Why Apple Silicon is exciting even if you dislike Apple

[hookedonentflix]

Apple Silicon seems to have ruffled a lot of feathers and a caused bit of a circle jerk on twitter. I will start this off by conceding that Apple's presentation had some over the top claims. They does this all the time and while it may be annoying to hardcore computer enthusiasts I think a lot of people are getting angry and pointing to those claims instead of evaluating the the processors on their own merit. 

 

I like Apple products (mostly for development) and wanted to give some reasons that I think even if you are not an Apple fan these processors should make you excited

• A major OS is transitioning to ARM. x86 is not a perfect architecture and has a list of its own issues. Apple's transition will force a lot of user onto an ARM based platform and we will see a lot of applications start supporting ARM to meet this demand. Windows for ARM already exists but doesn't have a ton of support from major application providers. I think the power benefits will force many other companies to have look to ARM based processors in order to compete in the long term. 
• Complete Stack integration. Whatever you think of Apple and their design practices they have just shed the last major constraint they have on products. They now have free reign to craft their computers in their image.  I think we will begin to see a crazy amount of tight integration between hardware -> OS -> Application and streamlining that can't be imagined unless you control the entire stack. I have a feeling the apple "ecosystem" might be getting some new snazzy features that other companies will have to compete with. 
• Power Consumption Standard. I see a lot of people arguing over the raw performance and benchmarks of the M1. I think its very important to consider power to performance. I don't think anyone can doubt that the power to performance ratio of these chips is anything less than astounding. As an engineer I am almost shocked. I think this will be another motivating factor for more companies to transition to ARM.

 

When looking at these new computer I am suggesting that you consider what this means for the industry as a whole. Apple one of the most dominant tech companies (even though they have been severely lacking performance for awhile) just just put some cards down that the rest of the industry will have to match.

[dizmo]

Your middle point is entirely Apple based. So. I'll just ignore that one, as it kind of goes against your title.

It's interesting, for sure, but I don't think the industry will have to match it, and it'll be interesting to see how many companies choose to code for Apple's decisions.

[Letgomyleghoe]

8 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

A major OS is transitioning to ARM.

there's already windows and linux ARM but they aren't great to be truthful 

10 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

Complete Stack integration.

i don't see how this fits the title. most people don't use windows or linux mobile versions.

11 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

When looking at these new computer I am suggesting that you consider what this means for the industry as a whole. Apple one of the most dominant tech companies (even though they have been severely lacking performance for awhile) just just put some cards down that the rest of the industry will have to match.

they don't have to match though, x86 still makes the most sense for most people, support is lacking (at least for mac) and the m1 still has a lacking amount of cores

[mahyar]

9 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

there's already windows and linux ARM but they aren't great to be truthful 

arm linux is tolerable

9 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

i don't see how this fits the title. most people don't use windows or linux mobile versions.

well technically android is a linux distro

[hookedonentflix]

5 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Your middle point is entirely Apple based. So. I'll just ignore that one, as it kind of goes against your title.

It's interesting, for sure, but I don't think the industry will have to match it, and it'll be interesting to see how many companies choose to code for Apple's decisions.

I guess my point that it will be interesting if Microsoft or other companies will start looking into developing their own hardware OS integrations if Apple can show exceedingly beneficial gains from it.

[Blademaster91]

24 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

A major OS is transitioning to ARM.

Windows for ARM exists, but Microsoft and companies are more willing to make software for x86 instead as a majority of the market is on x86.

24 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

Complete Stack integration.

A complete integration also means Apple controls what you can run on your mac, that may be fine for basic uses and those that are fine with Apple first party software, but maybe not for anyone that needs to boot Windows 10 or doesn't want to risk their work wtih any bugs there might be with running software on a emulation layer.

24 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

Power Consumption Standard.

The power consumption is interesting, but that power consumption tradeoff won't be worth it for everyone, people that need to run x86 applications, or use an eGPU will either have to switch to Windows or Linux, or also carry around a PC laptop.

[hookedonentflix]

8 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

there's already windows and linux ARM but they aren't great to be truthful 

Yeah I dont think there is any true viable arm based desktop platform for the vast majority of users

 

9 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

i don't see how this fits the title. most people don't use windows or linux mobile versions.

I mean its more about the fact we will probably see new things that people wouldnt even consider possible on a laptop before

[Letgomyleghoe]

5 minutes ago, hookedonentflix said:

new things that people wouldnt even consider possible on a laptop before

like what? no other platform has stack integration like apple does

[hookedonentflix]

12 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Windows for ARM exists, but Microsoft and companies are more willing to make software for x86 instead as a majority of the market is on x86.

But see the point is now they will also be shipping ARM versions the software if they want to support the mac ( which a lot of people do)  

 

12 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

A complete integration also means Apple controls what you can run on your mac, that may be fine for basic uses and those that are fine with Apple first party software, but maybe not for anyone that needs to boot Windows 10 or doesn't want to risk their work wtih any bugs there might be with running software on a emulation layer.

This is a valid concern. Although there was nothing stopping apple from doing before these chips. Its important to keep users specific need in mind when buying a product. I think for the vast majority of users of though who are already buying a mac they are fine with the loss of dual booting - although I suspect from rumors that windows will also run on these macs. 

 

12 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

The power consumption is interesting, but that power consumption tradeoff won't be worth it for everyone, people that need to run x86 applications, or use an eGPU will either have to switch to Windows or Linux, or also carry around a PC laptop.

You still get significant power gains even emulating x86 from the architecture. Also the eGPU issue seems like a lack of PCIE bandwidth on these chips that is also the reason for only two thunderbolt ports. Im sure this will be improved when they get further into the transition. 

[hookedonentflix]

5 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

like what? no other platform has stack integration like apple does

If I could answer that I would be in product development. Im sure if they come up with compelling features other companies will copy them they have time and time again.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, hookedonentflix said:

Complete Stack integration.

Aka a vertical monopoly which is actually bad for the consumer. 

 

1 hour ago, hookedonentflix said:

just put some cards down that the rest of the industry will have to match

Why? Apple has closed themselves off. Their new hardware does nothing new for competition. 

[GDRRiley]

meh zen2 already is doing well at similar power and zen3 is 15-25% faster (I'd expect the APUs to have a little more or a little less of an IPC gain)

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

IMO the Apple M1 looks like a good processor for light ultrabooks. I expect it to be much more efficient than everything on the market when executing blessed applications that make use of its accelerators and much slower at non optimized applications than everything else. The downsides are not too bad for phones and ultrabooks.

 

I wouldn't want a bigger version of this processor for my desktop as it railroad the user in executing only blessed applications, and IMO a desktop should be general purpose, being able to execute everything competently a Jack of All Trades if you will.

 

X86

AMD and Intel did an incredible job pushing the X86 architecture as far as they have. The X86(32b) ISA is especially jarring, there is a set of instructions in the 8bit space that accelerates BCD operations, instructions so obsolete modern compilers don't even emit them anymore. I'm not even sure a modern processor in 32b mode is able to execute them.

The X86(64b) originally defined by AMD is only a little better. Over the years extensions over extensions were added like AVX512 to the point there are over a thousand instructions. The ISA is so complicated both AMD and Intel gave up on making a straight decoder a while ago and translates X86 to an internal RISC like ISA before being properly decoded and dispatched for execution.

That said, X86 has one almost insurmountable advantage: There is decades worth of legacy code compiled for it.

You know the compatibility layer in WIN10 to let it run older win32/64 applications? Amongst other things it introduces older bugs in the windows API that older applications rely on to run. There are industries where they still run Z80 code. That's the reason 8bit Z80 microprocessors are still manufactured to this day and the thing was launched in 1976.

 

ARM

ARM was meant to have fewer simpler instructions that need fewer transistors to be decoded. Fewere transistor->less leakage->less power. It succeeded in that and is prevalent in lowe power devices.

Still, this comes at a price: raw performance. An ARM core doesn't do all the fancy stuff an AMD or Intel core does and hyperthreading is not common, the ones that try to do it have to sacrifice low power to achieve it and it's not worth it because instructions are smaller and it's easier to keep the execution units fed anyway. Apple has the best ARM cores, ahead of even ARM (the company) itself and it doesn't deploy hyperthreading either. General purpose performance is never going to be top chart with ARM cores.

The ARM ISA today suffers from the same problem as the X86. Over the years extensions and revisions were added to the ISA, making it complicated and adding instructions that make the decoder more complicated. Another problem is that instructions are weaker, and you need more of them to do the same job, increasing the instruction bandwidth. To make up for it, ARM cores usually have a bigger instruction cache, so the transistors you save on the core you use on cache, which is not ideal.

The companies that tried to make a high performance general purpose core failed in doing so. The companies that succeeded use the general purpose core to do light housekeeping, like OS, services, etc... and leave the intensive jobs to specialized accelerators. Apple deploys NPU for inference, GPU cores, media decoders/encoders. This is amazing for special purpose devices: A phone and a supercomputer both do a subset of tasks they are specialized for, so they can be optimized on the software side heavily for that use case.

 

RISC-V

RISC-V is a more recent ISA that was developed to be open and royalty free, and was designed with hindsight to avoid the anachronism present in both X86 and ARM. The extensions and compilers have been defined from the beginning, making the set as a whole efficient in instruction space allocation inside the ISA.

Geopolitically, China was cut from ARM, and is going all in with RISC-V. Europe is developing in that direction to avoid reliance on USA IP.

Long story short, the set is a much more efficient version of the ARM ISA, and cores built with RISC-V ISA are going to outperform ARM cores eventually in every metric. There are no high performance RISC-V cores around yet, and it might take a decade for one to emerge, but IMO is going to happen.

I played around with both cortex M3 and Risc-V, Gigadevices make microcontrollers based on both ISAs. The RISC-V version has the same performance of the ARM core at 1/3 of power consumption.

Cortex M3 vs RV32IMAC

 

VLIW

Other contenders are the very long instruction word isa, which works by offloading all complexity to the compiler to handle concurrency. The idea is that the decoder is super simple because it executes in-order, so only transistors that do work are used and there are few cache misses. but the downside is that high performance compilers are almost impossible to make for VLIW processors.

Intel failed spectacularly with Itanium when it tried to move from X86-32b to 64b. This is why today we use the AMD X86-64b set.

I know Russia is developing one for government use. The compiler complexity there is useful because others will have an hard time developing malawere for them, and they can make sure there are no third party hardware backdoors.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Blademaster91 said:

Windows for ARM exists, but Microsoft and companies are more willing to make software for x86 instead as a majority of the market is on x86.

Also don't forget that each one of those ARM chips is a mere mobile chip,while the M1 is for desktop.

[Lord Vile]

5 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

IMO the Apple M1 looks like a good processor for light ultrabooks. I expect it to be much more efficient than everything on the market when executing blessed applications that make use of its accelerators and much slower at non optimized applications than everything else. The downsides are not too bad for phones and ultrabooks.

 

I wouldn't want a bigger version of this processor for my desktop as it railroad the user in executing only blessed applications, and IMO a desktop should be general purpose, being able to execute everything competently a Jack of All Trades if you will.

Regarding this. Apple does have a translation layer that seems to be fairly efficient at running x86 programs on ARM. Think they ran one of the newer tomb raider games on it and it was fairly impressive. 
 

A bigger version of this, say an M1X or Z rated at 60W would be intriguing. Say have 16 high performance cores and 4 low power. 

[NineEyeRon]

I love Apple stuff and it’s of no interest, probably of little interest to a large number of Apple users in fact. We like Apple because we don’t need to care about this stuff.

[sora.sky]

The tight integration of the M_ chips that contributes to the performance increases should be scary to anyone concerned about right to repair and right to upgrade. It is very likely that Apple will use performance and efficiency increases to justify having the Mac Pro as a gigantic SOC with tightly integrated CPU, GPU, NPU and RAM. The PC world may see that as attractive and we might have something similar play out from Qualcomm or even Intel or AMD.

 

Enthusiasts like ourselves are more accepting of decreased performance and increased inefficiency to have reparability and upgradability. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

13 hours ago, hookedonentflix said:

mean its more about the fact we will probably see new things that people wouldnt even consider possible on a laptop before

anything you can do on a pc is possible on laptops. If anyhting, this makes less possible on laptops.

[whm1974]

Just now, HelpfulTechWizard said:

anything you can do on a pc is possible on laptops. If anyhting, this makes less possible on laptops.

Actually the size of laptops does limit putting high performance parts in them.

[Mark Kaine]

Apple is like amd, always over promising and under delivering, so no I don't think it's "exciting" at all, they're scam artists (very successful at that, which makes it even less "exciting" and just sad instead) 

 

All bling, no substance ~

[pythonmegapixel]

36 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Actually the size of laptops does limit putting high performance parts in them.

You can still put high-performance parts in them but they'll thermal-throttle beyond belief. Hell, even mid-range laptops get pretty warm while in use.

[RejZoR]

Technically, for Apple users, nothing will really change. Except they'll get superior hardware compared to what Intel based offerings gave them. Outside of that, Apple made sure things work. And that can only be done with tight ecosystem control only Apple has. Everyone is always whining walled garden this, closed ecosystem that. But without that control, they'd NEVER be able to pull 3 architectural transitions in what, last 30 years? You can only dream of Microsoft EVER achieving that. And ultimately, it's beneficial to the end users with minimal pain during transition. Anyone wants to remember how painful transition was just from Win9x to WinNT and how literally everything shit itself during that period. And it was just a change on SOFTWARE side! Hardware wasn't even the problem at that time.

 

It's really similar observation on mobile devices side of things as an iPhone user for last 2 years. You really have to start using Apple's stuff as a daily driver to start appreciating their philosophy of doing things. If you're an Android or PC user for 15 or more years respectively and you just try iOS or Mac and you instantly go: "I don't like this" and start talking how Apple is crap, you're just failing across the board. I was sort of that way before. Until I was so fed up with Google and Android I just said to myself, fuck it, I'm doing this and I'm gonna make it work. And here I am being in love with iPhone and iOS to a point it's unlikely for me to even ever return to Android (at least not with garbage support they offer with measly 3 years with massive delays for getting updates after Google publishes them). I'd never thought I'd go this path, but thanks to Google and Android, I have and it's been great.

 

And I think Mac's have same thing going on. And I can say with confidence the shift from Windows to MacOS would never be a painful transition like it is so many times with Linux. I've said to myself the same as for iPhone, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna really try Linux on my systems fully and I'm gonna commit to it properly. Until it just entirely shit itself on Realtek WLAN in one laptop making it unusable without connection and choked itself to death on ASUS Transformer with the touch controls which were so god damn fucked up it was simply unusable as a touch device. And I basically have that device to be quick access touch device. Lets just say after hours and hours of compiling f**king kernels and copy pasting long unreadable noodles into Konsole, I just gave up and returned to Windows. When you need to invest so much time just to get most fundamental things to even work, you know something is messed up. Big time. And I ultimately don't care if it's Realtek's fault or not. Me as a user just don't care. Make it work. Some dude in a garage forked the driver, how can't entire god damn Linux community? The thing is, I'd NEVER have such experience when transitioning to any kind of Mac. Sure, transition, ecosystem and apps would be a total shift, just like with Linux. But it would unconditionally and painlessly just work. No dicking around with WLAN and touch problems. Then it's just on you to get around things being done a bit differently compared to Windows and accept them.

 

To return back to M1, Apple made sure that for Apple users, a shift from x86 to ARM is basically blurred. I can confidently say most Mac users won't even know it happened. Except that they'll get dramatically better performance and battery life. They only know because Apple is bragging about "Apple Silicon" to no ends. And that's the thing you have to admire. The level of confidence, tech and planning to execute something as major as this is just admirable even if you don't like Apple and you're just a tech person (tech person, not a fanboy).

[hookedonentflix]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Technically, for Apple users, nothing will really change. Except they'll get superior hardware compared to what Intel based offerings gave them. Outside of that, Apple made sure things work. And that can only be done with tight ecosystem control only Apple has. Everyone is always whining walled garden this, closed ecosystem that. But without that control, they'd NEVER be able to pull 3 architectural transitions in what, last 30 years? You can only dream of Microsoft EVER achieving that. And ultimately, it's beneficial to the end users with minimal pain during transition. Anyone wants to remember how painful transition was just from Win9x to WinNT and how literally everything shit itself during that period. And it was just a change on SOFTWARE side! Hardware wasn't even the problem at that time.

 

It's really similar observation on mobile devices side of things as an iPhone user for last 2 years. You really have to start using Apple's stuff as a daily driver to start appreciating their philosophy of doing things. If you're an Android or PC user for 15 or more years respectively and you just try iOS or Mac and you instantly go: "I don't like this" and start talking how Apple is crap, you're just failing across the board. I was sort of that way before. Until I was so fed up with Google and Android I just said to myself, fuck it, I'm doing this and I'm gonna make it work. And here I am being in love with iPhone and iOS to a point it's unlikely for me to even ever return to Android (at least not with garbage support they offer with measly 3 years with massive delays for getting updates after Google publishes them). I'd never thought I'd go this path, but thanks to Google and Android, I have and it's been great.

 

And I think Mac's have same thing going on. And I can say with confidence the shift from Windows to MacOS would never be a painful transition like it is so many times with Linux. I've said to myself the same as for iPhone, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna really try Linux on my systems fully and I'm gonna commit to it properly. Until it just entirely shit itself on Realtek WLAN in one laptop making it unusable without connection and choked itself to death on ASUS Transformer with the touch controls which were so god damn fucked up it was simply unusable as a touch device. And I basically have that device to be quick access touch device. Lets just say after hours and hours of compiling f**king kernels and copy pasting long unreadable noodles into Konsole, I just gave up and returned to Windows. When you need to invest so much time just to get most fundamental things to even work, you know something is messed up. Big time. And I ultimately don't care if it's Realtek's fault or not. Me as a user just don't care. Make it work. Some dude in a garage forked the driver, how can't entire god damn Linux community? The thing is, I'd NEVER have such experience when transitioning to any kind of Mac. Sure, transition, ecosystem and apps would be a total shift, just like with Linux. But it would unconditionally and painlessly just work. No dicking around with WLAN and touch problems. Then it's just on you to get around things being done a bit differently compared to Windows and accept them.

 

To return back to M1, Apple made sure that for Apple users, a shift from x86 to ARM is basically blurred. I can confidently say most Mac users won't even know it happened. Except that they'll get dramatically better performance and battery life. They only know because Apple is bragging about "Apple Silicon" to no ends. And that's the thing you have to admire. The level of confidence, tech and planning to execute something as major as this is just admirable even if you don't like Apple and you're just a tech person (tech person, not a fanboy).

Very well put I appreciate this response

[hookedonentflix]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Apple is like amd, always over promising and under delivering, so no I don't think it's "exciting" at all, they're scam artists (very successful at that, which makes it even less "exciting" and just sad instead) 

 

All bling, no substance ~

This is the thing - there is a good amount of substance here

[hookedonentflix]

2 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Actually the size of laptops does limit putting high performance parts in them.

There are hardware features and things that go beyond raw "performance"