How many years will it take before an Apple competitor can make an ARM ISA SoC that is anywhere near "x86-64 high end" performance? Is anyone trying currently?
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/09/unleashing-open-so...
Hence the reason Google Fiber got laughed out of existence. Google thought everyone would just bend over backwards and laud their arrival. I guess they were shocked that it would require money and actual effort, like most difficult undertakings.
Don’t mistake building and selling consumer HW with building components. Very different problems. The former is as equal parts art as it is engineering. Building your own CPU will be vastly simpler. Whether or not Google has the same level of coordination between HW and SW to have Android benefit so greatly, I don’t know. It’s also unclear how big a step building the CPU is for Google. Lots of talented people on that project. That being said, it’s already behind schedule if I recall correctly so it legitimately could be causing them problems. Or they don’t have enough direction and good leadership to actually execute competently
Google had most of that (excluding AI) when they owned Motorola's phone unit. The phones had clean Android, respectable specs, inoffensively designed and very competitive on pricing. Unfortunately, Google had to unbundle Motorola, in part due to anti-trust concerns, as well as Samsung's public and private grumbling about the arrangement (Tizen, and a handful of Windows Mobile phones where promoted as a shot across Google's bow, in the same timeframe).
That said, when intel's mobile team in Isreal took their gloves off...
Graviton2 uses an ARM-designed core and actually cut the cache sizes a bit from ARM's recommendation, and it's certainly competitive if not an absolute 'wow!' like M1 is. (Apple could have shipped at that level 2-3 years ago.)
Many of these R&D will filter through to other ARM IPs. So it is perfectly reasonable to expect it would be available to Desktop as well. The problem is no one has the incentive to push ARM on Windows against Intel at its home turf.
I also wonder if being an SOC with integrated memory helps the M1 in term of performance (I guess it must improve data access latency). It might push competitors to build high performance SOC.
> "Iterating on a architecture is harder than starting one from scratch."
It can be true when the old code/design is just incredibly bad and needs to be tossed, but I don't think it's true in general.
Intel x86 chips would have had things like out of order execution many years earlier if they didn't need to be compatible with old software.
Some people have said that a lot of the 737 Max problems are due to Boeing execs insisting on keeping the same airframe.
I admit that isn't quite what the parent said, but realistically any architecture "from scratch" is going to reuse a lot of stuff from existing designs that works well.
The devil is in the details. It is a question of execution and need. Who is doing it etc.
It is easier for a team that made the original system to make a better rewrite because they understand past mistakes better.
And entirely new team may simply replicate mistakes of the past.