Well, I have the first model of laptops using nVidia Arm chip, it's called Toshiba AC100, and rocked a nVidia Tegra 2 in 2010.
It launched with Android, but I helped put GNU/Linux on it (got my first mainline author-ship with it), and daily drove it for a year at university (back then not everyone had laptops)
It was a hell of a device, and to this day I'm still missing anything close to it. 10 inch, 900g, 10 hour battery life (which was unthinkable on PCs back then), removable battery so when traveling I just had two batteries, extremely sturdy (I used to launch it in the air, and failed some times without worrying) [1]. That being said, even back then it was seriously limited, and I would max out the RAM just by doing ssh + quasselclient. By killing quasselclient I could have enough RAM to launch firefox to a simple web page, but that's it.
[1] It wasn't made to be sturdy, it's just that there was basically no weight, the pcb was very small, and it had pretty huge bezels
The Tegra series is still ongoing, its just marketed at self-driving vehicles.
You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.
> Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers.
I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement?
I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least).
On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about?
Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).
Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad?
I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.
Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.
From the stats I could gather I really doubt macOS market share increased substantially in usage. What I think happened is that they doubled their usual sales figures. Which is unsurprising if you look at the buildup of not-so-great hardware they release post-2015 before AS. Their machines had annoyances and were very uncompetitive with comparable offering because of soldered RAM/SSD pricing.
Then they released AS and the first round of hardware looked competitive because at least they seemed to have something different, a real advantage worth paying more. At least that was the marketing.
I believe it got many to update very old hardware that was kept running because Apple offerings seemed so out of touch; then some others got interested to "complete" their iOS devices and even traditional PC users got sucked in for novelty factor or battery life argument.
In practice if the second-hand market is to be looked at, many went back to other machines and the market is inundated by underpowered, overpriced, close to entry level machines (people figure out the hard way that 8GB of RAM is very tight for a post 2020 computer no matter how good your software optimisation is...).
Now the second release of AS was disappointing to say the least (pretty bad considering the price hikes) and I think many are holding to see what they can do with M3. So the sales have dropped a lot, at least as much as all other OEM if not more (especially in comparison to previous years).
So I think what they call the market share is actually the sales number, that doesn't mean much. If you account for all the hardware that got retired plus all the hardware that sit unused (waiting to be sold or else) macOS market share has been slightly slopping upward at best. Mostly stable in practice.
When you look at the sales numbers, it is almost 80% laptops. They barely sell any of what you would call a "PC".
It makes sense; since laptops is the only place where AS has any advantages and it is also the only way to use your extra expensive "computer" as a status symbol. This is also what most employers are going to buy for their staff because unless you need real power where AS is almost disqualified from the get go it makes everything easier. They used to sell a lot of iMacs (especially the 27" version) because it was very convenient, but they don't have those anymore so...
If anything, macOS is becoming less relevant as a computing platform by the day and more of a luxury alternative brand. So its market is becoming less relevant by the day too.
I think Apple is on the path to become to computing what Campagnolo is to cycling...
Traditional PCs are not going anywhere and for way more reasons than just upgradability (your car is not technically upgradeable but is made with components from many different competing suppliers).
Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.
We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.
Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.
Let's not exaggerate here. I've got the M2 Pro Mac Mini, and it is nearly silent, but depending on your workload you still generate nontrivial heat and the fans do need to run to keep it cool. Maybe I notice more because I build a lot of software, but this is not some magic bullet that avoids the need for traditional heat management.
> Nvidia has quietly begun designing central processing units (CPUs) that would run Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows operating system...
> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology...
> Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip..
(That would be the Nuvia core, I assume)
Really, just read the whole thing. Its a brief but juicy report.
Anyway, I wonder if Nvidia is going to make an SoC or a discrete CPU. Seems like an either-or proposition, as a big CPU with a small IGP (like AMD/Intel) doesn't make much sense for Nvidia.
> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology
Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.
>Why only Apple is able to pull it off? Why this lack of care from everybody else?
Apple got burnt, multiple times, by both Intel and Nvidia. That set them on a complete war path to move to arm where they control the chips. As part of that war path, their goal was to drop x86 entirely so they needed the transition layer.
Microsoft has no need to drop x86 entirely, in fact x86 will continue to remain a good part of a market for the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe RISCV suddenly takes off because even Qualcomm has begun pushing a cool billion dollars towards RISCV development due to ARM/Softbank attempting to make them destroy their IP. Heck, ARM/Softbank is basically trying to destroy the ARM market for profit by terminating Qualcomm's licenses by 2025.
I hope these ARM chips are Apple-level ARM designs. Apple has an ARM license that allows them to completely design their own cores. Only Apple's ARM designs have cutting edge performance. Everyone else (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) uses stock, or nearly stock, ARM designs off-the-shelf that, performance-wise, aren't at all competitive with AMD/Intel. I'd love a Surface Pro with an M1/M2 chip, but the Qualcomm ARM chips are dogs.
The problem with the current Qualcomm cores is that they are cheap and low power, but the new Nuvia cores should alleviate this.
...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.
Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.
Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.
Everyone keeps going on about ARM, but isn’t the difference mostly memory latency and throughput? Less waiting for memory means less wasted clock cycles. And probably also hardcore engineering in choosing the right tradeoffs? The x86 "penalty" seems to be mostly a few precent from what I’ve read. Yes x86 wastes some transistors on legacy instructions, but it doesn’t fully explain the year long difference between Apple and Intel and AMD. (Although AMD seems to catch up now and Intel also a bit with their HBM2 chips.) It’s also TSMC and Apple working together on designing a great chip.
I suspect, based on almost nothing, a vibe perhaps, that this will be an iteration of the Denver core. Previous versions have not been amazing on power iirc, I don’t think they got major design wins with it. I think at one point (2010 ish?) they considered an x86 processor based on this core as well. How much it remains a dynamic recompilation based “software isa” that could be x86 or arm or risc-v I have no idea.
I hope so. Then I can put some weird OS on it that nobody uses because I really miss the security-through-obscurity I got back in the day running Linux on PowerPC before either were popular. Nobody was going to bother writing shellcode for that shit back then :P
I do wonder if we will see these chips available for purchase to install in standard form factor ATX style systems? This is something I haven’t seen Arm crack into yet.
I think ATX style machines are very niche. Gamers love them and 3D artsits, but outside of that I think no one wants them anymore. I think that ARM-compatibility for games in the near term is a hard sell (although Blender, Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro have been ported to ARM for running on Apple chips.)
I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
I'm really curious if unified cpu/gpu chips are the future for laptop/desktop hardware. Mac is now unified across its product line, consoles are unified, phones are unified. My limited understanding though is that unified memory means giving up either high speed (for the cpu), or high bandwidth (for the gpu). Is that correct?
You can have your cake and eat it with a wide LPDDR5X bus. This is what Apple does, and its fine. Other specialized chips (like Tenstorrent's accelerators) do this too.
I think an AMD 7900-like approach where the memory controllers/cache are on tiny external chips is particularly practical. Its efficient and economical. I hope AMD (and others) repeat this with laptop CPUS.
GDDRX is not a good fit for laptops anyway because its so power hungry. GPUs and the Xbox/Playstation use it just because its the absolute cheapest bandwidth/$, at the cost of everything else.
HBM is very expensive and being hoovered up by the AI market. I wouldn't count on seeing it in consumer stuff again.
I don't understand the aarch64 hotness. Is it because Apple did it? At the end of the day it's just a different instruction set- what makes that such an advantage?
Are we rooting for an ecosystem where there are next to no standards? Not even a standard boot protocol. The world is going to be full of devices with one off SOCs with terrible after release support.
Because the best chip designs in the world are made by Apple, Intel, and AMD. ARM's chip designs are years behind those three. Apple has shown ARM can have excellent performance, but they are the only ones to do it so far. Android users have shown that they don't care about buying new phones with CPUs that are slower than 3-year-old iPhones.
Everyone but apple uses ARM-designed cores. Why are ARM-designed cores behind? Go check what the comp is for a CPU designer at apple, and then go check what it is at ARM. Suddenly, you'll be overcome with a feeling of clarity.
Yeah, Intel got xScale (née StrongArm) from Digital Equipment Corp as part of a settlement after the Alpha lawsuit for infringing on Pentium patents. Intel bought StrongArm which maybe meant Intel didn't really want it and sold it to Marvell. Intel didn't want Alpha either which was sold to Compaq, the last resort and buyer of all things great and small.
nv has been making tegras for ages now, and i'm pretty sure some of them ran windows at some point. so this doesn't seem that big news, especially if they don't have an oem in pocket yet.
phh|2 years ago
It launched with Android, but I helped put GNU/Linux on it (got my first mainline author-ship with it), and daily drove it for a year at university (back then not everyone had laptops)
It was a hell of a device, and to this day I'm still missing anything close to it. 10 inch, 900g, 10 hour battery life (which was unthinkable on PCs back then), removable battery so when traveling I just had two batteries, extremely sturdy (I used to launch it in the air, and failed some times without worrying) [1]. That being said, even back then it was seriously limited, and I would max out the RAM just by doing ssh + quasselclient. By killing quasselclient I could have enough RAM to launch firefox to a simple web page, but that's it.
[1] It wasn't made to be sturdy, it's just that there was basically no weight, the pcb was very small, and it had pretty huge bezels
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.
MikusR|2 years ago
nerdjon|2 years ago
I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement?
I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least).
On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about?
Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).
Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad?
I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
Oh, it can if Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft push it.
Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.
deaddodo|2 years ago
Microsoft had an AoT x86->ARM (and now, amd64->aarch64) binary translation layer before Apple's Rosetta had that capability (at least, publicly).
bsder|2 years ago
Once the M1 came out everybody HAD to upgrade, so Apple got a huge boost for a couple years as people cycled out their x86 stuff.
Latest data shows Apple's computer sales slumping much harder than the PC industry in general.
frandroid|2 years ago
fulafel|2 years ago
seec|2 years ago
Then they released AS and the first round of hardware looked competitive because at least they seemed to have something different, a real advantage worth paying more. At least that was the marketing. I believe it got many to update very old hardware that was kept running because Apple offerings seemed so out of touch; then some others got interested to "complete" their iOS devices and even traditional PC users got sucked in for novelty factor or battery life argument. In practice if the second-hand market is to be looked at, many went back to other machines and the market is inundated by underpowered, overpriced, close to entry level machines (people figure out the hard way that 8GB of RAM is very tight for a post 2020 computer no matter how good your software optimisation is...).
Now the second release of AS was disappointing to say the least (pretty bad considering the price hikes) and I think many are holding to see what they can do with M3. So the sales have dropped a lot, at least as much as all other OEM if not more (especially in comparison to previous years).
So I think what they call the market share is actually the sales number, that doesn't mean much. If you account for all the hardware that got retired plus all the hardware that sit unused (waiting to be sold or else) macOS market share has been slightly slopping upward at best. Mostly stable in practice.
When you look at the sales numbers, it is almost 80% laptops. They barely sell any of what you would call a "PC". It makes sense; since laptops is the only place where AS has any advantages and it is also the only way to use your extra expensive "computer" as a status symbol. This is also what most employers are going to buy for their staff because unless you need real power where AS is almost disqualified from the get go it makes everything easier. They used to sell a lot of iMacs (especially the 27" version) because it was very convenient, but they don't have those anymore so...
If anything, macOS is becoming less relevant as a computing platform by the day and more of a luxury alternative brand. So its market is becoming less relevant by the day too. I think Apple is on the path to become to computing what Campagnolo is to cycling...
Traditional PCs are not going anywhere and for way more reasons than just upgradability (your car is not technically upgradeable but is made with components from many different competing suppliers).
bhouston|2 years ago
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.
Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.
eslaught|2 years ago
timschmidt|2 years ago
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology...
> Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip..
(That would be the Nuvia core, I assume)
Really, just read the whole thing. Its a brief but juicy report.
Anyway, I wonder if Nvidia is going to make an SoC or a discrete CPU. Seems like an either-or proposition, as a big CPU with a small IGP (like AMD/Intel) doesn't make much sense for Nvidia.
MenhirMike|2 years ago
Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.
WhereIsTheTruth|2 years ago
Software made yesterday were already prepared to run on their new silicon
Rosetta was only a transition helper, not meant to be a permanent solution
Microsoft didn't do any of that, and still doesn't, their leadership is clueless and dangerous
If Microsoft doesn't put in the effort, it'll never work
Let's hope there's no secret agreement to exclude Linux (?AMD AI?)
I wish Valve would encourage developpers to submit ARM binaries to prepare for the future...
Why only Apple is able to pull it off? Why this lack of care from everybody else?
Meanwhile.. https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-to-launch-for-pc-win...
delfinom|2 years ago
Apple got burnt, multiple times, by both Intel and Nvidia. That set them on a complete war path to move to arm where they control the chips. As part of that war path, their goal was to drop x86 entirely so they needed the transition layer.
Microsoft has no need to drop x86 entirely, in fact x86 will continue to remain a good part of a market for the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe RISCV suddenly takes off because even Qualcomm has begun pushing a cool billion dollars towards RISCV development due to ARM/Softbank attempting to make them destroy their IP. Heck, ARM/Softbank is basically trying to destroy the ARM market for profit by terminating Qualcomm's licenses by 2025.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
bhouston|2 years ago
It did with .NET but most software isn't .NET I think.
pseudosavant|2 years ago
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.
Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.
Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.
huijzer|2 years ago
pjmlp|2 years ago
Until then, whatever Apple has over 80% of the worldwide desktop market hardly matters.
And after how UWP was managed, there aren't that many that care.
uxp100|2 years ago
guerrilla|2 years ago
ZiiS|2 years ago
EternalUsenet|2 years ago
bhouston|2 years ago
I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
seanalltogether|2 years ago
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
I think an AMD 7900-like approach where the memory controllers/cache are on tiny external chips is particularly practical. Its efficient and economical. I hope AMD (and others) repeat this with laptop CPUS.
GDDRX is not a good fit for laptops anyway because its so power hungry. GPUs and the Xbox/Playstation use it just because its the absolute cheapest bandwidth/$, at the cost of everything else.
HBM is very expensive and being hoovered up by the AI market. I wouldn't count on seeing it in consumer stuff again.
wmf|2 years ago
jauntywundrkind|2 years ago
$499 and way more GPU than one would need. Releases March 2022 with a reasonably competent 6x Cortex-A78's.
2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago
wmf|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
a6|2 years ago
[0] - https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/grace-hopper-superc...
wmf|2 years ago
dingi|2 years ago
vsskanth|2 years ago
Apple is already in it's third iteration of the M series and there's still no proper competition to the Macbooks.
pseudosavant|2 years ago
dmitrygr|2 years ago
wmf|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
freitzkriesler2|2 years ago
CalChris|2 years ago
TradingPlaces|2 years ago
Of course, ARM is suing them over it. Oh well.
zokier|2 years ago
solarkraft|2 years ago