Moving away from Intel sounds like a huge benefit to me due to the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades. I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation. That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.
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> I believe that ECC memory, for example, would be standard in all desktops and laptops today if Intel didn't use it for market segmentation.
This is an extraordinary claim. Don’t get me wrong, I love ECC, but it has a very real cost associated with it. Why would any alternative to Intel change the pricing dynamic?
We can't know, because choosing ECC or non-ECC based on price vs features isn't a choice most Intel consumers get to make. I do personally think the benefits would have proven themselves worth the cost over the previous couple of decades if The Market wasn't artificially constrained by an intentional limitation in the processors 99% of people use. Prices would come down with additional volume too.
The memory controller supports ECC if Apple cared about it they would’ve forced Intel’s hand a long time ago it would not be particularly difficult for Apple to request a custom SKU with ECC enabled.
> the number of ways they have held back computers over the decades.
Nonsense. There's a lot of valid reasons to be critical of Intel (largely stemming from general malicious business practices and greed), but suggesting they haven't been pushing computing forward and being market leaders and innovators is just plain untrue.
They were making 8c/16t Xeons back in 2010, and core counts there have continued to improve on the high end, and increment and propogate across their stack. It's taken till recently for most consumer software or usecases to really leverage more than 8 threads as well, so the demand on the consumer side wasn't really there. If it were, the AMD Phenom's likely would have been more successful given their multithreading performance advantage over their consumer intel contemporaries. Instead they delivered gains in performance per watt, lithography, IPC, idle performance, and instruction set/acceleration gains (AES-NI, AVX, QuickSync, etc), to say nothing of pushing the market forward in Memory and Storage as well. Clock speed gains were realized as well but pushing much passed 4Ghz starts pushing into limits of physics/thermodynamics given current fabrication tech/science.
ECC gives no benefit to most consumer applications, and actually would more likely be a detriment in most implementations, as it increases costs and limits performance while it's two primary benefits would largely go unnoticed if not entirely unused (error correction and improved total capacity). That's like suggesting you should make the entire frame of a car out of Titanium. Sure, it's technically better, but it's gains aren't worth it's costs and largely lost on most consumer buyers anyway, so why bother.
> That doesn't even touch on all the security issues.
No argument from there. Worth pointing out that exploits will often target the dominant marketshare holder of any given industry/segment (eg, Windows for OS, Android for mobile OS, Intel for x86 CPU's), but that doesn't discount the flaws that intel had implemented and their handling of said flaws/exploits. But that's not holding computing back so much as a matter of corruption/morality.
Intel is lagging behind AMD. If anything, Apple should jump ship for AMD and not have to screw-over their entire install-base and everyone's software and hardware investments. Going to ARM would be extremely stupid... an iPad isn't a laptop and vice-versa, and trying to force them to merge prematurely doesn't speak to any sense of product life or support.
You made a strawman regarding titanium. For as much as the recent Apple computers cost, a MacBook Pro should have ECC memory and plenty of ports, while a MacBook should not.
>> If anything, Apple should jump ship for AMD
There is a possibility if this tweet is anything to go by, https://twitter.com/_rogame/status/1225381275617415168 and apparently it seems this is being talked about since Nov'19 when the codenames appeared first time in Mac betas.
There have been APUs listed in Mac drivers since forever since they are part of the driver blob they get from AMD it doesn’t mean much.