- This is not the future of the PC.
This is.
If the enthusiast in you screams that,
"No you can't just replace GPUs and CPUs
with integrated SoCs."
I am here to tell you
that Apple Silicon,
go brrr.
Apple obviously knows it.
And make no mistake.
Intel, AMD and NVIDIA
all know it too.
The writing is on the wall.
And now it's just a matter of time.
PCs need to change.
And I'm gonna tell you how and why.
Right after I tell you about our sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
- A lot of you really liked our
How to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need!
And I'm really glad that you do.
Because it took so much effort to make.
But look at that run time.
And it could have been even longer.
Think about how many components
go into a typical PC build.
And then look at this unassuming little box.
The Mac Studio.
In our testing the M1 Ultra variant
pulled a grand total
of 223.4 watts from the wall.
Under the heaviest load
that we could give it.
And the M1 Max version didn't even break three digits.
If we ignore the Rosetta results,
they achieved 88 and 61% respectively,
of the core I9 12900K
and the RTX 3090 benches overall performance
in our productivity testing.
At just 34 and 15% of the total system power,
at most.
The 12900K, the CPU alone,
can draw more power
than the whole M1 Ultra Mac Studio.
And developers are still figuring out
how to optimize for Apple Silicon.
Now look at that PC
and all its components again.
All the raw materials
that go into making it what it is.
It's wasteful, right?
In almost every way,
except economically.
It's not that X86 is inherently bad,
but it has limitations
that even Intel have tried to overcome themselves.
With projects like Itanium.
While extensions have given it more life,
its complex instruction set design
is, at its core,
an old one that dates back to the late 1970s.
Literally every x86 base CPU boots up
in 8086 compatibility mode.
And can in theory,
run software made for the OG IBM PC.
Precious dye space and transistors
are used for supporting instructions and modes
that might be redundant,
or not even remotely useful today.
But must be there to maintain compatibility
with the architecture.
And now if I'm Intel or AMD,
looking at my options.
I'm sweating a little.
And weighing a switch to Arm.
While neither currently sells an Arm CPU,
both hold Arm licenses.
And AMD is on record saying
that they're willing and able to do it.
It wasn't that long ago, even.
That Intel had their own reduced instructions set CPU
called the I860 and I960.
And you'd be kidding yourself
if you thought that they weren't prototyping stuff
on the side.
Like Apple was when they were suffering
through 14 nm ++++.
A change in the PC industry would,
of course,
have a teething period
like Apple Silicon is currently experiencing.
But it could eventually be a good thing.
And not just for efficiency.
Think about it.
Intel and AMD are alone in the CPU race right now.
Just like AMD and NVIDIA
are currently alone in the GPU race.
And if Intel had their way,
in the '90s or in 2015.
There'd be only one.
Thanks to Intel's control over performance
and efficiency enhancing extensions.
Used on modern CPUs like SSE and AVX.
And AMDs control over the 64 bit extensions
that every desktop CPU
since core two has used.
We don't have any other desktop CPU manufacturers.
Anyone entering the x86 market
would have to reverse engineer
those extensions to compete.
Because AMD and Intel have a technology sharing agreement
that forbids sub licensing.
And expires if either company changes hands.
By contrast,
Arm doesn't sell anything directly.
They develop the base specifications
and then they license that to other companies.
Who then have the option of tweaking
and adding to those designs
to tailor them to suit their needs.
This is how Apple Silicon came to be.
And if Arm took off on the desktop.
We could see not only mobile players
like Qualcomm, Samsung
and MediaTek enter the ring.
But maybe Google or even HP.
They used to make their own CPUs once too.
And we can't forget NVIDIA,
whose last consumer Arm SoC,
uses GPU cores from 2014.
And lives on in the Nintendo Switch
and Shield TV+.
Actually it's kind of bizarre
that NVIDIA hasn't continued
to produce consumer SoCs.
Like perhaps contractual obligations,
within and outside of NVIDIA's control,
had something to do with it.
Because not only were they close
to straight up buying Arm.
A sign that they knew times were changing.
But they're also still actively developing Arm SoC's.
Just not for consumers.
Their Grace data center SoC for AI acceleration,
has a surprisingly similar level of integration
to Apple Silicon on paper.
And it's just begging to be scaled down
so that consumers can use it.
Just like the Teslas
and not Quadro GPU's do with GeForce.
But let's back up a sec.
Duopoly aside.
If x86 is so bad
and Arm is so good.
Why is x86 still the king of the PC?
Well, prior to Apple Silicon.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that Arm chips
simply can't perform.
Like Intel and AMD,
Qualcomm has a virtual monopoly
over non Apple Arm PCs.
And a literal monopoly
in the Windows ecosystem.
Thanks to an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft.
When that deal was pinned,
it probably did make some sense.
Qualcomm was the third biggest chip maker
even as of mid 2020.
And they're still a giant
who's recently been eyeing a slice
of the Arm pie for themselves.
So assuming Qualcomm would become
the biggest supplier of desktop Arm chips.
It made sense for Microsoft
to want to optimize for that hardware.
Unfortunately, for Microsoft and for us.
There's no polite way to put this.
Even Qualcomm's latest chips suck.
Which recently prompted Google
to follow Samsung and Apple
in going their own way with Tensor.
And may eventually prompt Microsoft
to do the same.
Qualcomms utter failure to compete
in the PC space, so far.
Has given Intel, AMD and especially NVIDIA
precious breathing room.
And we're not saying
that the PC as we know it is dead today.
It definitely still has some life left.
And they'll first probably try to integrate
x86 SoC's more tightly
before they consider switching over.
Intel for example,
could very well be working on an SoC
that combines Alder Lakes efficiency cores
with a larger number of XE graphics cores
and AI engine blocks.
Taking the dye space
that would otherwise have been allocated
to the bigger performance cores.
Even so,
reduced instruction set architectures
proved their worth in the late '90s
with early Arm licensees
and with PowerPC.
Which was famously used in the first iMac's.
Clock for clock,
PowerPC tended to outperform x86
by a wide margin.
Though this did depend on the task.
And eventually PowerPC
hit a performance and efficiency wall.
Just like x86 is today.
Intel's Itanium for its part,
was supposed to be a sort of successor
to risk as a concept.
By using what HP termed,
Explicitly Parallel Instruction computing.
Or Epic.
Yes, naming has always been bad.
Unlike our swacket from lttstore.com
It describes exactly what it is.
A sweater and a jacket.
As we know today,
Itanium didn't work out so well.
Still even Intel saw that the x86's days were numbered.
Their plan for Pentium 4
was more or less
to just clock it as high as it would go.
And hope that the numbers kept going up.
And now that we're back to this phase again.
Where we can't physically fit
more cores on a dye
because new process nodes
are providing less additional density.
Something's got to give.
The current solution,
stacking dyes.
Will only get you so far
when you're already pushing 241 watts.
By comparison,
a lot of Arms advantages today,
come not strictly from its reduced instruction set.
But from how it's typically bundled
into a system on chip configuration.
Where virtually the entire computer
is super close to the CPU cores.
Why does this matter when we already have APUS?
Well it's all about density and power draw.
Simply expanding the size of the dye.
Isn't normally a good idea,
from a power and thermal perspective.
But Arm cores are typically much smaller
than x86 and sip far less power.
So not only can you fit
more of them into the same space.
You're also not as limited
in terms of dye size in general.
M1 Ultra's dye area is bigger than the RTX 3090 Ti.
Let's do a case study.
AMD's 8 core Ryzen 7 5700G desktop APUS
are somewhere between an M1 and M1 Pro,
in terms of dye size.
The APU dedicates just over a quarter
of the utilized dye space
to CPU cores and cache alone.
And just 10% to the GPU.
For thermal management,
there's also a fair amount of unused white space
even within the cores themselves.
Meanwhile, even M1's big performance CPU cores
are tiny by comparison.
With all cores taking just over 20%
of that smaller dye area.
The GPU takes up double the relative dye space as the APU.
Which means there's way more GPU horsepower on tap.
And still room for other functions
like the massive media engine,
neural engine and storage controller.
There's very little white space by comparison.
Not only are those Arm cores efficient enough
to handle such a compact layout.
But when so much of the system
is contained within it.
Significantly less energy
has to be used for signaling.
Which also happens to be much faster.
If we tried to push an x86 processor
to these densities.
In proximity with this many GPU cores.
It would quickly become a thermal meltdown event.
Sort of like the opposite
of how Alex had to save
a frozen Core i9-12900KS.
Literally frozen.
Go check it out on Floatplane
along with more exclusive
when you're done here.
And it scales.
M1 Mac's sports a larger dye than the RTX 3070.
And M1 Ultra is about a third again bigger
than the RTX 3090 Ti.
With the dye that large,
the compute-y bits to the 3090 Ti
would take up roughly half
the M1 Ultra's dye area.
While Apple will currently dedicates
just over a third.
That means that if Apple built
a dedicated big chip design.
And weren't using their own Metal API
separate from the rest of the industry.
They legitimately could reach
high end GPU levels
of real world performance.
Shame that Apple had to go their own way.
But imagine if NVIDIA were to build such a thing.
They could corner the Arm desktop
or Notebook space very quickly.
If developers were on board, especially.
It's not as simple as gluing them together, obviously.
And that GeForce power consumption
is still a problem.
But it's also not an impossible hurdle.
And with the success of Apple Silicon,
despite its growing pains.
It's impossible for the industry
to ignore the advantages
to this approach.
You can have excellent performance
coupled with incredibly low power draw.
On a much more open architecture.
That allows for bigger
or more aspirational system integrators
to tweak things as they see fit.
This potential future will suck for enthusiasts
who like getting their hands dirty.
But the alternative is laid bare before us.
Power targets shooting up at record pace
to the point where we're looking at new connectors
to help deliver all the juice.
This generation of hardware now,
is already incredibly power hungry.
With Intel and AMD squeezing
higher and higher frequencies
out of their cores.
And NVIDIA rumored to require up to 600 watts
for their next gen top end GPU.
There's really no backing down.
We have to ask ourselves,
"Is it worth it?"
And at what point does it stop being worth it?
At least it's always worth listening
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- Thanks for watching guys.
This one's a bit more philosophical than usual.
So maybe go check out something
more down and dirty
for a pallet cleanser.
Like our 6.9 gigahertz GPU released on 6/9.
It's nice.