[HN Gopher] Why You'll Probably Never Own a Mac with an ARM Proc...
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Why You'll Probably Never Own a Mac with an ARM Processor (2012)
Author : leonidasv
Score : 14 points
Date : 2023-03-30 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cultofmac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cultofmac.com)
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >But Intel's now seen the light. They have almost infinite
| resources to throw at the problem of catching up. And they're
| going to do so quickly.
|
| >"By 2014, Intel will have gotten their power management ahead of
| everyone else and be using their manufacturing muscle as a major
| advantage in the mobile landscape," predicts Kanter.
|
| Hm, I'd be interested in a postmortem analysis on why these
| predictions seemed realistic in 2012 and why they so drastically
| did not pan out over the following decade.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think we can infer some of that from what Intel is doing now.
|
| There are two orthogonal competitions happening here. One is
| between x86 and ARM, and the other is between Intel and TSMC.
| TSMC can manufacture x86 chips (this is what they do for AMD)
| but they can also churn out ARM chips for Apple and Amazon,
| GPU's for nVidia, and so on. So while Intel's manufacturing was
| vertically integrated with their x86 chip designs, TSMC
| specialized in fabrication, and got ahead of Intel.
|
| Intel's response has been to undo some of that vertical
| integration. Part of this entailed plans to outsource some of
| their manufacturing to TSMC, but another part was to reinvest
| in their own fabs and compete directly with TSMC by providing
| fabrication for other companies' chips. This latter effort has
| received lots of political support. Maybe Intel simply decided
| their vertical integration strategy was unworkable, or maybe
| the recent chip shortage and the geopolitically vulnerable
| position of Taiwan has created a lot of political demand for a
| domestic alternative to TSMC that Intel is trying to capitalize
| on.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| They gave a postmortem analysis (sort of) and even linked to it
| from the submitted article.
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/623592/5-reasons-apple-should-dump...
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Thanks, I did read that over, but I'm more wondering about a
| hindsight for why the 2014 prediction seemed realistic, and
| why Intel failed to execute as predicted.
|
| Interesting that the CoM followup doesn't make any mention of
| architecture.
| philwelch wrote:
| There's a lot in this article that doesn't merit too much
| discussion, but here's a couple of interesting points.
|
| Here's the closest the actual article comes to making a thesis
| statement that matches the headline:
|
| > But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips
| for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years.
|
| "Never" vs. "in the next five years" is a pretty big difference,
| but the actual claim in the article was correct. The first M1
| Macs came out in 2020, more than five years after 2012. The
| headline was wrong, but headlines are often not written by the
| writer of the original article. That seems weird and bad to me
| but that's not the author's fault here.
|
| > Intel is the Apple of the microchip world: everyone is at least
| a year behind Intel when it comes to competing with their
| cutting-edge technology and design in the x86 space. Because of
| Intel's manufacturing strengths, they can make the entirety of
| their chips smaller (and therefore more power-efficient) than
| anyone else around, not just their CPU cores.
|
| It turned out that TSMC caught up to and surpassed Intel. It's
| tempting to prophesy that Intel will never catch up to TSMC based
| on the performance of the past few years, but things can change
| over time.
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