1y ago

Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market

arstechnica.com Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market

"They've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business."

Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market::"They've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business."

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Nobody tell Intel about Apple Silicon! Or that Apple's sales are increasing while they rest of the industry is in a slump.
- Apple's laptop segments have been decreasing massively since their switch to custom chips, actually. Could just be timing, or could be that people don't want the hassle.
  https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/18/kuo-macbook-sales-down-amid-no-new-products/
  
  Probably becuase people bought new Mac’s in 2020 and don’t feel like upgrading.
  https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/30/apple-says-strong-mac-sales-led-by-macbook-pro/
  
  They swapped to M series chips, what, two years ago? This says sales this year are down due to no new Macs.
  
  Hassle?
  
  Not everything runs on MacOS with Arm. Some people may not upgrade to M* class chips, and others who may have switched don't want the hassle. I know plenty of developers who went to ThinkPads on Linux instead upgrading to M* architecture and having build issues.
  
  Plenty of developers? Ok, sure. It was rocky for less than a year after they released the M1’s. I barely had any issues on my M1 Max that I got at release and I was just thinking the other day about how in haven’t thought about “will this run” or “oh there’s that thing that doesn’t run” in forever.
  
  Yeah, it really hasn’t been a hassle. At my workplace (software research, lots of which is actually x86-specific) many people have switched to Apple silicon Macs and nobody is looking back. The only issue I’ve noticed that is disruptive in any way is that Apple isn’t really supporting TAP based network adapters which causes trouble once in a while, mostly with certain vpn configurations. Standard development tools like IDEs, compilers, etc have worked since nearly day 1. Basically the only common targets that I wouldn’t develop for is Windows, but even then you can do it in a VM and it’s the fastest way to run windows on ARM still.
  
  There's a lot of brew packages that messed up when the chips came out. It's still a bit of an issue two years later.
  
  The M1 series was super good and Apple just hasn’t released anything since then worth upgrading to if you have an M1. They’re gaining market share though slowly, which indicates that their sales slump is lower than the market average.
  
  Their selling points for the previous generation are now moot though, so that's why people aren't buying or re-upoing generations:
  Gaming is null
  Lots of issues for creators, including codec and transcoding issues (slight fixed if run through Rosetta)
  Anything GPU-related is under lock and key by Apple drivers, no local AI or inference development.
  Tons of FOSS projects just won't build and work
  All of the M* media extensions are only available through XCode
  There's just tons of stuff that makes it unattractive to developers. My particular job requires building multi-arch containers and binaries, and it's just a nightmare to dev and test locally. The argument to this point might be "just use cloud", or "use a remote CI build system", bit the point is you shouldn't have to. I can have a machine that does everything I need it to do with another vendor, with way less hassle, and for way cheaper.
  
  Gaming is indeed a big weak point for M series chips. Some games run, but it’s a pretty bad experience overall. Personally I’m insulated from this because I have a gaming PC I can use.
  I’ve not heard this at all recently. This sounds like it was probably true in late 2020 but afaik creative workflows are quite flushed out at this point.
  No idea what you’re talking about here. Tools like PyTorch fully support metal for training and inference. llama.cpp fully supports Apple silicon. Apple’s shared memory model gives their GPUs access to huge pools of memory compared to even high end discreet GPUs, and this allows working with models otherwise not possible in a laptop form factor. No other laptop GPU is getting shipped with up to 96GB of memory.
  Really? This seems like a generally easy thing to fix, what projects (that ran on x86 macOS) are known to be bothersome?
  This is a barrier to the Asahi Linux folks, and I hope someday the situation improves for them. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant since nearly everything for macOS is gonna be built through Xcode. It’s the system toolchain.
  I don’t know exactly what software you use for work, but for simple cases docker desktop uses binfmt-misc to enable Rosetta and qemu-user for containers. This actually makes it really easy to build and test for a bunch of different architectures, x86 but also ppc64le, mips, etc. With x86-64 specifically you get Rosetta for very high performance. I know tools like gdb don’t work right in this environment, but thats not usually part of a typical ci/cd system anyways.
  
  Quick responses, sorry.
  gaming is a problem for people who DO want this type of machine, and not a second or console. It's only become an issue with M*
  Apple has literally thrown an entire engineering group behind their ability to import, export, and transcode media. So much so they even have their own fork of ffmpeg. It's atrocious.
  PyTorch is CPU with GPU acceleration where applicable, and most devs want direct GPU access. Not possible on Apple hardware. LLMs are kinda dumb, and most people work on imaging inference. Direct access to the hardware for local development is a must.
  Not sure what you mean, but Rosetta is essentially QEMU emulation, which is insanely slow. I can run a 2m build for something on a native x64 machine, or a 1 hour build through Rosetta. No thanks.
  This is a power play by Apple thinking people will still buy their stuff and just deal with the inconveniences, but turns out the sales numbers show that is not the case.
  In general, the "use containers for everything" is not a good workflow. It's also very subjective to performance on the platform you run it on. Containers all the time is exhausting and problematic for a number of different reasons.
  
  Lol! No.
  Gaming: has just jumped up in a huge way in the last couple of months. The software that's come out recently is amazing. Just run full windows games on your macbook pro? Sure.
  Creators: huh? Never heard of this before. Everything seems to run amazingly well.
  GPU: except for the local ai stuff that is being done all the time? What? Diffusion Bee doesn't exist now?
  Cheaper: well, yeah. Heh. You get that one, for sure. But if money is no object, then... 🤷
  
  Bruh...there is NOTHING about MacOS which invites the ability to run "full windows on your MacBook". I'm not sure form of Bath Salts you're smoking, but you should share that with the rest of the fanboys so they can experience the same delusions as you. Also "gaming has jumped up...in the last couple of months"...jFC those drugs you're on are amazing.
  All your other points make zero sense, and it's obvious you are not experienced in software development, so you can go away from me now.
  
  I said "full windows games", but yeah, you can also run Windows on it, but that's old news.
  Crossover and GTPK. Look it up. Didn't exist like it does now at the start of the year.
  
  Be careful in trying to interpret year over year statistics. Last year was huge for Apple as if you look at Q3 2022 then Apple increased sales 10% while the rest of the PC market dropped a massive 18%.
  You're saying "since switching from x86 to ARM apples sales are down! see it was a bad idea!" but actually they have been way way up and are just finally getting inline with the sales decline the rest of the PC industry has had after the covid work from home rush ended.
- Do you have numbers? Cause I'm thinking at at 8.6% worldwide, it's not really a big chunk of the pie. Especially as the article states, it's declining compared to the year before.
  
  The article you linked pretty much sums it up.
  Apple’s Mac market share increased to 8.6%, reporting year-over-year shipment growth of 10.3%, the only major manufacturer to do so.
  The year-over-year Mac shipment growth comes even as the broader market and competitors notch sharp declines in shipments, and as the Intel transition wraps up.
  Lenovo, HQ, Dell and Acer all had year-over-year drops in shipments, according to IDC data.
- you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Apple's laptops sales are decreasing. And most Mac users can't tell the differences between Intel, the M chips, AMD or whatever. They just know that there's a pretty apple on the back of their laptop and that's why they buy it.
  
  Apple's laptops sales are decreasing.
  Right now. But that’s because the M1 and M2 Mac sold like hot cakes and we’re at a quiet stop in the product timeline. They pick right back up when the new models drop.
  And most Mac users can't tell the differences between Intel, the M chips, AMD or whatever.
  This is silly. The M1 models were leaps and bounds better than the Intel predecessors. That’s not all due to the ARM chip, but list a “MacBook Air 2020” for sale and watch the Mac heads stumble over each other to ask “intel or m1”.
  They just know that there's a pretty apple on the back of their laptop and that's why they buy it.
  People generally tend to stick to one ecosystem because of lock in effects, such as investment in apps etc, but that’s equally true in the windows world. I’m not sure I would classify Mac users on the whole as tech illiterate though. Most know exactly what they are getting and why.
  And they are also A LOT of Mac users that just want a decent Unix machine and sturdy, capable hardware.
  
  But that’s because the M1 and M2 Mac sold like hot cakes and we’re at a quiet stop in the product timeline.
  So you agree that it's mainly Apple stans buy in whenever a new Mac drops, and hasn't been able to really influence non Apple stans.
  That's what the poster above you said. Apple stans buy in because they're a cult, so of course their sales will increase once a new mac drops.
  sold like hot cakes
  The same was true for every other manufacturers during covid as everyone was bound to work from home and needed a laptop, but nobody seems to mention that
  
  So you agree that it's mainly Apple stans buy in whenever a new Mac drops, and hasn't been able to really influence non Apple stans.
  No, I very much do not. M1 laptops have drawn in a lot of new users, simply because of the battery life and performance.
  Apple stans buy in because they're a cult, so of course their sales will increase once a new mac drops.
  I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. There are a lot of factors that influence purchasing decisions. It’s expensive equipment and people try to decide whether it’s worth spending cash on. Apple users are not made of money.
  The same was true for every other manufacturers
  Yes. So?
  Market share of ARM laptops skyrocketed from 0% to almost 10% overnight regardless. That’s the topic right?
  
  Some of those people know that docker performance is hot garbage on Macs.
  
  Only if you're not using AARCH64 based containers. At my job, we leverage the appropriate containers and performance is insanely good.

131 comments