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One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech dumping.

For Huawei, that's pretty much a given. Doesn't explain Apple and Samsung though. For Qualcomm, I would be surprised if their bread and butter ARM CPUs weren't mobile CPUs. Why stick with reference designs if they could tweak them or come up with higher performing ones? The Apple iPhone CPUs from two years ago are still trading blows with the latest Snapdragons. That's crazy.

IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. This is a luxury that is harder for Qualcomm to afford, as their customers wouldn't put up with it.

> IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors.

Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.

That was a rumor floating around - that WebKit took advantage of new A12 instructions. It wasn’t true at the time. They may have released the patch since then.

https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616

It's not just about WebKit. The remainder of the OS, including the graphic stack, is most likely to be optimized as hell for the A12 CPU.

There is a _LOT_ to be said for gaining a few %5 here and there improvements. Apple can both optimize their software for a very limited set of micro-architectures (a luxury that doesn't exist on android which runs on everything from tiny in order cores to larger more general purpose OoO cores) as well as optimize the cores themselves for an exact instruction sequences they determine to be critical for _their_ OS/applications/power envelope. This means their cache sizes/latency/TLBs/ROB buffers/frequency/power profiles/etc are decided not based on what generates a good specCPU score but what generates a good iOS/safari experience.

Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.

The new A12 processor comes very close in the same benchmarks to the best desktop processors, not mobile specific or phone centric benchmarks. I don't know why you persist in your non factual and biased comments.

"What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance. Of course there’s compiler considerations and various frequency concerns to take into account, but still we’re now talking about very small margins until Apple’s mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance. It will be interesting to get more accurate figures on this topic later on in the coming months."

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...

"we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance"

moderately clocked skylake != "best desktop processors"

There is a good 2x perf difference between a 2 something Ghz skylake and a 4.5Ghz skylake, particularly on L2 cache bound single thread benchmarks (which is what specint2006 is these days, its more a cache benchmark except for libquantum which is "broken" and more accurately reflects clockrate*cores). A moderately clocked skylake is a laptop.

But you say, IPC matters!!! Sure it does, but a microarch with the same IPC and the ability to clock 2x faster is generally a 2x faster CPU.

Nor is apple shipping a phone with 16+ cores...

People have been saying their phones were as fast as their desktops for years, and its not anymore true today than it was 5 years ago. Its questionable whether it will really ever happen as there is this heat/power dissipation problem in phones that desktops don't have. Not to mention desktops don't have nearly the physical constraints on RAM/storage/IO capacity you find in a phone/laptop.

There are hardware-level optimizations in A12 for Objective-C, at least.

Further, Apple chip design probably doesn't need to respond to market pressure the same way Qualcomm does.

If Snapdragons get too expensive, phone manufacturers will switch to Huawei / Samsung / MediaTek, but Apple can absorb a $5 or $10 increase in per chip cost for better performance and power efficiency since it is vertically integrated.

And also Qualcomm seems to have been forced into giving away all of their server chip designs to the Chinese, too:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/

That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply.

And there's this sweet irony, too:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-...

If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada:

https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62...

https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063...

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60...

That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).

Nortel didn't disappear because of Huawei. Chinese are used as scapegoats for everything these days.

I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management.

For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.

I don't think you can dismiss the Chinese element in Nortel's downfall quite so easily. Undoubtedly Nortel made missteps themselves, but rarely does a large organization fail for just a single reason. In Nortel's case it definitely appears that China played a part. I think it can reasonably be argued from either side on whether or not China's activities served as a tipping point.

It's not 'China'. It's new competitors that blew them out of the water, like Apple and Samsung did to Nokia, for the reasons I listed in my previous comment.

Except a major one of those new competitors appears to have been a Chinese company that benefited from misappropriated trade secrets and IP. As I said, more than one reason for a failure of this scale. As an example, Nortel might have emerged from bankruptcy intact, as many companies manage to do, had it not been for the financial collapse of 08'-09'. That downturn made it more difficult for Nortel to get competitive prices for the assets it was shedding in an attempt to emerge from bankruptcy. Prior to that, a contributing factor in the decision to declare bankruptcy in the first place was that it could not easily service its debt and retain enough working capital to support operations. It had plenty of cash on the books, but nearly all of it was in other countries and repatriating it presented very thorny problems. [0] As I said, no one simple reason.

[0] http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Part+Last+things+first...

"misappropriated trade secrets": I read that as Nortel was poorly managed and handed those on a plate. That's business, if you're not smart others will be more than happy to abuse you. In this case Nortel essentially asked a competitor to manufacture their products from them... What could possibly go wrong?

Your last point regarding cash is also an example of poor management in my book.

It's too easy to always find scapegoats.

By misappropriated trade secrets I'm referring to the fairly well documented hacking of Nortel, not the willing hand-over of IP. [0][1][2]

I also think it's simplistic to say their cash issue was purely an issue of poor management, as it resulted in part due to the unforeseen financial collapse at the time.

Of course you can try to define both of those as "poor management" as well: Nortel should have protected itself better from hackers. Or they should have been prepared for a financial collapse on a scale not seen for 80 years.

Under this type of reasoning, any problem at all for any company anywhere could be defined as "poor management" and that all companies fail from poor management. The problem is that this overly simplifies rather complex issues. It's a bit like saying "Everyone dies of heart failure." Because in every instance of death the heart has stopped beating. In every instance of a company failure, its managers failed to act in a way that might save the company, therefore management was poor.

It neglects the difference between proximate causes and distal causes. It ignores that, for example, the heart may have stopped because a bullet hit an artery and a person lost too much blood. Back to companies, it ignores the difficult questions of "Why & How did management fail? What, if anything, could they have done differently given the knowledge they had at the time? Would those things have been enough?"

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/report-ch...

[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/15/nortel_breach/

[2]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-c...

Mike Z, is that you?

Nope :) I have nothing to do with the comms industry directly. I just really enjoy (to the extent that's the appropriate word) the puzzle that is massive organizational failure. It's a fascinating topic. Sears & Toys R Us are two more recent examples that have enthralled me. The road from massive mult-billion dollar corporation to defunct is filled with branch points. Any one of them might have avoided or delayed disaster. You're correct of course in a general sense that mismanagement is a frequent component. In my opinion though, that may be a sufficient condition in many cases, but it's not always a necessary condition.

A great example, maybe my favorite, where poor management was really a primary issue was the death of Circuit City. There as they faced increasing competition from internet sales, Best Buy, and other competitors, they sought to cut costs in part by firing the highest paid floor sales staff, replacing them with lower paid, usually minimum wage workers. Some of those higher paid workers may have been dead weight, but on the whole they represented the most experienced, most knowledgeable floor staff best able to help customers (or more cynically sell them on stuff they didn't need with techno-jargon). In any case, it was a very short jump from there to revenue falling off a cliff, and bankruptcy. So poor management, absolutely foreseeable, directly caused their downfall. Though even there the poor management was partly a result of externalities like increased online shopping putting previously non-existent pressure on them.

I think the sears story's most important point is that they canceled their general catalog sales in 1993, the year before amazon was founded.

So 100% lack of foresight, but the real screw-up was by 1997 or so everybody and their dog was trying to sell everything under the sun online. Where was sears, still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that internet sales were just the modern version of the business model that worked immensely well for sears.

How much would it have cost them to resurrect some form of mail-order/web forms read some business journals about Dell's order and deliver model and start making some side bets and deals with UPS/fedex?

Oh yes, these were absolutely the early decisions that started their demise. In more recent years though, I attribute their demise to the CEO. If not for this they may have weathered the storm another decade, maybe (though less likely) pivoted to a long term midel of profitability. But the CEO, far from simply beimg incompetent, engaged in a protracted pattern of self-dealing to his other financial interests that gradually drained them of resources and productive assets.

And to add to my other comment, Yes: It really is astonishing that Sears did not see the clear analogues between the internet and its traditional catalog sales. But then they'd (as you pointed out) decided to reduce costs a few years earlier by discontinuing their general catalog. Had they kept the catalog it's entirely possible someone would have said "Hey, this internet thing looks popular, how about we put a copy of our catalog up there?"

I'd love to know what their thinking was in the late 90's. I can imagine that management for brick & mortar stores might have pushed back on making inroads on the internet out of fear it would cannibalize their sales, and blocked it internally. Or it could simply have been inertia and a blind spot against noticing that "internet" wasn't a flash in the pan fad.

I was at Nortel (they acquired a startup I was at). I have never seen a more incompetently run company. Some of the stupid stuff they did was mind blowing. An example would be their acquisition of Alteon for near $8b when they could have had Foundry for less, except they would not make Bobby head of enterprise (where he would be useful) because of some old grudge over the Rapid City vs. Centilion beef internally (last gen of stuff they acquired - Bay Networks timeframe).

> I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...)

Admit it - you're the real common link here... /s

That could only apply to Huawei if I understand what you mean.

This is one thing I can't tell if I'm being "tin-foil hatty" about. What is embedded in that processor?

That argument could easily be reversed: Why wouldn't the Chinese be worried about bugs embedded in foreign tech used for sensitive tasks like military applications? In both cases it's more a matter of trust than anything else.

Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.

It’s also possible Huawei is getting hassled by the US because it is not susceptible to US government attempts to embed such things on behalf of the US, as some (not all) other companies might be. Like you I can’t tell how crazy this idea is. I’m open to your tinfoil hat theory too, but both can be true.

Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.

Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese.

And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry.

China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung.

Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week.

Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine.

* Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl...

* Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...

Samsung as a whole ( Not Just Samsung Electronics ). Many Korean could have argued the other way around, because Samsung controls the government.

Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.

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