It launched with Android, but I helped put GNU/Linux on it (got my first mainline author-ship with it), and daily drove it for a year at university (back then not everyone had laptops)
It was a hell of a device, and to this day I'm still missing anything close to it. 10 inch, 900g, 10 hour battery life (which was unthinkable on PCs back then), removable battery so when traveling I just had two batteries, extremely sturdy (I used to launch it in the air, and failed some times without worrying) [1]. That being said, even back then it was seriously limited, and I would max out the RAM just by doing ssh + quasselclient. By killing quasselclient I could have enough RAM to launch firefox to a simple web page, but that's it.
[1] It wasn't made to be sturdy, it's just that there was basically no weight, the pcb was very small, and it had pretty huge bezels
You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.
I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement?
I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least).
On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about?
Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).
Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad?
I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.
Oh, it can if Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft push it.
Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.
But the big problem is hardware. Are we going to see customizable ARM systems or are all ARM systems going to be basically SOC's and basically just be a console. Maybe with an expansion port for something other than graphics?
I am asking because to my knowledge we have not seen this yet. But upgradability and building your own computer is a big reason that people choose a PC vs a console.
Is this a limitation of ARM (and could Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft just go down that same path) or is it just a limitation of how it has been implemented so far.
If it is perfectly feasible, would we still see the big performance improvements like we are seeing on the M chips with everything combined?
Microsoft had an AoT x86->ARM (and now, amd64->aarch64) binary translation layer before Apple's Rosetta had that capability (at least, publicly).
Once the M1 came out everybody HAD to upgrade, so Apple got a huge boost for a couple years as people cycled out their x86 stuff.
Latest data shows Apple's computer sales slumping much harder than the PC industry in general.
Then they released AS and the first round of hardware looked competitive because at least they seemed to have something different, a real advantage worth paying more. At least that was the marketing. I believe it got many to update very old hardware that was kept running because Apple offerings seemed so out of touch; then some others got interested to "complete" their iOS devices and even traditional PC users got sucked in for novelty factor or battery life argument. In practice if the second-hand market is to be looked at, many went back to other machines and the market is inundated by underpowered, overpriced, close to entry level machines (people figure out the hard way that 8GB of RAM is very tight for a post 2020 computer no matter how good your software optimisation is...).
Now the second release of AS was disappointing to say the least (pretty bad considering the price hikes) and I think many are holding to see what they can do with M3. So the sales have dropped a lot, at least as much as all other OEM if not more (especially in comparison to previous years).
So I think what they call the market share is actually the sales number, that doesn't mean much. If you account for all the hardware that got retired plus all the hardware that sit unused (waiting to be sold or else) macOS market share has been slightly slopping upward at best. Mostly stable in practice.
When you look at the sales numbers, it is almost 80% laptops. They barely sell any of what you would call a "PC". It makes sense; since laptops is the only place where AS has any advantages and it is also the only way to use your extra expensive "computer" as a status symbol. This is also what most employers are going to buy for their staff because unless you need real power where AS is almost disqualified from the get go it makes everything easier. They used to sell a lot of iMacs (especially the 27" version) because it was very convenient, but they don't have those anymore so...
If anything, macOS is becoming less relevant as a computing platform by the day and more of a luxury alternative brand. So its market is becoming less relevant by the day too. I think Apple is on the path to become to computing what Campagnolo is to cycling...
Traditional PCs are not going anywhere and for way more reasons than just upgradability (your car is not technically upgradeable but is made with components from many different competing suppliers).
We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.
Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.
> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology...
> Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip..
(That would be the Nuvia core, I assume)
Really, just read the whole thing. Its a brief but juicy report.
Anyway, I wonder if Nvidia is going to make an SoC or a discrete CPU. Seems like an either-or proposition, as a big CPU with a small IGP (like AMD/Intel) doesn't make much sense for Nvidia.
Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-begins-amd-announces-...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7990/amd-announces-k12-core-c...
Software made yesterday were already prepared to run on their new silicon
Rosetta was only a transition helper, not meant to be a permanent solution
Microsoft didn't do any of that, and still doesn't, their leadership is clueless and dangerous
If Microsoft doesn't put in the effort, it'll never work
Let's hope there's no secret agreement to exclude Linux (?AMD AI?)
I wish Valve would encourage developpers to submit ARM binaries to prepare for the future...
Why only Apple is able to pull it off? Why this lack of care from everybody else?
Meanwhile.. https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-to-launch-for-pc-win...
...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.
Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.
Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.
I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
My guess is that Nvidia will have a line of mobile cores/chipsets for integrators that want them, while also offering PCI-enabled boards for gamers and enthusiasts. Even Apple can't outrun the demand for a PCI-enabled machine, and they don't even support eGPUs. Nvidia's incentive to abandon ATX (or at least modularity) is even slimmer.
I think an AMD 7900-like approach where the memory controllers/cache are on tiny external chips is particularly practical. Its efficient and economical. I hope AMD (and others) repeat this with laptop CPUS.
GDDRX is not a good fit for laptops anyway because its so power hungry. GPUs and the Xbox/Playstation use it just because its the absolute cheapest bandwidth/$, at the cost of everything else.
HBM is very expensive and being hoovered up by the AI market. I wouldn't count on seeing it in consumer stuff again.
$499 and way more GPU than one would need. Releases March 2022 with a reasonably competent 6x Cortex-A78's.
[0] - https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/grace-hopper-superc...
Apple is already in it's third iteration of the M series and there's still no proper competition to the Macbooks.
I have a midrange Android phone that I use to watch videos, listen to music and podcasts, internet browsing, chat, banking. The only thing I don't do on my phone is play games. I never once caught myself thinking "boy, this phone is slow, a faster CPU would do wonders here". It doesn't ever even feel hot to the touch.
I bet it can run just fine most mobile games available. What the hell are people running on their phones that need a better CPU?
Geekbench:
* Pixel 8 Pro: Single: 1760 Multi: 4442
* iPhone 15 Pro: Single: 2894 Multi: 7192
* iPhone 12: Single: 1995 Multi: 4401
Of course, ARM is suing them over it. Oh well.
Apple got burnt, multiple times, by both Intel and Nvidia. That set them on a complete war path to move to arm where they control the chips. As part of that war path, their goal was to drop x86 entirely so they needed the transition layer.
Microsoft has no need to drop x86 entirely, in fact x86 will continue to remain a good part of a market for the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe RISCV suddenly takes off because even Qualcomm has begun pushing a cool billion dollars towards RISCV development due to ARM/Softbank attempting to make them destroy their IP. Heck, ARM/Softbank is basically trying to destroy the ARM market for profit by terminating Qualcomm's licenses by 2025.
Nvidia and Intel are not necessarily nice irreproachable companies, but if there is one company that is known to be a major d*ck with their suppliers it must be Apple. You only need to look at how they treat their developers to understand, and the only reason suppliers are not treated worse is because they actually need them. I am sure Intel and Nvidia are perfectly OK with Apple doing their own stuff even if they lost a bit of business. Not unlike a tech support guy who finally got rid of a decently well-paying but majorly annoying customer, I guess. Sometimes the money isn't worth it...
It did with .NET but most software isn't .NET I think.
(Edit: Just googled, Gerard Williams is now at Nuvia and in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple)
Until then, whatever Apple has over 80% of the worldwide desktop market hardly matters.
And after how UWP was managed, there aren't that many that care.
Rosetta outperforms it because of hardware assistance, not because Microsoft's implementation is bad (let alone "terrible").
On a M2 MacBook Pro with the lid closed.
Apple's effort to make a good modem also reportedly failed, so its not like their chip team are miracles workers.
Not that I am skeptical. Apple has a long history of making good premium SoCs.
The only other designer of ARM chips at this scale is Qualcomm, and they stick to creating very general purpose designs (chips that conform to known designs and can be decent for all of their customers.) The exception being some minor one-off tweaks for Microsoft's ARM laptop. Intel and AMD are in the same boat -- they can do new and innovative things in hardware, but it doesn't really mean anything unless software is optimized for it. And if software is never optimized for it, was it worth the engineering investment?
Of course Apple is also offloading a lot of stuff from the CPU cores into specialized on-die units for machine learning, video CODECs, etc. Along with very decent GPUs. No, it's not all strictly CPU stuff, but it does all matter in the end.
Not all of what Apple is doing is everyone's cup of tea, and no it's not "the best performance in the world", but it's hard to find better performance in the same power envelope.
I hate to break it to PC builders, but DIMMs are starting to max out, signal integrity over those pins is becoming a problem. Before long, CPU RAM is probably gonna be soldered and packaged with the CPU anyway.
The architecture won't necessarily be like Apple though. The CPU/GPU could be their own tiles, meaning we could have GPU-less SKUs that still use PCIe GPUs. And the SoCs or whatever they are can still be socketed.
I installed DivestOS on it and use it as a backup phone (i.e.: I take it with me to the gym, and keep my main phone at home). If they had kept support, I wouldn't even have replaced it.
2018 OnePlus 6T: 521
2017 iPhone 8: 1020
My older phone is literally twice as fast. From a performance perspective it will be usable far longer than the OnePlus.
Dotnet supports Apple Silicon for the same reason it supports AArch64-Linux; it's a real user platform. Windows-on-ARM is really not, and it won't get the attention it needs until attractive hardware is ready to ship.
> it won't get the attention it needs until attractive hardware is ready to ship.
Dunno what to say!
Windows RT is the perfect example; software was not ready, and is still not
It's only been 11 months that Visual Studio can run on ARM
It's only been 3 years since Visual Studio runs in 64-bit on x86 ;)
I think the biggest holdback for VS with ARM was there were no good build boxes out there. With VS for ARM, Microsoft released their own ARM dev kit hardware loaded with 32gigs of ram and a snapdragon 8cx. Anyone else selling ARM hardware for Windows skimps with like 4g of ram.
VS could however crosscompile to ARM32 and later ARM64 for quite awhile.
When I try a new phone, I don't see any noticeable difference in speed. Everything loads more or less the same.
A better CPU (even one twice as fast) on a smartphone brings virtually no benefit at this point. Half of "this is pretty fast" is still "pretty fast".
If anything, it seems that Apple's much larger product - the iphone - had a lot more to do with M1/M2 design than high end desktop equipment. On package DRAM is common in cell phones to reduce board size. And M1 is a scaled up A series SoC. I think it's a great product for Apple. But as someone who's supported Mac, Linux, and Windows machines at a university for a decade, it doesn't feel appreciably different from Intel NUCs over that timespan. AMD's 7840U is setting a new standard for power and performance on the PC side right now. And the two will continue to leapfrog.
Unsurprisingly, Intel made it for Apple, and they were pretty much the only OEM that used it.
Anyway, I think Intel sold some NUCs with them, but they were very expensive.
"Sweet spot" is exactly right. It's not the best at anything but the best balanced that I've ever used, by a huge margin.
I don't think it's magic either and I hope that Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia etc. can deliver a similar package in a future laptop. For now though they seem hopelessly behind, at least among the products I've used.
Also, among those companies, Nvidia is the only one I'd trust to do a decent end user experience. Maybe Google to some degree, but they'd end up sunsetting the product after a generation or two.
Microsoft tried to do the same with the Surface line, but every single one I've used sucks. The tablets are way too heavy and clunky. The laptops overheated and couldn't even charge while playing games. Windows has a ton of ads.
Apple's integration of all the things really makes it a standout in today's commoditized and enshittified world, IMO. It's not just tech specs but how the product feels to use at the end of the day.
My most recent laptop purchase was a $300 AMD Ryzen 3 to which I added 64gb of ECC DRAM for another $300ish. Zero complaints. It's faster than the M1 at every game the two can both play.
I run Linux on both. I'm not really tied to platform - if I can run Linux on it and it performs better, I'm game.