If what Apple is doing works, it will change the industry like how the iPhone changed the telco industry.
A little history
Some little back story. Back in the 80s, there is a young kid from Seattle, Washington started a company in a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his best friend. That kid’s name is Bill Gates and that company is called Microsoft.
The genius move that Microsoft did was to license DOS from IBM and recognizing a need and a trend: Computers need be in every home and every office. From that point onward, with the genius of Microsoft marketing and engineering, Windows and Intel x86 instructions set is in every home and office of the world.
Meanwhile, other companies who are competing w/ IBM, have their own solution and mainly focus on business customers. Most of them are on the RISC train and produce their own chips like the Motorola 8800, Sun SPARC, IBM POWER and HP PA-RISC, Apple PowerPC chips. Unfortunately for all of them, they later lost their market due to Intel and Windows. All of them either abandon their platforms or bought over by larger companies. At this point before 2005, the computing world was x86 instruction set and RISC remains in the niche market for big-iron computing like mainframes or low-power alternatives.
Enter the iPhone
On January 2007 at MacWorld convection, Apple announce a device that will basically change the course of human history: the iPhone.
{{> figure src=“https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-41153b3ffc441c06eeeafef1e36b8623" >}} Steve Jobs with the first iPhone. Things change a lot for Apple from here on. And the world too.
the iPhone not only changed the telco world or the phone industry, it did something that is very hard to do: a decently powered hand-held computer running a BSD variant. Basically, running a fully functional OS on a hand held computer.
The next step of Apple plan is something that a lot of people doesn’t understand at that time: making your own chips for your own phone. Other phone manufacturer just design the phone using off the shelf components. For example, other phone makers use Snapdragon for the main processor, andriod for the OS and customize your os a bit as a differentiation factor. Apple on the other hand, decided to build everything in house.
What’s more intriguing is that they begin to overpower their phones. Adding GPU on the iphone 4, adding 64-bit support and secure enclave on the iphone 5s, adding efficiency cores in iphone 7, neural engine in iphone 8.
The next step was to put their own designs in all of the products. S-series on the Apple Watch, W-series on the airpods and T-series on the Intel mac to give more functionality to their macs.
By the time in 2020 when they unveil their A14 chip, their little smartphone chips has started to rival Intel high-end laptop chips.
Here comes the M1
Apple first announced the transition to Apple Silicon in WWDC 2020 and release their first product by Mid-november 2020. People minds are blown. It is inconvieable that a fanless ultra laptop can handily beat out high end workstation laptop.
Apple M1 shows the benefits of a SoC RISC design: low-power usage, cheaper because all the memory controller, them memory itself, storage controller, CPU, GPU and specialized neural processing circuit is on the chip itself.
And add that to boot, the optimization has made the M1 faster than anything Intel and AMD can offer at the same power level.
The M1 is Apple first foray into laptop / desktop computing. It will be Apple’s least powerful and slowest chip. It give it’s first warning shot to the x86 designer and a clear message: We are coming for you.
What’s next for Apple
As for Nov 2020, Apple just put the new M1 chip only on 3 product lines: the Mac Mini, Macbook Air and the base Macbook Pro. The transition, according to Apple will take around 2 years and Apple has yet to update the following products: the iMac, higher end Macbook Pro (including the 16″) and the Mac Pro.
At this at the lower limit of what Apple is making, I’m excited for what Apple will be coming up for their iMac and eventually Mac Pro.
How the M1 will impact the Intel and the semi-conductor industry
For the rest of the industry, the M1 is basically a wake up call for the x86 designer. Or at least it should be. So far we haven’t see anything from Intel or AMD officials says, but if I’m one of the officials and see the benchmarks and what Apple did w/ their 1st gen products, I’ll be worried.
Predicting the future is a very hard business to get right, but here’s my take on what Intel and other x86 designers will do.
Intel will have a make a long take on their roadmap and architecture. If Intel still hold on to Andy Groove’s creed of ‘the paranoid will survive’, they might throw out their entire roadmap for the consumer space and make up a new one to be presented by 2021.
Not only you get hit by AMD with their Ryzen and now you are blindsided by Apple? Intel will be have it’s ego blown a few notches down and plan a comeback.
Apple has been a trendsetter for the personal computing space and will continue to do so in the near future. Apple has pushed Intel to include a GPU on their processor. Unhappy w/ what Intel is offering, Apple decided to make their integrated GPU more powerful than some mid-tier discrete offerings. I expect Intel will feature more powerful GPU and the possibility of hardware accelerated encryption, secure enclave and neural processing capabilities on their newer chips.
One of the factors that made Apple cheaper to make is because it has less circuit that is not needed. the M1 doesn’t even have SATA controller because it is not needed. One of key tenets of Intel chips is that they are backwards compatible. I suspect Intel will plan to drop support for old features that is not needed anymore.
ARMing up
And indirect effect that Apple will be having is the rise of the ARM architecture. Apple shipped at least 13–15% of all PC shipped in the market for the past 7 years. It’s not the majority, but it’s no insignificant that it will be ignored. more people will be on ARM platform than before. this will drive more software developer to the ARM platform. it will come down to Microsoft to jump on the ARM platform bigger than what they did before. With Apple Macs perform better than the Windows counterpart, Microsoft might more inclined to focus on ARM development with an upcoming player: Qualcomm with their SnapDragon processor and possiblly Samsung with their Exynos.
With ARM processor already powering the fastest supercomputer in the world and Amazon started to offer ARM instances in the cloud, development on ARM platform will go through a faster pace with the introduction of Apple M1.
Conclusion
With Apple, one of the largest company in the planet started to introduce a new platform on the desktop-class computing, the impact will be significant enough for Intel and other x86 players to change course in the near future.
It will be exciting times ahead when group of dedicate intelligent people are forced to innovate. I will not be surprised that the future Intel processor will be a CISC processor in name only.
Plug
Support this website and my growing family by purchasing from my Amazon Affiliate links.
Get your Apple Computers with M1 chips at my Amazon Affiliate links.