Apple Silicon, A Year In
Wow, where to start?
The performance of the M1-series of Apple CPU’s is just simply amazing. We are finally seeing ARM CPU’s that can compete in the desktop space. In terms of raw performance, they’re staggering! When you switch to performance-per-watt, then nothing even comes close. This is total a toal “cake-eating” situation for Mac fans, and may even foresee a shift into more mainstream ARM desktop CPUs.1
We have had server CPUs working and available for a while, although not really available to consumers (I’m looking at you, AWS Graviton!) as they are hyperscaler-only, in-house designed parts. Now that Apple is bringing ARM chips to the mainstream, will wee see finally see ATX form-factor ARM boards? I am starting to think not…
The hyperscalers are buying the lion’s share of today’s hardware, with CPU’s being at the center of it. They are driving the economics of the IT industry more than ever. We are at the point where they are getting their own bespoke HW, and their own bespoke CPU SKU’s even for “mainstream” x86 processors. Their ARM CPU’s are going to be even more bespoke (if that makes sense?) in the fact that each platform’s CPU’s will be built to what their operator (AWS, GCP, Azure) values and thinks is best.
For better or worse, the world seems to have moved-on. There will always be tinkerers and homelabbers (guilty!) who run their own gear, but I am starting to believe that the majority of IT professionals starting out today could perceivably go their entire career without ever having to manage their own infrastructure HW.2 I am not talking about gamer PC’s or laptops or even home NAS appliacnes (QNAP, Synology, etc.) I am talking about server-class HW (or near sever-class HW.)
What this all means is that there is not much of a market for server-class (or near) ARM mainboards for the datacenter – which is what trickles-down to homelabbers and tinkerers. There was a time when it looked like there might be, but most of those efforts were not large in scale and/or were stillborn. In fact, some of the IP and talent that was working on that was either hired or acquired by the hyperscalers to jumpstart their ARM efforts.
What this means is that x86 processors will be the mainstream home platform for the forseeable future because there is so much investment in the gaming world in that platform. Both major home gaming consoles are x86 (PS5 and Xbox Series X) However, the other big player, the Nintendo Switch, is ARM-based…so it is even creeping in there, as well. As games get used the the ARM ISA as a platform and have optimized code for it also, the lock-in that x86 has will be even more tenuous, so there is definitly the possibiltiy of clouds on the horizon.
Finally, it seems like Intel is now looking to package x86 into MCM-style deployments, similar to how AMD has been building their EPYC and Ryzen parts, with a potentially even higher amount of integration of AI/ML computing and other “goodies” that is similar to what Apple is doing. This means that HW is becoming more specialized and less generic, and because we are in the land of giant procurers of bespoke hardware, most of these SKU’s will probably not be available “downstream” – maybe not ever.3
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The Microsoft “Windows S” ARM CPUs have been repurposed/”uprated” smartphone CPU’s from Qualcomm. ↩
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If you break down a homelab budget to even $1-2k/year (which is small) it gets you a LOT of cloud computing, particularly if you’re learning, and don’t have lots of long-running jobs. ↩
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I seriously doubt that Amazon will ever let any Graviton CPU’s leave their datacenters in a running condition. There’s no grey market when it comes to hyperscaler gear. Once they’re done the metal is recycled and the CPUs are probably ground into paving silicon. ↩