journalism

AMD, Nvidia + ARM and Apple are shaking the Intel realm, taking advantage of its stumbles – Specter and Meltdown – and big developments of its own: the new AMD Ryzen 5000 are superior on desktops, and Apple with its architecture-based M1 chips ARM is a battering ram against the x86-64 architecture in the laptop world.

Intel was founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore (chemist and physicist) and Robert Noyce (physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit) when they left Fairchild Semiconductor. The other key character was Andy Grove, another chemical engineer, who ran the company for most of the 1980s and the high growth period of the 1990s.

Their success began modestly when they got Japan’s Busicom to order microprocessors for their programmable calculators. Engineer Ted Hoff designed a revolutionary chip that could be used in many other devices without the need for redesign.

It had potential and Intel decided to buy back the rights from Busim for $ 60,000.

In 1971 the first microprocessor was born: Intel 4004, a set of 2,300 transistors that executed 60,000 operations per second at US $ 200.

Then came the Intel 8008, Intel 8086 and 8088, selected by IBM for its IBM PC and in 1982 the Intel 80286 appeared, equipped with 134,000 transistors and the first to offer software compatibility with its predecessors.

In the meantime, “Moore’s Law” appeared, which states that every 2 years the number of transistors in a microprocessor doubles.

And William Gates built the “Wintel”, personal computers based on the Windows operating system, from Microsoft, and a microprocessor from Intel, with x86 architecture: computing grew rapidly.

In June 2005, Intel reached an agreement with Apple Computer to provide processors for Apple computers, with dual-core Intel Core Duo processors.

The brake

But one day Intel ceased to be the once innovative company.

The firm that dominated the world of PCs with a firm hand missed the opportunity to get into the iPhone and dismissed the relevance of the mobile world.

In recent times it is said that the Kingdom of Intel is in trouble, reeling. And there are very firm competitors, with the voracity that the market hunger grants.

For starters, AMD, which has achieved the new AMD Ryzen 4000 in laptops and AMD Ryzen 5000 in desktop PCs, which have grown a lot in gaming.

Intel’s stagnation in the 14 nm chips and the delay in the jump to 10 nm is striking. Not to mention the 7 nm that they also have programmed, a lithography that they are already using at AMD, and it bases their success.

Then, graphics card maker Nvidia, in 2020 has invested $ 40 billion to acquire ARM, a threat to Intel (and AMD). It is a potential bet for PCs and laptops, just as Apple does with its M1.

Meanwhile, ARM has just presented the Cortex-A78C for laptops also thinking about the leap from mobile phones or tablets to more traditional equipment when it comes to working and producing.

A no-minor question is whether the Apple M1s are all that Apple promises because they could challenge ARM in gaming equipment, and Qualcomm and Mediatek.

Apple broke the deal with its traditional partner, Intel, and went its own way. Will their promises be true?

Apple M1

“(…) Apple is making claims about batteries that I would characterize as “bombastic at best” if applied to a laptop with an Intel chip inside. With this M1 chip, I don’t have any frame of reference except Apple’s claims, which are substantial.

Apple claims 18 hours of video playback on the MacBook Air and 20 hours on the MacBook Pro. Video playback is a bad metric (especially since modern chips are optimized for it), so what to keep in mind is that those claims are significantly higher than what Apple claimed about its Intel-based predecessors: 6 more on Air and almost double on Pro.

But to be frank, I was expecting big announcements from Apple on battery. We already knew that it could extract more performance per watt than Intel and that translates directly to battery life. What I didn’t expect is how optimistic the company would be about performance.

Since the M1 is based on the ARM architecture, Apple needs an additional layer of software to run applications designed for Intel chips – it’s called Rosetta 2. The very idea of ​​x86 applications emulated on an ARM processor gives me hives. The experience of Intel applications emulated within ARM on Windows is not great. But Apple says that for certain graphically intensive applications you can get better performance on an application running through Rosetta 2 than on an equivalent Intel chip. (…)”.

We will see. As read, there are many processes to verify.

Now, if Apple’s expectation is true, the microprocessor market will be worse than Game of Thrones, and no one is assured of ruling the 7 kingdoms.

macOS Big Sur, also known as macOS 11, is the new version of Apple’s operating system for laptops and desktops, and comes as a successor to macOS Catalina. The new macOS will be available for download starting this Thursday, 11/12 on all compatible computers, both desktop and laptop. However, the star of the day was Apple’s new microprocessor, M1.

Apple M1 will be the first of a family of chips that will be integrated into Apple equipment, offering notable changes with respect to the Intel processors that were used until now.

Unlike what happened with Intel computers, all new Macs share the same processor. Therefore, the differences in performance are smaller.

In mid-2020, Apple announced that it would no longer use Intel’s microprocessors.

Apple SoC is the collective name for the system-on-chip (SoC) and system-in-package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc. using the ARM architecture.

Advanced RISC Machine (ARM), is a 32-bit RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer = Computer with Reduced Instruction Set) architecture and, with the arrival of its V8-A version, also 64-bit, developed by ARM Holdings, although originally conceived by Acorn Computers (the Acorn Archimedes, released in 1987).

They require fewer transistors than x86 CISC processors, typical of most personal computers. This design approach leads to a reduction in costs, heat and energy.

The ARM architecture is licensable. ARM Holdings’ core business is the sale of IP cores (intellectual property) to create microcontrollers and CPUs based on this core: Alcatel-Lucent, Apple Inc., AppliedMicro, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ember, Energy Micro, Freescale, LG, Marvell Technology Group, Microsemi, Microsoft, NEC, Nintendo, Nokia, Nuvoton, Nvidia, Sony, MediaTek, NXP, Oki, ON Semiconductor, Psion, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp, STMicroelectronics, Symbios Logic, Texas Instruments , VLSI Technology, Yamaha, and ZiiLABS.

Although Apple outsources all of its manufacturing, including that of its own SoCs, it continues to design the processors and fully controls the integration of its hardware, software and services.

The new product

Apple’s promise is a 2X more powerful laptop processor that lowers power consumption and thus increases battery life.

Apple M1 will have 8 cores, 4 of which are “high efficiency” and 4 “high performance”.

The most efficient 4 cores would be as powerful as the current dual-core processors in MacBook Airs.

In internal reviews, the Apple M1’s performance per watt far outstrips available laptop chips, Apple claims.

For Apple the improvements in performance per watt had been marginal on the x86 architecture.

The new chips offer twice the performance of the most powerful traditional laptop chips, and with a consumption that is 33% of those chips.

The Apple M1 promises 2.6 TFLOPS performance, compared to the latest generation Intel and AMD processors.

Apple claims that the M1 makes computers that use it “faster than 98% of laptops sold today.”

There are also improvements in machine learning thanks to the integrated Neural Engine with 16 cores and capable of processing 11 trillion operations per second.

Promises

The GPU is also part of that total renovation: it has 8 cores and they call it “the most advanced graphics processor we have ever created”.

This processor will have hardware decoding engines for multimedia content and support for Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4.

The Apple M1 is, according to Apple, manufactured with 5 nanometer technology, with 16,000 million transistors, which allows many of the components of the motherboard of your MacBook or your iMac to be now condensed in this new SoC.

At Apple they talked about how in the design of this processor they used a unified memory architecture with high bandwidth and low latency, which allows the different elements of the team to have access to this crucial component to execute all kinds of processes.