A milestone in the semiconductor industry. A signaling point.
Prior to the release of the M1 the semiconductor industry seemed relatively stagnant apart from AMD overcoming WinTel in the past few years, but if you were following AMD around the Zen release, it was quite obvious this was going to happen.
The picture looked something like this.
You have Intel who traditionally has been holding the high ground in the high-end market, (pc gaming, high performance laptops) including Apple devices. They also dominated the entire server market, and continue to have huge marketshare. AMD was relegated to lower tiers u
This time with the release of the M1 things are less clear, but there are a few companies in incredible positions as times change.
The ripple effects from the release of the M1 based Mac’s will be incredible. gets people used to all day battery life from all their devices. consumers expect and demand this. rest of the industry must become even more efficient in order to meet these demands. the next step beyond this is achieving week long battery life this will be a new turning point for the industry and certainly achievable.
what does week long battery life mean? what does this allow for the industry? wearables i would think, but we already have a clear demarkation of a day is a week of battery really necessary? I mean i just hate plugging things in but apple will change that too.
would like to think the focus on doubling transistors following moores law will change to be something similar for battery life (though this is much harder, so would be interested to see the line). Do we stop caring about performance?
Before M1 After M1
This is a demarkation. Why? What has the M1 shown the rest of the industry?
So now that we have the facts on performance, what have we learned?
On the surface looking at the raw performance metrics it seems like
POWER
Power puts everything in context.
CPU
How much of the market is this?
Certainly more ARM. Possibility of ARM taking a huge marketshare. Requires response from AMD and Intel. Allows NVidia, Qualcomm and maybe more to enter a much larger market and potentially really transform datacenters and the consumer space. What does this mean for high performance gaming laptops? Will push the thermal envelope at the top end, and eventually these gains will trickle down again. We will continue to see better and better performance in low power devices, which will become more and more mainstream.
As we look to a future of AR, we require extremely low power devices to make this possible, yet with a lot of compute capability, or the ability to offload it to another device. Requires full realtime experience, which even ARKit is lacking in it’s current state. It is high performance, but we need methods to eek out every last bit (this is a tangent and a half)
https://mule.substack.com/p/the-tech-monopolies-go-vertical https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-memory/1220825-apple-m1-arm-performance-with-a-2020-mac-mini/page16
talk of
will the rest of the industry try to catch up using unified memory arch?
super high performance workloads!? rely on icc
if you want more industry insight read the above lmao