Ubuntu Developers Get it Up And Running On Apple's M1 With Early Parallels Desktop Build

[mike456]

Yes Risc-v seems the future:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/new-risc-v-cpu-claims-recordbreaking-performance-per-watt/

[andre30correia]

lossing time with apple produts

[curfew]

If Lisa Su is smart, and we have seen that she just might be, she may be eyeing for an exit strategy out of x86. And now, if you look at available options, guess what?.. There is something far more compelling than ARM! That's right, RISC-V!

An "exit strategy" for a product that has 99+ % market share as of today? (That is x86 CPUs as a whole on consumer laptop/desktop market.) That sounds retarded, to be frank. Apple market share has been quoted as 13 % in the PC market, so I guess that ARM will soon have 10-15 % market share, but strictly limited to Mac OS X, which means it hardly affects the dominance of x86 on "general purpose" computers i.e. Windows machines. This shift from Intel to in-house ARM processors will only make it harder for new users to switch from Windows to Mac.

It will take a couple years for the Apple ecosystem to fully leverage ARM on the PC, and then some more before it even becomes a viable option for Windows users. I would say x86 will easily remain the dominant force by far for the whole 2020s. Right now talking of an ARM take over is simply too early as we haven't seen what Apple is capable of delivering for the highend desktop PCs, where power consumption is less of an issue and performance cannot be compromised.

[Michael_S]

If Lisa Su is smart, and we have seen that she just might be, she may be eyeing for an exit strategy out of x86. And now, if you look at available options, guess what?.. There is something far more compelling than ARM! That's right, RISC-V! OFC there is no buyout or anything, but AMD can essentially start designing their own RISC-V cores, just like apple is doing woth ARM. And from the looks of it, ARM has reached its peak as a conpany, while RISC-V is going to take about 5 years to become a competing architecture. Just enough time for a design to be made... With no licensing fees...

"With no licensing fees" - to be clear, the RISC-V instruction set is fully open. The implementations are not required to be. Most of the RISC-V implementations are proprietary and require licensing fee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations or a quote from the Ars Technica article on a high performance RISC-V processor that mike456 linked in the post after yours, "Micro Magic intends to offer its new RISC-V design to customers using an IP licensing model"

So no, AMD can't get all of the benefits of RISC-V for free unless by some miracle one of the open source implementations manages to outperform the proprietary ones.

[GreenByte]

"With no licensing fees" - to be clear, the RISC-V instruction set is fully open. The implementations are not required to be. Most of the RISC-V implementations are proprietary and require licensing fee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations or a quote from the Ars Technica article on a high performance RISC-V processor that mike456 linked in the post after yours, "Micro Magic intends to offer its new RISC-V design to customers using an IP licensing model"

So no, AMD can't get all of the benefits of RISC-V for free unless by some miracle one of the open source implementations manages to outperform the proprietary ones.

what i meant by that, is that they don't need to pay a dime to have a privilege to create a risc-v design. While Apple had to pay ARM licensing fee just to be able to create the CPUs

[Michael_S]

Everyone competes with and copies Apple because they have set the design and usability standards for personal computing for over 40 years. Apple quite literally has been and still is Microsoft's R&D Center. Microsoft is the most Chinese style American computing company in history because they have NEVER innovated, only copied Apple. And if it wasn't Apple they were copying they were simply buying up smaller more innovative companies just to extinguish their tech.

As far as Android....the only reason they are so successful is Android is the Microsoft of mobile OS's in the sense that it can go on any cheap piece of crap hardware and still make a buck. Even more so since Google gives Android away for free. But let's be clear, as far as Android phones go worldwide, the vast majority of them are equipped with SoCs that are roughly the performance equivalent of an iPhone 6....perhaps even as far back as a 5 series. Sure...for the vast majority of world Android users that's just fine for what they use their phone for. Only Geeks are concerned with paper benchmarks concerning the numbers and the speeds and feeds as the Brits say.

But Apple leads the way. And the industry MUST follow. That's called competition. There is MORE than a dose of pride involved.

Apple has been, and remains, a spectacular innovator in many respects - or as others have said, a company great at taking ideas and refining their usability.

However, from day one they have targeted products at people with high incomes.

A $200 Chromebook, $450 Windows laptop, or $100 Android phone might be a junky piece of tech with a frustrating user experience. But a good portion of people can buy them. Apple's position on people with budgets like that is a polite version of "go screw yourself".

Mind you, I'm no fan of Microsoft or Google. I'd like to see free software conquer the world. But I'd rather see companies that bring computing to the masses win than companies that only bring computing to the top 20% of earners.

[Michael_S]

what i meant by that, is that they don't need to pay a dime to have a privilege to create a risc-v design. While Apple had to pay ARM licensing fee just to be able to create the CPUs

Oh sorry, I thought you meant they wouldn't pay a dime to fab some other company's design.

[GreenByte]

Oh sorry, I thought you meant they wouldn't pay a dime to fab some other company's design.

No worries. AMD is best at what they currently do - design CPUs. It would be a no brainer for them to switch to RISC-V if they saw an opportunity

[lyamc]

I wish we could edit mobile posts like you can using the desktop site.

You can edit in mobile, the little box next to Like is invisible, Press to the right of the Like button and you’ll get a little menu

[coder]

And lookee here. just broke on Reuters only 7 hours ago.

Thanks for posting.

Microsoft would HAVE to answer Apple's move to ARM with their own efforts and in doing so kick off the Age of ARM and the decline of x86. That time starts in earnest in 2021.

I don't really see why MS' moves have to be a response to Apple. MS has been moving steadily down the path of ARM for the past 10 years, and if Qualcomm didn't seem terribly enthusiastic about continuing to push into the laptop world, then MS has to either find a new partner or go it alone.

Oh, and Hololens2 was MS first product to have a Qualcomm chip in it, and definitely something MS didn't copy from Apple. For that matter, XBox also breaks from your "Apple clone" narrative. And with MS' big, long push for Azure and the embrace of Linux, those are things we've also not really seen from Apple.

In fact, these days, you might say Apple is starting to copy MS a bit. Apple used to be about open, standard APIs. Well, now they've ditched OpenGL, OpenCL (which they co-created) and took a page from MS playbook with Metal. And you could even call Swift a copy of C#.

Yeah, companies do copy each other. But, sometimes they just do the same sorts of things, for the same sorts of reasons. All I know is that MS is a much bigger contributor to Open Source than Apple, these days. I don't think you can credit Apple for that.