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Comment by khitchdee | Hacker News Reader

Apple will always be niche because they are too expensive. ARM based PC client processors accounted for about 9% of the total market. But I don't expect that number will grow a lot higher due to cost of Macs. Also, you can't bring out a desktop PC based on Linux because that a very slowly growing market segment and MacOS is proprietary. Don't think Apple will start another PowerComputing type scenario where they open their platform to others. It's not a matter of performance for this reason (price). So, on Windows, assuming Macs don't take away any more market share from Windows, they need to beat AMD+TSMC.

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> So, on Windows, assuming Macs don't take away any more market share from Windows, they need to beat AMD+TSMC.

No. All it needs is

- Microsoft and Qualcomm breaking their unholy and IMHO questionably legal alliance

- an ARM CPU vendor willing to do the same as Apple did and add support for accelerating translation of x86 code (IIRC, memory access models/barriers are done differently between x86 and ARM, and Apple simply extended their cores to be able to use the same memory access/barrier model as x86 on translated-x86 threads)

- an ARM CPU vendor willing to implement basic functionality like PCIe actually according to spec - even the Raspberry Pi which is the closest you can get to a mass market general-purpose ARM computer has that broken [1]

- someone (tm) willing to define a common standard of bootup sequence/standard feature set. Might be possible that UEFI fills the role; the current ARM bootloaders are a hot mess compared to the old and tried BIOS/boot sector x86 approach, and most (!) ARM CPUs/BSPs aren't exactly built with "the hardware attached to the chips may change at will" in mind.

Rosetta isn't patented to my knowledge, absolutely nothing is stopping Microsoft from doing the same as part of Windows.

[1] https://www.hackster.io/news/jeff-geerling-shows-off-an-amd-...

If you translate, you do face performance issues. Apple or some other vendor cannot make an ARM chip so fast at a competitive cost that beats an x86 chip in emulation mode. The underlying acceleration techniques for both ARM and x86 are the same.

> Apple or some other vendor cannot make an ARM chip so fast at a competitive cost that beats an x86 chip in emulation mode.

This reminds me of Iron Man 1... "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps! - Well, I'm sorry. I'm not Tony Stark."

Apple has managed to pull it off so well that the M1 blasted an i9 to pieces [1]. The M1 is just so damn well more performant than an Intel i9 that the 20% performance loss compared to native code didn't matter.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...

And for 99.9999% of users the M1 performance benchmarks vs. i9 _don't matter one bit._

The use case for the vast majority of laptops include I/O- and memory-bound applications. Very few CPU-bound applications are run on consumer laptops, or even corporate laptops, for the most part. CPU-bound applications should be getting run on ARM or GPU clusters in the cloud.

The use case for an M1 in laptops is the power benchmarks vs. an i9.

> The use case for the vast majority of laptops include I/O- and memory-bound applications.

Where the M1 just blows anything desktop-Intel out of the water, partially because they integrate a lot of stuff directly on the SoC, partially because they place stuff like RAM or persistent storage extremely close to the SoC whereas on desktop-Intel RAM, storage and peripheral controllers are all dedicated chips.

The downside is obviously that you can't get more than 16GB RAM with an M1 and 24GB RAM with the new M2's and you cannot upgrade either memory at all without a high-risk soldering job [1]... but given that Apple has the persistent storage so closely attached to the SoC to swap around, it doesn't matter all that much.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...

That performance difference is not due to architecture but process technology. Intel is on Intel' best node and Apple is on TSMC's.

No. The architecture is the biggest factor. Damn, even Jim Keller talks about how most programs use a very small subset of instructions. It isn't like RISC makes miracles, but sure helps them when your power budget is small.

That comparison is Intel 14nm vs. TSMC 5nm nodes. Please verify from the link. That's appx a one node difference. Intel fumbled the ball on EUV intro.

The "x86 translation support" bits are part of ARM64 ISA, they just weren't standardised in time - apple effectively implemented a WIP version of it AFAIK, though main changes are in interface for OS.

> Also, you can't bring out a desktop PC based on Linux because that a very slowly growing market segment

Wouldn't bet on that one

Windows runs on ARM, too (with issues, but those are also related to the questionable performance of the SoCs).

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