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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

there is nothing that prevents either AMD or Intel to innovate even beyond what Apple has done, and integrate the RAM or build similar SoCs, if the market demands it.

Actually I do wonder if they have a real issue here. Can the chip makers (AMD/Intel), the PC manufacturers (Lenovo/Dell/HP/etc) and Microsoft cooperate enough to compete.

I'm not sure Microsoft is that committed to Windows anymore (mobile first/cloud first). The PC manufacturers have been complacent for a long time, happy to suckle on the WinTel teat. Intel have been struggling to deliver (this is probably what drove Apple to switch).

Perhaps Microsoft could step up but my gut feeling is their heart isn't in it. What little moat Win32 still has disappears with a switch to ARM.

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Yes, you've hit the bulls eye - Apple's M1 performs so well because both the software + hardware are optimised for each other. And that's the real challenge for AMD / Intel / Qualcomm / Nvidia etc. with their processors. ARM never took off for the desktop because it lacked good software support. Apple has fixed that within its ecosystem.

AMD is rumoured to be building a CPU that has both ARM and x86 cores - hope that is true as that will be truly game changing.

Microsoft has been trying to make Windows on ARM work for years now. It was a key drive behind "mobile first" efforts back when Microsoft worked hard on Windows Phone. It's been diminished since, but the effort hasn't disappeared. Most recently the Surface Pro X has been a return to Windows on ARM. The Surface Pro X is useful to mention for several reasons including things like Electron on M1 wouldn't have happened so fast if Microsoft hadn't put so much work into Chromium on ARM for Surface Pro X, and also that the Pro X was the first device to ship Microsoft's x86 (32-bit) emulation for traditional Win32 applications. (Microsoft also has in the beta pipeline x64 emulation for Windows on ARM.) Microsoft isn't necessarily in danger of losing their "moat" in any switch/focus to ARM at this point, given the wide variety of applications known to work out of the box on the Surface Pro X today (with more support/compatibility again already in the beta pipeline).

They have already shown they can. APUs from Intel and AMD already combine CPU, GPU, and video decoding/encoding on a single chip.

That's only one part of the problem here.

"Competing" in this sense is delivering similar user experience (battery life, performance, seamless hardware interactions) that Apple is achieving through their top-to-bottom control of the hardware and software.

It's not enough to show off Intel/AMD SoCs and call that good when the other components and software force subpar UX.

Again, they have already shown they can reduce battery usage with integrated GPU and video decoding. What's missing is unified memory, which is already in the pipeline for datacenter products: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15593/amd-unveils-cdna-gpu-ar...

As far as performance, MacOS has been slower than both Windows and Linux on the same hardware for as long as I can remember. I see no reason why both operating systems won't achieve better utilization of these upcoming systems than Apple does with their M1.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos101...

The M1 operates in a unique and valuable space right now, but the claim that it will be effectively impossible for the rest of the industry to move into that space doesn't hold water.

Yes, I agree. In fact, software has been the bottle neck for sometime now as CPU development in terms of performance has outpaced software.

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