this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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You're correct, but it's important to note that the M chips are very expensive to produce, and abandoning x86 means literally all the software iOS and OSX uses needs to be rewritten (or translated via Rosetta). It's a huge project with tons of risks and massive costs. Apple can do this because they're pretty much completely vertically integrated at this point, and control their ecosystem completely. If amd independently released some new non compatible architecture that was dramatically faster, it'd likely be dead in the water.
Intel learned this lesson the hard way during the Itanic days. AMD took the relatively safer approach when they released amd64.
Correct. I wish there were open source chips in this category. Not that anyone could afford to produce it, but I believe Software for a chip with a new instruction set would be more adapted if you could look everything up
RISC-V is open source. Lots of boards are moving to RISC-V.
Well it seems I am not up to day on the topic. This is great
There are, Risc-V has been hard at work with several partners (including Bosch and Qualcomm) to bring comparable RISC SoCs to consumer markets (there are already industrial offerings). But it's not fast nor cheap to do it. It also has a major drawback that's never talked about that, unlike x86, SoCs become obsolete way sooner for a much higher upfront cost. So, an upgradeable Risc-V option is kind of an elusive idea, for most of the computing power and energy consumption advantages come from the System on a chip design. Today people expect more storage space than ever, and to play with the newer and most powerful graphics options. Something that SoCs cannot change fast or easily.
Software support is also the worst point right now, a problem that Apple addressed by bearing the brunt of the port and compatibility work. But it's not so simple for other vendors who have to rely on third parties to make their software available in their platform.
Why spend more in a new laptop that is barely just as powerful and runs none of the software you want? Apple cult clout is the only thing leading the sales of the Apple Silicon. And software developers are not interested on porting their software to a platform with no users.
On the other hand Risc-V has only existed since 2015, so it's massive strides and advances are actually quite impressive. And with more governments looking to become independent from Chinese transistors we might be looking at a new processor arch era, though only after a short growing pains period that we are in right now.