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Comment by carlycue | Hacker News Reader

Apple's decision to ditch Intel and be in charge of their own destiny has done wonders in the short term but there will surely be consequences in the long run. Apple Silicon can't stay ahead forever and will hit a plateau. It's inevitable. At that point, they don't have the option to call Intel or AMD again. What are they going to do then?

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> At that point, they don't have the option to call Intel or AMD again.

That's not what Intel says.

>Intel’s CEO Wants to Win Back Apple.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/intels-ceo-wants-to-win-bac...

They'll hire people from AMD, Intel, or whoever else happens to be around then. Money talks, and Apple has a ton of it throw at the problem. Their marketcap is larger than AMD, Intel, TSMC, and NVidia... combined.

Intel or AMD aren't going to turn their nose up if Apple wants their chips again.

It's not like making their own cpus and switching back to intel/amd are the only options anyway.

It seems more likely that other arm processors will catch up to intel/amd, and in that case they won't need to necessarily always make their own processors as long as they can just get another company to add support for any custom instructions they use.

Why is a plateau inevitable? And if it is, why aren’t AND and Intel subject to the same plateau?

Why must AMD and Intel end up on top again? It’s not like apple doesn’t have the cash to keep investing in chip dev.

The supplier for all of them is TSMC, Apple being >50% of their production has a huge advantage

https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/02/08/apple-tsmc-5nm-chips-2...

Intel runs its own fabs, and slipping on r&d success in that area is a large part of what's been causing them problem in recent years.

> Apple Silicon can't stay ahead forever and will hit a plateau. It's inevitable.

Yes.

> At that point, they don't have the option to call Intel or AMD again. What are they going to do then?

I think there will be plenty of vendors, including Intel and AMD, willing to sell to Apple, actually.

They also have other potential alternatives - Apple is also rumored to be doing lots of R&D into RISC-V and other architectures that don't require licensing ARM.

> Apple is also rumored to be doing lots of R&D into RISC-V and other architectures that don't require licensing ARM.

Out of all the companies making CPUs, Apple seems the least likely to have problems licensing ARM. Apple co-founded ARM, and they seem to have much more favorable licensing terms than any other company, likely due to some old contract from the Newton days that's been grandfathered in.

The Asahi project is discovering quite a few ways in which Apple's processors break the ARM spec and/or implement custom instructions -- which not even architectural-license holders are allowed to do. See e.g. this comment thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29783549

Why is the plateau unavoidable? Apple has a lot of money, they can hire top talent

There was nothing unreasonable or problematic about Apple creating their own chips. It was good strategy and good business. It's good for the industry and end users. Everyone wins except for Intel, but Intel will gladly sell them chips again if they get the chance. It's money.

I think intel wins longer term too, more competition and diversity will help the d while market (assuming AMD / apple doesn’t make intel go bankrupt)

> At that point, they don't have the option to call Intel or AMD again.

I don't see why not. If anything a transition back would be easier with their now universal binary format.

Does the x86 -> ARM translation work in both directions?

Not at the moment. But there’s nothing fundamentally preventing Apple from writing an ARM to x86 translator. It’s probably easier that the opposite direction because x86 provides stricter execution ordering guarantees than ARM.

On the plus side you don't need to translate x87.

My point is that once Apple is ready they won't have to.

That's just not how business works - if you're in any kind of b2b business and the CEO of a $3Tn company calls you, you take the call and you bend over backwards to win the business if you can. If Tim Cook called Intel and said Apple was thinking about going back to Intel, Intel would surge like crazy to make it happen. The same exact thing would be the case for AMD or anyone else for that matter.

Intel already plateaued: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png

> Apple Silicon can't stay ahead forever and will hit a plateau. It's inevitable.

that's a pretty large leap. Why can't they stay competitive? There's no reason why reverting to the mean applies this way.

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