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Comment by khurs

2 months ago

Wouldn't this help Intel compete?

If they have Apple's designs months prior to launch, rather than after launch.

10 comments

khurs

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swiftcoder  2 months ago

Ripping off designs from your own fab customers is a pretty sure way to crater your fab business, and get sued into the ground at the same time.

  • marmarama  2 months ago

    It's not so much ripping off the designs - nothing of what Apple Silicon is doing is particularly surprising and both x86 and Intel's microarchitectures are sufficiently different to Apple Silicon/ARM that knowledge of specific implementation approaches wouldn't be directly useful in most cases.

    The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.

    • swiftcoder  2 months ago

      > The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.

      While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap.

      I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being willing to outspend everyone else, and their real superpower is vertical integration - which Intel isn't in a position to compete with.

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    • hajile  2 months ago

      M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.

      This has both a technical and human component.

      On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.

      At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.

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