PC enthusiasts are a tiny market. If Intel (or AMD) design their companies around enthusiast needs, they'll get what they deserve. Sanity is you design for the mass market and pick up what you can by throwing enthusiasts the occasional higher-priced bone.
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Incoming Intel CEO Derides Company's Inability to 'Deliver Better Products' Than Apple's M1 Chip
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PC enthusiasts are a tiny market. If Intel (or AMD) design their companies around enthusiast needs, they'll get what they deserve. Sanity is you design for the mass market and pick up what you can by throwing enthusiasts the occasional higher-priced bone.
I am really digging' my lifestyle M1 MBA, Pat. You and Intel are going down. Apple for lifestyle win. 
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
Roughly 3.8 Billion people are gamers according to some studies, and 48% of that happens on PCs. The mass market and the gaming market are merging, it seems.
If PC enthusiasts being a tiny market were true, then the investors wouldn't have anything to worry about, would they?
The PC market is huge, and while "enthusiasts" may be small (I honestly don't know for sure) influencers, reviewers, and those who inform the "average" buyer have certainly been clamoring for AMD over Intel for a while now.
I think acknowledging a new type of competitor would be better than describing Apple as a Lifestyle company.
The new competitors have diverse product ranges, vertical integration, great engineers, and deep pockets. Apple is the epitome of this.
Perhaps they simply MUST avoid saying how good “Apple Engineering” is publicly?. But internally they need to recognise this new class of competition if they’re going to survive.
Indeed. Underestimated your “competition” is never a good path to success. “Apple has a lot of seriously good CPU designers, and TSMC is killing our fabs” would be a much better thing to tell the troops. Then you formulate a plan for what you’re going to do about it.
I agree with most comments here about the situation right now.
However, remember this is not magic.
All tech moves forward.
Apple makes great versions of ARM CPU's today.
Apple is only doing this due to the work of very clever engineers.
New people are becoming engineers every day.
There is no fundamental reason why at some point Intel cannot be just as good if not better than Apple with designs in this space.
Again there is no magic. It's just humans working and creating things.
I for one genuinely hope Intel, AMD and Apple, and perhaps even Samsung and others create amazing powerful computing components.
Trust me on one point. The very VERY last thing any Apple fan should ever want is for Apple to have no strong competition.
However, remember this is not magic.
All tech moves forward.
Apple makes great versions of ARM CPU's today.
Apple is only doing this due to the work of very clever engineers.
New people are becoming engineers every day.
There is no fundamental reason why at some point Intel cannot be just as good if not better than Apple with designs in this space.
Again there is no magic. It's just humans working and creating things.
I for one genuinely hope Intel, AMD and Apple, and perhaps even Samsung and others create amazing powerful computing components.
Trust me on one point. The very VERY last thing any Apple fan should ever want is for Apple to have no strong competition.
Apple's design team comes from Intel. You're essentially seeing from Apple what Intel processors would look like on a proper and modern process node. And a lot of people give Apple too much credit for what is actually TSMC's ability to keep pushing their process nodes forward.
Pat Gelsinger is not wrong ... a company focused purely on microprocessors needs to be better at it than a company focused on end user products that just makes them as a means to an end for their consumer products.
Pat Gelsinger is not wrong ... a company focused purely on microprocessors needs to be better at it than a company focused on end user products that just makes them as a means to an end for their consumer products.
Right now, it's still possible to have both power and flexibility (ie: the current PC-building paradigm).
What happens if those two qualities become mutually exclusive in the future though? What if the future of PC performance comes from integrated processors like the M1, with all the components soldered onto one giant chip, with no / little avenues for upgrades? There may come a time when the performance compromises that come from inserting standalone parts into a case become so great that building your own PC is good only for pretty Instagram pics and not for "real work".
In a sense, it becomes like the Apple Watch conundrum, where people find they eventually have to choose between wearing a pretty analogue watch that only tells time, or an apple watch for the health benefits.
I believe that eventually, everyone will have to pick a side.
No, Apple’s design team does not come from Intel. They come from DEC (via PA Semiconductor), Exponential Technology (via Intrinsity), AMD (one of the Nuvia guys worked with me at AMD, for example), etc. They have a few folks from Intel, including in management, but the majority of the team has never worked at Intel.
If I was taking over as the president of Intel, I'd come out and say that management failed, or engineering failed everyone. AMD, and Apple are eating our lunch. They are getting the spotlight, and it's getting damn dark for us. We do make great things, but we CAN do better. We can't sit on our current tech and assume that we will have a market in the future. We need to innovate. We need to drive things. We need to stop asking why, and start saying why not! We have to look beyond the x86/64 space. We have to innovate, we have to reach, we have to think about things in a way they haven't been thought of before. We need to take some risks, we need to also keep the eye on the ball, we need to do things right the first time, and do things better than our competitors. And it's not only die size, we need to rock the world by what we put on those dies. We can do better. We WILL do better. We can bring the spotlight back to us. We can rock the world again. The future is ours! Let's go get it!!! My door is always open. Let's get to work, and build Intel again!!! We have so got this!!!
Well I stand corrected. I assumed the management would have brought over a significant portion of their teams. I still think TSMC deserves much more of the credit than they are getting tho.
Microsoft are one of the most valuable companies in the world ..
The point is that these companies once tried to compete with Apple, and failed.
The M1 has internal 16GB with no external memory bus. No LPDDR.
I was comparing it to an i5/i7. Both support more than 16GB of memory on an external bus and have multilane PCIe.
When designing a chip nothing can be "OBVIOUSLY .... trivially scaled up".
Adding one more interface may blow you out of an area budget or pin budget.
Adding LPDDR may blow your power budget.
Adding more memory may blow your area, timing and power budget.
You may need a new package.
You now need additional verification, etc.
My day job is designing chips and nothing is trivial.
Apple's CPU team didn't come from Intel.
FreeScale, Exponential Technology and others come to mind.
Intel's 10nm and 7nm are proper and modern process nodes.
Their modem team; at least part of it came from Intel.
My Intel contacts are very positive on his return, but Gelsinger is going to have to do a lot better than whiny throwaway quips that sound awfully reminiscent of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer pooh-poohing Apple, Blackberry pooh-poohing Apple, and a whole bunch of other companies that Apple has gone on to bury in the meantime.
Sorry Intel, but Apple designed a significantly better SoC for computers, ON THEIR FIRST TRY, than you EVER HAVE. Why don't you focus on the engineering challenges and inherent physics-based limits surrounding x86 vs RISC ISAs like Arm's, instead of taunting a company that has you under its foot right now in the consumer space.
Oh, and on the enterprise front? You're a good 18-months behind on your process plans, guys. NVIDIA just bought Arm and is coming for your lunch. Those who live in glass houses...
Sorry Intel, but Apple designed a significantly better SoC for computers, ON THEIR FIRST TRY, than you EVER HAVE. Why don't you focus on the engineering challenges and inherent physics-based limits surrounding x86 vs RISC ISAs like Arm's, instead of taunting a company that has you under its foot right now in the consumer space.
Oh, and on the enterprise front? You're a good 18-months behind on your process plans, guys. NVIDIA just bought Arm and is coming for your lunch. Those who live in glass houses...
The point is being made in the context of the PC market. Microsofts OS has 75% of the market, macOS is less than 20%
Keep in mind that Apple’s A-series chips were kicking butt in performance/watt compared to rival Arm designs, even when TSMC’s process wasn’t a node-and-a-half ahead of Intel’s. TSMC deserves a lot of credit, but so do Apple’s CPU designers.
YES! GO INTEL!
I need you to produce great CPU's for all my future HACKINTOSH needs
Since APPLE chose the non upgradable non fixable ARM route.
I need you to produce great CPU's for all my future HACKINTOSH needs
Since APPLE chose the non upgradable non fixable ARM route.
Right ... not trying to denigrate what Apple's done here as they seem to even be ahead of AMD who are also on TSMC's nodes, but I think in general TSMC's deserves much more of the credit than most understand.
Funny how the CEO of VMWare which imo is a joke now is trying to say Apple is a Lifestyle company when VMWare hasnt done much for 5+ years now AND one of their biggest customers are Apple customers. On top of that, Intel hasn't done **** in almost 8+ years in the CPU space cause they got complacent they had no competition and with Spectre/Meltdown they handled it very poorly and showed that a critical flaw was ignored because they value more than doing right by the customer.
Given all of this, this man has a lot of "balls" to say that Apple is a lifestyle company (not completely false but also what they aim for, its what people have made them look like) and they will be bested soon when Intel can't get their head out of their ass when it comes to their current CPU Market.
This man is going to apparently run intel really well -__-. Could've just shut up, brought intel back and then shown Intel is ready to compete again instead of just being all talk
Given all of this, this man has a lot of "balls" to say that Apple is a lifestyle company (not completely false but also what they aim for, its what people have made them look like) and they will be bested soon when Intel can't get their head out of their ass when it comes to their current CPU Market.
This man is going to apparently run intel really well -__-. Could've just shut up, brought intel back and then shown Intel is ready to compete again instead of just being all talk