Up to 32 cores: Apple is gunning for Intel with its next-gen silicon

[Rayneofpayne]

Where did you get 14% from?! It's WAY less than that from just a quick Google, I can't find a single figure above 9% and that's being very generous from what I'm reading.

Edit: They ship around 5-6 million Mac's a year. To put that in perspective, HP sell triple that.

It's from a proper statistic company we use and pay for analytics from work, I believe the metric comes from ISP analytics of devices across all companies connected to the internet that leave a footprint aka some custom OS designs made for intelligence work is not counted as well as Java legacy based machines used for industrial applications they have separate analytics for industrial and enterprise as well as server statistics.

Apple has 14-16%(8%are still MahaveOs devices) of world wide pc marketshare, that is including desktop, AIO, and laptop formfactors.
Linux and others are listed as 4-6%, and Windows currently inhabits 80-82% the market over the years fluctuates by a consistent 2% per, yet a total of 6% marketshare fluctuates depending on new releases and such.
Keep in mind this does equate to cell phones, tablets, and development/project boards(Raspberry Pi) are not counted as Linux would most likely be higher due to Raspberry pie alone and other project boards that are used more inconsistently. It also ignores pandora box style arcade cabinet boards that have access to the internet.
Keep in mind as I stated these are consumer stats not industrial or enterprise which is more skewed towards Windows and custom compared to Apple devices.

 

[Rayneofpayne]

AMD and Intel have fantastic engineers (especially when they can focus on the CPU performance, rather than on adding artificial backdoors for shadowy organizations). So if M1 comes too close, I have no doubt that it will just make AMD and Intel start adding even more performance improvements.

Maybe even creating a completely new architecture that doesn't come with 40 years of baggage and unused x86 instructions and extensions.

I agree to an extent, however, they will in all likelihood only be able to compete in Power per watt meaning it will only be able to compete with low power devices, unfortunately you magically can't create power from nothing, and juicing ARM/AIM big/little style RISC processors only ever resulted in them losing the advantage they have at lower voltage, It's why they were pretty much abandoned until the smartphone wars reignited an interest in the arch design.
Any performance is solely coming from optimizations directly from the OS but just like consoles in gaming you can only get or do so much, magic isn't a thing in this universe other than for those with wishful thinking and the gullible.
Still I hope you are right, it would be nice to see Processors in x86/x64 actually kick some baggage to the curb that is holding it back, but the same can be said for standards like atx that have far gone on to long changing and cutting off the long forgotten and used except in enterprise where they refused to migrate databases for 50 years.

 

[candle_86]

I agree to an extent, however, they will in all likelihood only be able to compete in Power per watt meaning it will only be able to compete with low power devices, unfortunately you magically can't create power from nothing, and juicing ARM/AIM big/little style RISC processors only ever resulted in them losing the advantage they have at lower voltage, It's why they were pretty much abandoned until the smartphone wars reignited an interest in the arch design.
Any performance is solely coming from optimizations directly from the OS but just like consoles in gaming you can only get or do so much, magic isn't a thing in this universe other than for those with wishful thinking and the gullible.
Still I hope you are right, it would be nice to see Processors in x86/x64 actually kick some baggage to the curb that is holding it back, but the same can be said for standards like atx that have far gone on to long changing and cutting off the long forgotten and used except in enterprise where they refused to migrate databases for 50 years.

RISC wasn't abandoned, every modern x86 chip is RISC, it has a decoder to translate from x86 CISC to RISC, Cyrix did it first with the 5x86, then AMD with the K5, and finally Intel with the P6 designs. The closest thing to a traditional CISC x86 cpu we've seen in years is the early ATOM's as they where based on the P54C core aka Pentium Classic, where as the P6 core was Pentium Pro.

Once you start adding instructions and large registers and caches you get the modern x86 designs anyway. ARM can't maintain performance per watt and compete with the latest x86 chips, it doesn't work that way, their heat and power demands will be close to x86, the only thing they don't have is the pipeline to convert x86 into RISC Micro ops, that's it.

 

[moon982]

Where did you get 14% from?! It's WAY less than that from just a quick Google, I can't find a single figure above 9% and that's being very generous from what I'm reading.

Edit: They ship around 5-6 million Mac's a year. To put that in perspective, HP sell triple that.

People who have MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, iPhone and iPad counting Apple footprints on the internet or sales every year.

 

[moon982]

No not likely, apples suck at playing games, and given this is now running the weaker ARM design I'd be suprised if it could run Quake.

You mean can ARM outperform high end i7? Will be if Apple can pull this off.

 

[candle_86]

You mean can ARM outperform high end i7? Will be if Apple can pull this off.

highly doubt it, apple is a new comer to the game, and has so far been able to compete somewhat in mobile, they have zero experience in high performance cpu design. There is a reason the Surface outsells the ipad pro 10-1

Apple is betting on the wrong horse, so far they're 1to2 on picking the winning cpu design, first they picked the 6800 which lost to x86 designs, then they picked powerPC which again couldn't compete, then finally they went with a winner, and now they wish to return to the days of being insignificant and useless by moving back away from the winning cpu design for something that is weaker.

But it's ok, Microsoft may choose to bail apple out again.

 

[ypsylon]

Considering how impressive is M1 now while rendering in Blender via Rosetta2... With 32 cores like this and enough RAM you can simply brute force renders on CPU alone without need of mega expensive GPUs in CUDA ecosystem for example (like my humble self is involved). M1 is mega impressive with 16 GB of RAM in a tiny laptop. With more cores and more RAM this will munch even current king of the hill - 3990x. At fraction of power envelope vs x86 competition.

There is huge potential in ARM Macs to change face of the computing landscape, from being mostly fashion statements for ludicrously wealthy YouTubers to actual alternative to Winblows (except gaming at least for foreseeable future).

 

[Burty117]

Considering how impressive is M1 now while rendering in Blender via Rosetta2... With 32 cores like this and enough RAM you can simply brute force renders on CPU alone without need of mega expensive GPUs in CUDA ecosystem for example (like my humble self is involved). M1 is mega impressive with 16 GB of RAM in a tiny laptop. With more cores and more RAM this will munch even current king of the hill - 3990x. At fraction of power envelope vs x86 competition.

There is huge potential in ARM Macs to change face of the computing landscape, from being mostly fashion statements for ludicrously wealthy YouTubers to actual alternative to Winblows (except gaming at least for foreseeable future).

You have to remember ARM doesn't scale in performance like that, others have tried high performance ARM CPU's (could be wrong but one of the fastest super computers around is run on ARM CPU's) but it eats power and produces heat consistent with the power draw and they tended to be considerably less efficient than an x86 processor at that power level.

Things could change of course, Intel stuck on 14nm+++++++++, AMD on 7nm and Apple on 5nm and Apple clearly have the right engineers in place for good ARM based CPU's.

I just wouldn't hold your breath, I'm sure the CPU will be pretty good, very efficient but I wouldn't bet on it being able to brute force anything or outperform a threadripper just yet.

 

[Caliburman]

This is good, healthy competition. This will push the bar for all competitors.