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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 1 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ekr ◴[12 Nov 20 11:47 UTC] No.25068802[source]▶
There were talks of splitting Google and other huge companies due to their size (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/house-amazon-fac...).

Wouldn't it be awesome if Apple's CPU/IC design segment became a separate company and sold these CPUs and maybe SoC by themselves?

I think that would make a big dent into AMD/Intel market shares. Since Apple's part/die should be quite a bit smaller than most of the x86 dies, the fab costs should also be smaller and so should the final price.

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leadingthenet ◴[12 Nov 20 12:01 UTC] No.25068880[source]▶
No, it wouldn't be awesome.

This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Furthermore, this chip is not meant to be a retail product. It's optimised for the exact requirements that Apple's products have. The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I genuinely don't understand how can anyone who wishes to break up Apple not see that these things?

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1. delfinom ◴[12 Nov 20 13:46 UTC] No.25069760[source]▶
>This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push, and because other parts of the business were able to massively subsidise the R&D costs necessary to come up with a competitive SOC in an established market that's otherwise a duopoly. If their CPU/IC design segment were its own company, the M1 would never have seen the light of day. Period.

Eh, that's some very biased thinking.

In the real hardware world of both mechanical and electrical. I can approach a company and say "we want something with these specs, we'll buy 10 million pieces per month, what can you do you us?" and that kicks off R&D efforts after some ground contractual agreements to commit both parties.

You know, exactly what Microsoft did with AMD when they commissioned unique SOC designs for their consoles with a host of never before implemented features such as direct gpio <-> ssd io.