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Leaked Intel Roadmap Reveals More Efficient Chip Than M1 Pro and Max to Launch Within Two Years
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My point was really about how people think Apple (or any product manufacturer) needs a competitor in order to push them forward in developing technologies or products. To that point, Intel effectively walked away from the phone chip market that could have driven their growth and tech to new highs, but instead just continued to iterate their desktop and laptop chipsets by throwing more power at them, as if there isn’t a cost for chipsets requiring more power.
So maybe I’ll take back what I said about companies not needing a competitor to drive development of new products, because it sure seems like Intel needed Apple to show them just how uncompetitive their chipsets have been. If Apple hadn’t launched the M1 chip, Intel could have just continued to do the bare minimum performance tweaks and maybe battle occasionally with AMD.
The sky being blue and ice being cold is also true, no need to say it on every discussion about the sky or ice though.
Yep. If there were more PC fanboys on the site, we would hear them talk about how GREAT Intel‘s new super-duper powerful chipset is going to be and it will make the M1 / M2 chips look like toys in comparison, once Intel launches it…sometime soon, like later this year or maybe 2023 or 2024, but it’s going to be way better and Apple sucks.
Apple has known their path of development of the M chips for 3+ years and has been bringing product to market that not only is powerful, but efficient in a way Intel and AMD didn’t think possible. Apple will continue to launch newer, faster and more efficient chips on a timely basis, because that’s part of how they operate. Intel is far more likely to continue to delay chip releases, because they’re not their own customer, they simply tell OEM’s that they’re delayed and offer up slightly tweaked current chipsets in the interim.
Well, if Apple didn't have Android, they wouldn't be incentivized to improve iPhone. If phablets hadn't been a thing in the early 2010s, the iPhone 6 would've been the same rough size as the iPhone 5 (and yes, I know many would like it that way — but most don't).
For the CPU, it's a bit more abstract. But without multiple vendors each pushing the boundaries in their own way, one vendor gets lethargic.
Then how come Apple leapfrogged the pack with A7 and kept pushing and pushing forward, even when QC and MediaTek haven't been close in years?
True.
Thaaaaaaat very much remains to be seen.
The 12900HK in the MSI GE76 is 3% faster in single-core and 19% faster in multi-core compared to an M1 Max. But it achieves with a much higher power draw:
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vs.
Not much of a "45W" part in practice.
It remains to be seen how much better the 28W Alder Lake-P or the 15W Alder Lake-U do.
I'm just looking at the actual results of what Alder Lake can do, which is: power efficiency clearly wasn't as high a priority for them as it was for Apple. They picked the tradeoffs.
Well, for a start, it let them make good tablets, not just phones. Then it let them make good smartwatches (years before Qualcomm). And then it let them make good laptops and desktops.
They didn't do that out of boredom or because it was an interesting engineering challenge; they did it because they had a broad, very-long-term strategy to bring their entire line-up to their own chip design.
Exactly. Which is why the whole "I hope Intel crushes Apple to give them competition" idea is bogus. Apple makes great chips because it allows them to make great products, and they will do that regardless of what other chipmakers do.
I think both are simultaneously true.
If both AMD and Intel slowed down their pace of innovation, why would Apple's Mac chips need to continue improving at the same pace?
Yet Apple's A-chips improved massively for years while facing no real competition. Why should the Mac be any different?
Why does Intel even care about the M1? Apple is still only 6% or so of the desktop market, and none of their OEMs can defect because Apple doesn’t sell to outsiders.
OEMs won't defect to Apple, but they'll absolutely put pressure on Intel. Such as by moving to AMD. Or by partnering with Qualcomm. Or starting their own ARM designs.
I am reminded of the saying - The Mantis Stalks The Cicada, Unaware Of The Oriole Behind
It is true that PC makers don’t really have a choice outside of Intel and AMD, and both currently don’t really offer much differentiation from each other. You can maybe point to one processor being a little faster or a little more power efficient than the other, but I find that is really splitting hairs compared to what the M1 brings to the table.
What would really disrupt the market, I feel, is the move towards the M1 Mac model of having all the components integrated into one circuit board, rather than the current PC model where the OEM buys a bunch of parts from different vendors, then puts them together to form a PC which he then sells to other people.
Yes, you can argue that having replaceable parts is more convenient and versatile, but Apple has already shown just how much performance we are giving up in exchange for a benefit that not every user needs. And I think that may be the real danger here - Apple causing users to re-evaluate just what it is they value (and don’t value) in a product, leading to a shifting of priorities.
Can you imagine a future where building your own PC is considered a niche hobby otherwise viewed as impractical because of the performance hits? We will instead see every PC maker buying all-in one chips, with companies that make standalone PC parts (like Intel, which makes processors but not graphics cards) looking in from the outside.
Apple showed Microsoft a path forward for adopting ARM that was able to run x86 applications with a reasonable level of performance with power consumption that provides amazing battery life. That the M1 Mac's are able to run Windows for ARM and play games reasonably effectively means that Microsoft's internal research into their own ARM CPU platforms could provide a path to remove the full dependence upon x86 architecture. Microsoft has made big gains in virtualising 32-bit and 64-bit x86 binaries onto ARM architectures as well meaning the backwards compatibility issues that hindered their earlier ARM based devices aren't problematic. Apple has also given Microsoft a number of devices to develop against as well providing a potential future market for their operating system once the exclusivity deal with Qualcomm is lifted. Some of Intel's top competitors, such as AMD and NVIDIA, are already licensees of ARM and have similar development capabilities to Apple as well. In NVIDIA's case they already ship combinations of ARM and their own GPU tech as seen in the Switch.
Apple has removed the stigma around ARM as being an architecture that was not capable of competing with desktop chips and was only useful for low power embedded/mobile use cases. Apple has removed one of the biggest moats around the x86 architecture. That's why Intel cares.
I’ve worked for consumer product manufacturers for more than 25 years and although I’ve always kept an eye on competitors, what has driven me in product design hasn’t been what a competitor offers, but rather what they’re not offering. For any well run company, that way of thinking for product development is the norm. For any company, certainly those in the tech field, what consumers see with brand x offering some feature, that brand y then offers its version of afterwards, is not necessarily coming from a point of competition, because of the time it takes for development of products.
It’s well known that Apple isn’t often willing to risk brand value or consumer sentiment, in launching just about anything that has potential for significant failure, which is why it takes them longer to get products and tech to market. That and the fact that with such a limited number of SKU’s, and the huge volumes they now sell, they’re almost always going to iterate extensively, internally, before launching, which has this appearance when viewed from the outside, as Apple copying and being behind in technology development.
The M series of chips, born from the A series mobile ARM chips, is one exception, imho. They’re not following anyone, they’re doing what they want based on hitting performance and efficiency parameters that they believe result in good UX and cost.
And this idea that seeing Intel’s roadmap for potential future chips is going to drive Apple forward, Apple has known in principle what Intel’s roadmap is, because Intel would have shared it before it hit the press. Just for giggles, can you really see Tim Cook or any other Apple exec, after seeing Intel’s roadmap, going to the chip development team and telling them they better beat Intel’s proposed future chip release in performance (but not to worry about the efficiency since Intel hasn’t figured that out yet)? I think the more likely scenario is that the Apple chip team laughs and says they’ve already hit higher performance levels with even better efficiency, in chips coming to market in the next 6 months, following their normal product release calendar.
Because Apple had a long term roadmap to get the A-Series powerful enough to also power Macs. But if Intel has a breakthrough and can beat Apple on performance per watt by a healthy margin that would force Apple to react.
It took Apple 10 years to get to where they are today with the M1 chip. I will be very surprised if Intel could somehow course-correct in a fraction of that, and I wouldn’t hold my breath on this.
I would expect that Intel would have a chip in 2023/2024 that outperforms a chip from 2021.
Is this news?
Is this news?
If you were expecting intel to achieve this only in 2025/2026, then yeah, I suppose it might be.
That’s a really interesting point. Apple really does rely on innovating their chips *a lot* and if that section falters, every part of their business will suffer
The tradeoffs were picked for them. They couldn‘t match apple’s power efficiency both because of their lame process technology and because of the overhead of variable-length instructions. Even if the first problem goes away the second won’t.True.
Thaaaaaaat very much remains to be seen.
The 12900HK in the MSI GE76 is 3% faster in single-core and 19% faster in multi-core compared to an M1 Max. But it achieves with a much higher power draw:
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vs.
Not much of a "45W" part in practice.
It remains to be seen how much better the 28W Alder Lake-P or the 15W Alder Lake-U do.
I'm just looking at the actual results of what Alder Lake can do, which is: power efficiency clearly wasn't as high a priority for them as it was for Apple. They picked the tradeoffs.
“We’ll use our own manufacturing” and “we’ll use CISC” are still tradeoffs that they’ve picked.