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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Regarding hardware, will Dell be able to compete with a MBA at the $1000 price point? I doubt it.

If it will cut into their sales they might have to adapt.

Also, from what I heard, while intel was on top, it was charging outrageous margins on its CPUs. AMD mobile were said to be hundreds of dollars less per cpu. The manufacturers might choose to pass on these savings.

Of course, if AMD becomes the only game in town, they might jack up their prices as well. We'll see.

I didn't really think about it at the time, but Nvidia buying ARM makes even more sense now that Apple has shown what can be done with ARM CPUs. Not necessarily because Nvidia wanted a CPU, but because otherwise, they'd be stuck providing GPUs for Intel CPU systems. AMD can bundle Radeon GPUs and Apple has the M1 CPU/GPU. That means that for a system vendor (Dell), the only cost effective place to use an Nvidia GPU would be in an Intel system. And if those are already more expensive, then that market will be shrinking.

However, with Apple showing the viability of ARM for desktop / laptop use, this opens a whole new market up for Nvidia/ARM. Apple has already shown it is a viable approach hardware wise, so half of the work is done.

So, an ARM powered Dell laptop might not be too far off.

You're right, it could be that Nvidia will push for more beefed up cortex CPUs, with the same tricks employed in m1, like larger L1/l2 caches, increasing the die size, and add more complex pipelines, put the ram on the soc, and an Nvidia gpu.

The potential problems are.

- This might take some time, if it's not already in progress. And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens.

- Windows seems to still have issues with app portability and emulation. But who knows, maybe MS will push harder

- Making their own chips and also licensing cores to vendors like Qualcomm, might spook them. It's not a good position to compete with someone who owns the IP you depend one. This might be a good thing for RISC-V

But we'll find out in a year or two what is the play. Competition is good for everyone. That's why I don't like apple having exclusive access to new nodes, be it because apple is willing to pay premium, or that other companies avoid low yield.

Anyway, seems like TSMC will have their hands full for a few cycles.

> And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens.

What do you mean? What other options do they have?

The other option is to use the best available x86 mobile CPUs, and these at the moment seem to be from AMD.

From what I've seen even current AMD CPUs are competitive with M1. Ryzen 4900HS has a fair lead in multicore performance and close single threaded. Of course, all this at a higher power and fans running as a jet engine.

But AMD is one process node behind, and one architectural node behind their desktops (Zen 2 on 7nm).

So, OEMs can use the perf gains from both the advancements to lower the TDP a bit,(ex 10%), put a larger battery. And this can result in a competitive product, even with the rumored M1X, since Ryzens already have the multicore lead.

That being said, from I read, the next mobile Ryzens will be 5000 series, released in a month, at 7nm. So only a ~20% IPC uplift is expected. Also probably TSMC's 7nm improved a bit. Nothing to scoff at, but not as exciting as a new process node.

Anyway, we'll see soon enough.

So in short, CPU and GPU manufacturers will have to do vertical integration themselves to compete.

Nvidia isn't stuck on Intel, they're selling AMD CPUs as part of their DGX A-100.

That said, it's clear that they're hoping for more vertical integration in the same way that AMD already has.

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