Which does support that Jobs quote about customers having no clue about what they want...
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Key M1 Mac Engineer Departs Apple for Intel
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Which does support that Jobs quote about customers having no clue about what they want...
It’s a little different when the ”customers“ are the computer companies who buy your chips. (Nobody at Intel or AMD spends any time worrying about what end-users wnat).
Also, at the time of the 386 release the majority of customers were still using MS-DOS and .com executables were common. Most of DOS use was still 16-bit.
I like your thinking. Seems to make sense.
I was kind of hoping the M2 would be based off the A16 rather than the A15 cores. The A15 is actually a faster core than the M1 (A14), so wouldn’t be the end of the world if Apple did base the M2 on that. But I guess more substantial gains available via the A16 core.
I can’t recall, is the A16 meant to be going down to 4nm process node?
Yeah - really looks like this company's stock is about to tank! People like you have been saying things like this for the past 20 years.
The Feds are going to be increasing interest rates about 3 times this year to slow inflation and that in turn will cause companies to lose value.
Increasing interest rates *might* happen - but there are a lot of variables at play.
- How much does Omicron slow the economy (lessening the requirement for interest rate hikes)?
- How fast does TSMC catch up on their backlog of orders, relieving constraint of several apple products?
- What happens to other stocks (Apple is looked upon as more of a safe haven these days)?
- Is there a new product to be released in the next 12 months (AR/VR)?
- Once Apple is finished their full conversion to ARM chips - will their PC market share continue increasing but at an accelerated rate?
It's crazy to think a few interest rate hikes will make Apple lose almost 2/3 of their value - leaving them below a trillion in value.
I didnt say that. I was meaning everything is inflated that is included tech stocks and the feds are trying to slow things down, so that would be companies losing value at some point.
And why Jobs and by extension Apple are fortunate their Mac marketshare is small. When they decide to make a big change in direction, the only question is “Can we get about 20 million folks to buy this in the next year?” They’re profitable with the Mac sales at that level, so if 10 million folks are like “NO 32 BIT? I’M GOING TO LINUX!” but another 10 million go “You know, I’ve always wanted to try the Mac,” you’re able to shed yourself of your legacy software stack, legacy hardware framework… and, yes, legacy customers (those that might REALLY still prefer the PowerPC that you’d rather just stop supporting).
Cmaier - Why are you defending Apple's propaganda ? Yes, I know you are a fabricator for CPUS, but tell me this does POWER have the ability to wipe out M1 or INTEL ?
It’s not propaganda if it’s true, and as a CPU designer, especially one who designed the fastest chips in the world, I am giving Apple it’s proper due.
What does POWER have to do with this?
I have always been for POWER architecture because I feel it can be just as powerful if not more than M1.
Tell me, long before Intel was part of Apple.. what were your thoughts of the 68k, PowerPC processors ? Do you think Apple pulled the plug too soon on them (PowerPC 2005) ?
I don’t have experience with power, but I have lots of experience with PowerPC (which is very similar). https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/641683
One could make a powerpc chip that’s as fast and power efficient as M1, sure. (And since M1 beats Intel in those metrics, PowerPC could beat Intel, too). I’m not aware that IBM has any interest in pushing Power in consumer devices. They also have no experience designing at reasonable power levels, so I’m not sure the fine folks at IBM are the ones who could do it. (I worked very closely with IBM’s chip designers at one point, and I was not all that impressed, but that was many many years ago).
I guess this is moot, but do you think the PowerPC had potential back then or was it trash as most say it was ? Could Apple have designed the G5 for instance to work in notebooks, compared to what happened then when it was not possible? Yes, I am a PowerPC Mac user and use both intel and PowerPC, more so PowerPC for enthusiast reasons because its what I grew up with in 1999 with my 1st Mac computer, a Sawtooth PPC G4.
Also, I am not sure if you know POWER is not open source from what I read. I also run Linux on my G4 and G5 which is good for trying to keep the architecture alive. I just feel altivec was not fully realized at the time, given what we know. Was PowerPC a failure? Many think it was, I don't as each processor architecture has its good and bad points. You are right, PowerPC could beat Intel too and it did for a time. I wish IBM did get back into the interest with consumer devices. I would like to see a new PowerPC system one day. I don't own an M1, but I do know PowerPC being RISC and M1 RISC are distant cousins and both can offer good benefits.
That’s all fine. There really isn’t much advantage one way or the other between Arm and Power when we are talking about things like Macs. In the end Arm wins because it’s easier to scale a low power architecture to the desktop than it is to go in reverse, and neither PowerPC nor POWER is all that optimized for very low power applications like smartphones or tablets.
I agree, but tell me what was it about the PowerPC that got Steve thinking Intel, after all he had a keynote about mhz myth which I thought was true where a 500/1000/2.5 PowerPC G4/G5 can beat the most powerful Pentium IV.. Was there any truth to PowerPC at that time being faster than Intel ?
PowerPC implementations were, for awhile, faster than Intel. The architecture was also cleaner. But nobody back then cared about power at all - we all felt we could burn as much power as we wanted.
If you were or could ever re-design the G5 Quad core 970MP chips, how would you do it so as it not to get so hot ? And thus, it could be used in a notebook ?
I suppose I’d use a lot of clock-gating, make sure there were no dynamic circuits, and try and find a better fab than IBM. That was one of the problems back then.
So, really it wasn't that PowerPC was a failure, it was IBM not standing behind its customers and Apple. Motorola also had issues as I remember the downgrade of 500 mhz chips to 350,400,450.
The problem with powerpc was never anything inherent in the architecture. It was that IBM, Motorola, and even Exponential (where I worked) were targeting high performance desktops and not laptops.
Any RISC architecture (Arm, SPARC, MIPS, Power, Alpha, etc.) has an inherent advantage over x86, but the differences between the various RISC architectures make only a very small difference compared to other things (like differences in microarchitecture, implementation, fab, etc.)
So, really PowerPC could have surpassed Intel, just it was IBM and Motorola that did not want to get involved it seems. Wow ! What PowerPC could have been.