hmm, this was posted 1 hour ago, 49 points, 84 comments, and it already moved down to 31st slot, off of front page (from somewhere in the top 15 just 5-10 minutes ago). That seems surprisingly fast.

I noticed because I wanted to come back to read more comments and had a hard time finding it.

<comment><USER79> Comments outnumbering votes is one of the heuristics used to determine if a thread is likely to be toxic rather than promoting good discourse, so that may be what dampened this off the front page.

<comment><USER78> I see, thanks for an explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Strange how Microsoft apparently has no way of providing a Rosetta like solution for Windows on ARM.

</comment><comment><USER81> Interesting... Java was the promise of program once run every where, and i guess that is somewhat true, but what got their faster and better is the browser as a platform. For most things the browser doesn't need Intel or Microsoft, not running or hosting it.

</comment><comment><USER82> What I can't reconcile is NVDA's stock price given the vast majority of their revenue and dominance comes from supplying GPUs to the Wintel industry. What is their position in a world where Wintel starts to wind down?

</comment><comment><USER83> How much of the improved efficiency is really ARM vs Intel and how much is that the new Apple silicon will now be TWO cycles ahead of Intel in miniaturisation. That must count for something too.

<comment><USER84> You can look at AMD CPUs if you want an apples-to-apples comparison, as theirs are on the same TSMC nodes as Apple.

<comment><USER42> AMD is going to go with an enhanced version of TSMC's 7nm process for their next round of CPUs.

Apple will be using TSMC's new 5nm process for the first version of it's laptop class chips, so they will have a process node advantage in the upcoming generation.

<comment><USER83> I guess we could compare AMD's new chips with Apple's old ones and see how that looks.

<comment><USER42> The A13 in Apple's iPhone is on the same TSMC process node as AMD's current chiplets and compares quite favorably despite a greatly reduced power budget and a lack of active cooling.

>Last year I've noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4)

<comment><USER68> The Apple core runs at 5W. Consider that AMD's chips run at significantly higher clock rates. The power budget isn't greatly reduced. It's basically the same. Apple has little room for improvement. They have to stay below 2.4Ghz to keep the same power budget.

Just read the article you linked.

>Apple's marketing materials describe the A13 as being 20% faster along with also stating that it uses 30% less power than the A12, which unfortunately is phrased in a deceiving (or at least unclear) manner. While we suspect that a lot of people will interpret it to mean that A13 is 20% faster while simultaneously using 30% less power, it's actually either one or the other.

<comment><USER42> I did read it. That 5 watt figure is with one of the two big cores fully loaded. AMD idles with a bigger power draw than that.

>In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2)

When compared to other designs that operate under the same cooling and power constraints, there is absolutely no competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Until ARM can give processing power comparable to x86-64 power limits be dammed. x86-64 will continue to rule the desktop and large parts of the server market.

</comment><comment><USER86> The last time I played around with Visual Studio, I vaguely remember some options for compiling for ARM.

No surprises if Windows eventually moves to ARM. (And if servers do too.)

<comment><USER51> Windows is already running on ARM and in an actual production model that's been on the market for a while. Its just that Apple does a lot better with marketing and makes a much bigger deal of these things. Microsoft on the other hand has always been really bad at marketing.

<comment><USER87> Windows for ARM can't emulate Intel x64 software. Nor will games using OpenGL versions above 1.1, among other things.

I disagree that Apple is only better at marketing things like this, they're much also better at doing it. And their processors are presumably going to be ahead of anyone else's ARM based computers, just like they've been with phones.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm- app...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-app- performance)

<comment><USER51> I didn't compare the two options just saying that apple makes a much bigger splash with their announcements than Microsoft. A lot of people here haven't noticed that a Windows version running on ARM but all know about Apple switching to ARM.

<comment><USER40> Because no one uses Windows for ARM, so there is no inTeresa in talking about it. Apple Silicon will be used by millions within months of release.

<comment><USER51> That is also known as good marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Cool, I really hope this means people will stop saying "Wintel" now, especially in places like job descriptions (where it just looks stupid.)

<comment><USER89> Yes, and maybe we can start calling Apple computers PCs (Personal Computers), which is what they are. At least they seem more personal than my multiuser Linux desktop system.

<comment><USER90> A few commentators have noted that it's unfortunate we renamed microcomputers "personal computers" because clearly smartphones are much more personal.

<comment><USER91> Personal except for that fact that you really own your smart phone in name only. Where you owned a 1980's personal computer lock stock and barrel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I'm a bit surprised at the use of the term "Apple silicon". Everybody seems to have started to use it. As best as I can tell, this is a term invented by Apple's marketing department. I believe it's meant to imply that Apple is producing some magic that goes beyond the CPU.

Readers of this site will of course understand exactly what is being discussed, but I'm concerned that the overuse of this marketing term confuses things for non-technical readers. There are already more common, and more accurate terms that can be used instead.

<comment> tim-- For CPUID, it makes sense.

       GenuineIntel
       AuthenticAMD
       AppleSilicon

<comment><USER92> The downvotes sure came quickly on my original post.

My point was that we don't refer to AMD CPU's as "Authentic AMD" in general speech. However, in Apple's case they have succeeded in promoting their own narrative.

I understand that this happens, but I was just intrigued by the fact that they managed to do it. The difference in terms does have a subtle effect in conversation however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> I have been using an iPad for over 10 years, am a huge fan.

But it's disingenuous to compare benchmarks for single threaded performance between the ipad and macbook.

I can't do any 'very' serious productivity work on the ipad that requires multiple apps, period. (try moving a photo between multiple photo-editing apps, ha.)

I hope that is just a 'feature' of iOS, or else macOS will suffer greatly as people leave it for more productivity based OS's.

<comment><USER94> This is not at all disingenuous. The fact that the environment in an iPad is restrictive versus a general-purpose computer is not particularly related to the performance of the processor powering each. There is no reason to think that (when the environment allows it) the performance of more "serious" apps will not be equivalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> On a related note, why aren't Qualcomm arm chips performing as well on benchmarks ?

<comment><USER47> They just aren't as good[0].

[0]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple- iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> I'd stick with AMD and Linux.

</comment><comment><USER97> i feel like i saw this movie before. ah yes, PowerPc.

Steve Jobs reveal transition to Intel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg)

i don't know if the history will repeat itself but it will be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER98> Indeed, it will be interesting to watch. Last time they had Steve to run the show.

If the last few years are to be a guide, it will crash and burn. Apple hasn't been developer and power user friendly for some time now. Focusing on thinner laptops while sacrificing the keyboard and the touchbar to name two. I've been hearing from developers being skeptic who are planning to buy before they switch to Arm. Which is a different vibe when they switched to intel.

It could be a massive marketing stunt from MS when they announce a more like MacOS version of Windows which actually runs on Intel.

<comment><USER33> Steve wasn't there for the 68K to PPC transition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> One thing people prophetizing about Apple ARM transition changing the industry tend to forget about: Apple is not a leader, but actually a latecomer in the ARM space.

macOS is the last major OS getting ARM support. iOS and Android have been built with ARM support from the very beginning. The first commits working on ARM support for Linux have been made more than a decade ago. The first publicly released Windows on ARM hardware came out in 2012, and MS has undoubtedly have been working on it for years before the commercial release.

If anything would trigger an ARM transition on a massive scale, it would likely be the work invested in the high performance ARM hardware by the companies such as Amazon and Fujitsu.

<comment><USER67> Besides the various mentions of iOS being on ARM, it's also worth mentioning iOS is a fork of macOS (née Mac OS X), and was explicitly branded as _the same OS_ when the iPhone launched. In other words, macOS has been capable of running on ARM—at least internally at Apple—for 13 years.

It's highly likely that Apple has maintained internal macOS ARM builds for every successive release since, if not since before the Intel transition. They had similarly maintained x86 builds of macOS from the time they began its development after the NeXT acquisition.</comment></comment>


Danish government builds Minecraft world of Denmark from geodata - <AUTHOR> http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/ <comment><USER2> Translation:

        The Geodata Agency's data is now free, and we have inserted them into Minecraft.

        That means that the whole of Denmark proper is now available as a virtual world
        in 1:1 in Minecraft itself, so you can freely move around in Denmark, find
        our own neighbourhood, construct and deconstruct like in any other Minecraft world.

        On this page, you can read more about the free data in the Minecraft world, and
        how you get started playing or download the free data.

According to this page[0] the map is divided into three regions, each which has their own server:

      * Northern Jutland: server1.gstcraft.dk
      * Southwestern Denmark: server2.gstcraft.dk
      * Eastern Denmark: server3.gstcraft.dk

[0] [http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/spil- her/](http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/spil-her/)

<comment><USER3> The OSGB in the UK did something similar last year: [http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/innovate/developers/minecraf...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/innovate/developers/minecraft- map-britain.html)

Apparently it was built by an intern, it took him two weeks to create the 22 Billion blocks: [http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2013/minecraft- ma...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2013/minecraft-map-of-great- britain.html)

<comment><USER2> Is it 1:1? It doesn't appear 1:1, given how tiny the A/B-roads are. I am just curious, there are not a lot of screenshots (or information on the scale in fact).

<comment><USER4> > Each blocks represents a ground area of 50 square metres. The raw height > data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block > height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, > which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high. Although this > exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features > such as Bournemouth's cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.

It seems to be a 1:50 scale.

<comment><USER5> > _The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit > within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft._

Well, I'm a cheapskate I play Minetest, not Minecraft. I'm fairly certain that Minetest has a larger height limit, but it can freeze like a bastard. The other day I went for a dig, and I used the compass to work out my position. I was over 500 blocks under the surface, I kept running into lava flows(!).

<comment><USER6> I'm now curious enough about Minetest after viewing its website that I might want to contribute. I love Minecraft and have played it since alpha, but it's always bothered me that it's built in Java - and that it runs horribly slow once Feed the Beast comes into play.

<comment><USER5> > _I love Minecraft and have played it since alpha, but it 's always bothered > me that it's built in Java - and that it runs horribly slow once Feed the > Beast comes into play._

I have never played Minecraft, so I can't comment, but Minetest does slow, it has a lot on its plate.

I just signed up with flickr, look for user "mrtucker257". I've uploaded some photos of my upmarket real estate.

<comment><USER7> Here is a link to NAFV_P's album: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/123873955@N07/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/123873955@N07/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that, it was my first time on flickr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have to say that I am quite impressed by their work. I spent 30 minutes earlier, walking around in the neighborhood where I grew up, and it was extremely easy to navigate and recognize roads, houses, and large buildings.

Even the train tracks through the city were there as rails in Minecraft (although not fully connected and working).

Very cool, the guys at GST did some amazing work here.. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to download the full 1TB world?

</comment><comment><USER9> I've long been surprised that real-world places weren't modelled more often in minecraft (and fps games).

My tentative conclusion was it might be too helpful for e.g. actual shooting. Though, height data is generally available anyway (e.g. google maps' "terrain", council planning databases), just not as easy to work with.

<comment><USER10> I think it's more likely to be a design decision. If you try to model a large real world area, some people will immediately notice how it is unlike reality; so the constraints of computational power, design skill, and developer ability are multiplied. The differences can be truly jarring.

My guess is that there is more upside to creating unique areas. This affords more creative freedom and the luxury of changing the simulation in accordance with constraints and resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if this is a minor "show-off" project, it's a good reminder for the power of open data. Location services, emergency planning software, tons of other stuff benefit enormously from this kind of openness.

[Crazy fun idea]:Basically, given Denmark's open geographic data one could potentially build an MMORPG which takes place in Denmark and have the terrain pre-generated. I think I would call this one Hamlet: The revenge.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't Hamlet: The Revenge just be Hamlet? :P Imagine a Hamlet roleplay server

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm wondering how they did it? Is there some kind of converter to transform GEO data to Minecraft Worlds?

<comment><USER2> GST itself has a very detailed explanation in Danish.[0] But basically, two of their employees worked to created the converter. They even include a table list of GST's own descriptions of terrain types and what Minecraft biomes they were converted to.

They don't have underground data, so some simple steps have been taken for each area based on a general idea of the underground (e.g. Bornholm's underground becoming stone).

As for buildings, they know the shape of buildings, but not their texture, so they are merely randomly generated in 'unrealistic colours' (as they describe it).

As the map data is updated each quarter (3 months), the Minecraft data will also be updated.

It's a very interesting read, I recommend you learn Danish and read it!

[0] [http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/om-frie-data- i-e...](http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/om-frie-data-i-en- minecraft-verden/)

<comment><USER14> Or just use Google Translate: [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie- data/minecraft/om-frie-data-i-en-minecraft-verden/&edit-text=&act=url)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't Mojang already do this? [http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Superflat](http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Superflat)

</comment><comment><USER16> On the Denmark minecraft server someone has placed nazi insignia all over Amalienborg (Warp there to see).. I think the server admins should have made it impossible to break and place blocks...

<comment><USER17> There is a "the" Denmark Minecraft server? It looks like the map data is just being provided. Is there an official server hosting a live game?

<comment><USER16> Eastern Denmark: server3.gstcraft.dk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If they included Hans Island in this, any canadians are obliged to go there, build an inukshuk and leave a bottle of canadian whiskey for our Danish friends - i mean enemies! ;) - who happen by. see also : [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4797368](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4797368)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd love it if we could get things like this for the moon, or Mars, or deep sea Earth.

And I'd really like 3D printed toy models of Mars or Moon too - I haven't found anything that does this.

<comment><USER20> What, like this? [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26311](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26311)

Somehow event at 10X/50X exaggerated height I don't find these particularly interesting. Planets, even Mars, are for the most part really smooth.

A somewhat exaggerated model of the Matterhorn was one of the first things I printed and it's pretty cool, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> building whole cities and landscapes by putting together small bricks piece by piece? would be surprised if they were not all over it in DK, the land of lego.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there a way to download the maps rather then connect to the servers? I keep poking around but it's not jumping out at me..

<comment><USER23> ominous answered this but was marked as dead. Not clear why, but my best guess is that people use Google Translate to bypass spam filtering?

Here's the link he posted. I'm leaving out the google translate link: [http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/download- data/](http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/download-data/)

<comment><USER24> It was almost certainly the link shortener that got ominous's post autokilled by HN code. Here's the translate link: [https://translate.google.pt/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...](https://translate.google.pt/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgst.dk%2Femner%2Ffrie- data%2Fminecraft%2Fdownload-data%2F&edit-text=&act=url)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I never really got into minecraft, do people just mine and build things or do you actually have a story/things to complete?

<comment><USER26> There is no story but I enjoy the adventure mode. It's a totally different game but we can compare it to and Sims game, any other simulator or the more recent Dayz. It doesn't have a story but it's enjoyable to play. You need to survive the night, create a shelter, get stronger by obtaining rare block, build a nice house etc....

<comment><USER27> > There is no story but I enjoy the adventure mode.

Well depends how you look at it... it doesn't have a narrated, scripted storyline but it most definitely has a kind of an open ended story these days. It was added gradually over the years so every update was a bit more to explore.

<SPOILERS> It is quite epic, really... you have to journey to the center of the earth, then descend into hell and finally ascend into the heavens. </SPOILERS>

Nothing forces you to do so, though. You can spend your time farming cows if that's your thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> just yesterday I was searching for publicly available administrative geodata of European countries. it's not an easy task due to language barriers and fragmentation. Does anyone know where to download the source data of this project?

<comment><USER29> Download here [http://download.kortforsyningen.dk/](http://download.kortforsyningen.dk/)

Instructions here [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgst.dk%2Femner%2Ffrie- data%2Fminecraft%2Fdownload-data%2F&edit-text=&act=url)

Edit: You need a user to be able to download from Kortforsyningen. Not sure what the user agreements says about foreigners because the sign up form is in danish and the options are like if you are a danish city, citizen, ngo etc. What I can see you only need to supply user name and email address.

What surprises me is that I can't find any pages in English. So good luck navigating if you don't understand danish.

<comment><USER30> > What surprises me is that I can't find any pages in English. So good luck > navigating if you don't understand danish.

The American expat community hasn't grown large enough to form an effective separatist group and demand that the Danish government translate everything into English? How awful. /s

<comment><USER31> The Danish government does translate a pretty large amount of stuff to English, not specifically for Americans but because it's the _lingua franca_ used to interact with anyone non-Danish, even fairly nearby people like Finns and Germans (Finns are officially supposed to know some Swedish, which is similar to Danish, but in practice English is used even for intra-Nordic communication). Not everything is translated, but it's sort of trending in that direction. I would guess most "scientific" type stuff, like this data, will eventually join that group.

On the other hand Google Translate tends to work pretty well with Danish anyway, because sentences are fairly short without complicated German-style clause structures that confuse the translator, and the grammar is not too different from English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What a waste of tax payer money.

<comment><USER32> I came here to write this but am quite surprised that other people don't agree with it and downvoted you. These agencies aren't paid from our tax money to produce toys - they are there to provide a cost efficient service where possible.

I have the same worries about the entire gov.uk rework.

Neat hack yes, but this is government, not private enterprise or personal time.

In the UK we almost called for the hanging of an MP who bought a duck house on expenses and I'm sure these "neat hacks" over time have cost a lot more.

<comment><USER33> If you go down the "government should be cost efficient" route, you end up with things like [/PPI/] which, whilst making the government more cost efficient, has thoroughly damaged many vital UK services.

Edit: By PPI, I meant PPP/PFI. I conflated the two into one incorrect abbreviation. Apologies.

<comment><USER34> What are you talking about? PPI was a private-industry thing. PPP is regarded as a failure partly because it damaged service provision but mostly because _it didn 't actually save money_.

<comment><USER33> You're right - I've conflated PPP and PFI in my brain there. Apologies.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>