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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Apple seems to be against use of nvidia GPUs in their products - would they potentially abandon using ARM if it comes under nvidia ownership?

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Apple is not fundamentally against the use of nVidia products. nVidia refused to implement the Metal APIs knowing full well that in a few years they'd be replaced by Apple's own silicon. Why spend a 1-2 years implementing adding a feature that will be legacy 1-2 years after it ships?

> Apple is not fundamentally against the use of nVidia products.

Are you sure about that? I don't know this story about Metal, but I believe Apple has refused to certify an nVidia driver on Mac since like 2018 (I think), effectively cutting Apple users off from using nVidia products on Apple platforms.

My theory on why Apple prefers AMD follows from Nvidia's main advantage over AMD being software, both their drivers and CUDA.

Apple needs/wants to be in full control of their driver stack. They don't necessarily want to write it themselves, but they want tighter control than Nvidia is willing to give them. AMD on the other hand is much happier to offload responsibility and accept help.

I don't think this set of circumstances would come up for an ARM processor.

Nvidia-provided macOS drivers had QC issues (major bugs) too, some of which never got fixed, which probably didn't help matters.

Apple has an ARM architecture license from the very early days. I don't know if it's perpetual or what the terms are. b Apple doesn't use any stock ARM cores and already develops their own compiler, libraries, OS so how much do they rely on ARM, Inc?

ARM was originally Acorn RISC Machine. (I had an ARM desktop in 1988.) ARM was spun off as a separate company when Apple joined in, with a 43% stake. I imagine that when they sold it, they kept a perpetual license. [1]

Or maybe not: [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd.

[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-...

Apple is currently against NVIDIA GPUs simply because they got screwed over with NVIDIA GPUs before in terms of hardware reliability and such, which prompted them to switch to AMD for GPUs. It doesn't have much to do with NVIDIA as a company and more to do with their hardware.

But when it comes to ARM chips, Apple designs their own ARM-compliant chips, so NVIDIA owning ARM would do nothing in that aspect imo. Especially since iPhone/iPad chips have been ARM-based for the past decade, so I don't think that Apple really has a good option or reason to switch away from ARM at this point.

> Apple is currently against NVIDIA GPUs simply because they got screwed over with NVIDIA GPUs before in terms of hardware reliability and such

That's the oft-mentioned and certainly plausible reason, but it's not a matter of fact that it's THE reason, is it?

In the absence of any other known reason, this seems to be the most likely explanation.

But yeah, you are correct, there is no factual officially stated reason, and I wouldn't expect Apple to publicly bring it out ever either.

The argument against this reason is that Apple used Nvidia GPUs in their MacBooks from 2012 to 2014(?). This was years after the broken GPU time.

Apple had a long patent and design mark infringement fight with Samsung all while using Samsung fabs for their SOCs, flash, and LCD panels.

Nothing personal, just business.

I'm not an expert, but I thought Apple's reason for ditching Nvidia was speculated to be that their ecosystem was closed and integrating Nvidia slowed down development and lead to failures. I don't think there's an absolute opposition to using Nvidia owned stuff, especially for ARM where Apple licenses IP and custom designs the hardware on their timeline.

Apple's customers don't care about NVidia -- they don't do serious computation, scientific computing. Our Hollywood clients all use PC-architecture machines with NVidia for video editing and rendering. The writers, etc, use Macs.

So Apple can save the cost and get higher profit margins by not having powerful GPUs in their products.

I know a lot of VFX and animation people that do serious rendering / ray-tracing computation and do wish they could use nVidia GPUs in their Macs. It's worth considering how, unlike writers, rendering needs machines not just for all the animators, but for the render farms too.

Of course not.

They might be against nVidia GPUs. They won't throw their investment in Apple Silicon out just because of that.

Apple has a perpetual license no? So wouldn’t matter too much on leverage.

What's the available alternative for Mobile? X86 has never matched ARM on power efficiency vs. compute trade-off for mobile

I think the commenter is referring to Apple's switch to ARM for laptops.

Apple typically has forward-looking supply chain contracts. I imagine ARM is under contract for the licensing for long enough that Apple will build out their own design team.

Already, TSMC is the manufacturer for the cores, so Apple really doesn't have too much of a dependency on ARM in the short term.

I think what we'll see over the next 3-5 years is a divergence from the ARM-licensed design to an in-house-designed architecture: "Apple Silicon II"

Apple already has a perpetual license for the Arm ISA (analogous to the api). The actual chip design has been Apple customer for several years now. Apple does not get their chip designs from Arm.

So in that case they really need nothing from ARM at this point

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