Apple Announces Its New M2 Processor

[Anux]

The definition of better I use is how well a product fulfills its mission, how it meets the requirements of the task at hand. This makes it intrinsically relative.

Agreed, I don't think we have much different views on that matter.

While horizontal integration definitely creates more revenue, isn't the fact the M1 is a commercial success enough evidence that it will have a market?

Since we don't know what an M1 would cost, we can only say that the MAC is a success, thats what I wanted to say with AMD sells CPUs and Apple sells end user products.

Intel already designs mainboards BTW, don't those count as (almost) complete devices?

They build those NUCs but those are more tuned for price than anything else.

Didn't Intel had the lead in term of process at the time? Why use the old one? If it was cost effective for ARM, what made it different for Intel?

Yes but their newest process was always pretty expensive and exclusivly reserved for their high margin chips.

The point of the comparison was that evidently the one size fits all didn't fit that market. In the particular case of ARM, what made it suitable is probably being just IP cores that made them flexible for use in higher level designs based on them (i.e. the ability to make the SoCs further down the chain) rather than being discrete units as most x86 are.

Thats essentialy what I think too.

My main point is that ARM, x86, MIPS or whatever, all are equal in the end if you put enough research power behind them. Maybe one workload performs slightly better on one or the other, but nothing that makes an instructionset inherently bad for low power or high performance.

[sinepgib]

AFAIK, Rosetta2 only falls back to CPU emulation when it has to, it mostly intercepts system calls and routes them to native ones. That's something that is much harder to do in the Windows ecosystem.

Considering WINE does exactly that for Linux, I think it should be doable.

[mangeek]

They could ship something like Rosetta tho.

AFAIK, Rosetta2 only falls back to CPU emulation when it has to, it mostly intercepts system calls and routes them to native ones. That's something that is much harder to do in the Windows ecosystem. Apple's been very aggressive about deprecating legacy runtimes/frameworks/APIs, while Microsoft has had to pile 20 years of compatibility libraries into Windows.

I wish Microsoft had rewritten Windows in .NET back in the Vista days, and pushed everything older off into a compatibility VM or container. That's the kind of break they'd need to do what Apple does today.

[sinepgib]

I don't think so. They could have made one, but there would be no market for it. You can't just drop a processor/SoC out there that can only run Linux or some janky flavor of Windows and expect it to sell. There's no market for 'PC-class' ARM CPUs except for the one Apple made. Microsoft tried and failed, people use Windows to run x86 software, Android/ChromeOS aren't huge enough (and x86 meets their PC-class needs). My impression is that Apple was the only player big enough to make their own hardware/software ecosystem.

That's a valid point. I didn't think of that enough. They could ship something like Rosetta tho.

[mangeek]

If that was the case then Ampere, MediaTek, Qualcomm and Nvidia would have already made an ARM based chip with better performance.

I don't think so. They could have made one, but there would be no market for it. You can't just drop a processor/SoC out there that can only run Linux or some janky flavor of Windows and expect it to sell. There's no market for 'PC-class' ARM CPUs except for the one Apple made. Microsoft tried and failed, people use Windows to run x86 software, Android/ChromeOS aren't huge enough (and x86 meets their PC-class needs). My impression is that Apple was the only player big enough to make their own hardware/software ecosystem.

[sinepgib]

As ravyne explained earlier, you are unlikely going to see something in the same ballpark as M1 using x86/84. AMD at one point was experimenting with an ARM processor (not sure what happened to it?) so maybe we will something out of that.

Eh, works for me as long as it doesn't end up being a second citizen for mainstream distros, which I fear will be the case for Apple hardware (indeed, even Intel Macs have rather poor support in Linux). The actual ISA is more or less a secondary concern for me. The only proprietary programs I use are some games from time to time, so I can always get ARM builds of everything else if needed.

[mdedetrich]

I see. I sincerely hope AMD/Intel makes something comparable to the M1 at some point. While I do like the M1 (as I said, I had a brilliant experience), I don't like MacOS and, despite the valiant efforts from the people doing Asahi Linux, most Mac users are actually happy with MacOS, so it'll remain a less Linux friendly alternative and a rather niche Linux user (which means harder to find answers for hardware specific issues), and it'll also take a long time for it to be fully supported. I wouldn't buy an M1/M2/whatever precisely for that reason (I bought a Lenovo last year anyway, and I generally don't change computers for about a decade).

As ravyne explained earlier, you are unlikely going to see something in the same ballpark as M1 using x86/84. AMD at one point was experimenting with an ARM processor (not sure what happened to it?) so maybe we will something out of that.

[sinepgib]

I brought up those semiconductors since we haven’t seen any of them touch the single threaded performance of even Apple’s A13.

Qualcomm is the only ARM semiconductor that’s trying to compete against Apple’s laptop/desktop line with their 8cx. As I mentioned earlier Qualcomm can’t compete with their own architecture which is why they purchased Nuvia. We won’t see competitive products from Intel/AMD until 2024.

I see. I sincerely hope AMD/Intel makes something comparable to the M1 at some point. While I do like the M1 (as I said, I had a brilliant experience), I don't like MacOS and, despite the valiant efforts from the people doing Asahi Linux, most Mac users are actually happy with MacOS, so it'll remain a less Linux friendly alternative and a rather niche Linux user (which means harder to find answers for hardware specific issues), and it'll also take a long time for it to be fully supported. I wouldn't buy an M1/M2/whatever precisely for that reason (I bought a Lenovo last year anyway, and I generally don't change computers for about a decade).

[sinepgib]

Not shure where I said that AMD doesn't care for that segment because they offer low power notebookchips. If someone wanted they could probably build a custom soc like the apple one (see consoles). Also I never said that one is better, which one and how do you define better?

You didn't say it, but the fact they do one-size-fits-all speaks for itself. It says, at least, "this market is not worth actively targetting". Maybe it's a matter of incentives: Apple makes only consumer devices (I'm counting the somewhat beefier Mac Minis tho), so it certainly is worth focusing as it is all the market they have.

The "which one is better" is pretty much all the thread discusses, I didn't check if you specifically supported that thesis.
The definition of better I use is how well a product fulfills its mission, how it meets the requirements of the task at hand. This makes it intrinsically relative.
So, x86 seems to definitely be better for general purpose, indeed the only place where it never really took off (not counting the first years of course) is really low power embedded. For everything else it's quite appropriate, even if not the best for some.
But for consumer laptops specifically Apple seems quite better, and ARM in general for embedded and phones. Why? Because your priorities there are to have a decent performance baseline (CHECKED), a moderate heat dissipation (CHECKED) and long battery life, and in all those aspects it beats the current x86 chips in the market. Is it possible that it's not the CPU design per se that makes the difference? Yes, of course. But being pragmatic, if it's not in the market it's only a nice theory.

There are the laws of physics and capitalism. AMD doesn't build smartphones or laptops, they build general purpose CPUs and sell them to many different companies that build stuff with it.

Laws of physics and capitalism don't stop you from selling SoCs to laptop manufacturers and powerful but power hungry chips for desktops and servers. The laws of physics clearly didn't stop Apple and last time I checked the same laws apply to everyone. The laws of capitalism pretty much say "if you can profit it, it can be done". And again, Apple sells well and makes profit.

Selling CPUs to manufracturers gives much less profit than selling a finished product to the enduser while trippling the price of every upgrade and accessory. Just look at the money that Apple and AMD get each year and tell me how AMD should be able to design an additional chip that would cost a few billions without knowing if they can sell it to anyone?

While horizontal integration definitely creates more revenue, isn't the fact the M1 is a commercial success enough evidence that it will have a market? Besides, most economic liberals will always claim that the reason capitalists get the most of the companies' earnings is because they take the risks.
Certainly Apple made much more than AMD, it even quadruples Intel's revenue. But then again, they use a handful of engineers and it wouldn't make a dent on that profit. They have the know how, they're not stupid.
Intel already designs mainboards BTW, don't those count as (almost) complete devices?

Jepp like I mentioned the ATOM was build on old processes to reduce cost and therfore couldn't compete with ARMs on the newest process

Didn't Intel had the lead in term of process at the time? Why use the old one? If it was cost effective for ARM, what made it different for Intel?

also there was a big ecosystem for ARM apps that diddn't run on x86 which may have been the bigger problem (see windows phone).

Most of it was Java, wasn't it? Either Java's promise didn't hold (likely) or the ecosystem should have been (mostly) portable. But I agree on the bottomline: smartphones without apps are but fancy toys.

What exactly is your point here? My friend had a smartphone with ATOM (it was garbage). I haven't seen an Apple chip in a router or other embedded devices either. And the chip in the Applewatch is a competly different design and not at all compareable to the M1.

Not an Apple chip of course but ARM. Even MIPS. The point of the comparison was that evidently the one size fits all didn't fit that market. In the particular case of ARM, what made it suitable is probably being just IP cores that made them flexible for use in higher level designs based on them (i.e. the ability to make the SoCs further down the chain) rather than being discrete units as most x86 are.
Apple chips aren't appropriate for that kind of embedded either of course. But they don't aim for one size fits all and they don't intend to cover such spaces. They don't try to take a server optimized chip and use it everywhere.

[WannaBeOCer]

But theirs were aimed for devices with a fraction of the power, weren't they?
I'm not entirely skeptic to the difference being just packaging and process. But it's really not all that important: do we have that packaging and process today for the competition? Do they offer something in the same range of perf/watt at a decent perf? No? Call me when they do, I may be interested.
People here is too accustomed to thinking like IT and should put the consumer hat from time to time. The consumer gives exactly 0 shits about whether the ISA is elegant, the process is small or the system is packed in a single die, they care about what they can experience. One model is giving them a relatively fast laptop without noisy fans, with virtually no overheating despite that and with a battery that lasts ages longer than anything they've used. Coulda shoulda is something that technical people care about, not consumers. Hypothetical ways for Intel and AMD to get there is something Intel's and AMD's engineers care about, not the user.

I brought up those semiconductors since we haven’t seen any of them touch the single threaded performance of even Apple’s A13.

Qualcomm is the only ARM semiconductor that’s trying to compete against Apple’s laptop/desktop line with their 8cx. As I mentioned earlier Qualcomm can’t compete with their own architecture which is why they purchased Nuvia. We won’t see competitive products from Intel/AMD until 2024.