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Comment by leadingthenet | Hacker News Reader

No, it wouldn't be awesome.

This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Furthermore, this chip is not meant to be a retail product. It's optimised for the exact requirements that Apple's products have. The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I genuinely don't understand how can anyone who wishes to break up Apple not see that these things?

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>This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Eh, that's some very biased thinking.

In the real hardware world of both mechanical and electrical. I can approach a company and say "we want something with these specs, we'll buy 10 million pieces per month, what can you do you us?" and that kicks off R&D efforts after some ground contractual agreements to commit both parties.

You know, exactly what Microsoft did with AMD when they commissioned unique SOC designs for their consoles with a host of never before implemented features such as direct gpio <-> ssd io.

> This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push

This seems pretty grounded.

> The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I'm less convinced of this. Their exact needs seem to be making laptops... and so these chips would make interesting candidates for other laptops, if split off from Apple.

It's never going to happen, and an independent company might struggle for R&D money, but if these prove to be better laptop CPUs there is a market there.

But they're not just making generic laptops. They're making Macs.

Everything from the memory model, to the secure enclave for TouchID/FaceID, to countless other custom features, are parts that other SOCs do not need to have present on the die, and cannot optimise for.

For good or bad, this is truly a piece of engineering that could only have come out of Apple.

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