I think AMD is the most likely to win this race as they are way more reasonable than Nvidia and Qualcomm in terms of margins and better at working with the vendors.
Apple's ARM switch worked because they have tight control over the whole software stack, and actually worked really hard to provide transparent support for older x86-64 software. Windows for ARM has none of this support and has basically zilch market share as a result.<p>If Microsoft releases an equivalent of Rosetta at the same level of quality it will be a different story. But I can't see what influence Nvidia has over this?
I really think Intel will be hard to displace on the desktop.<p>There is a very low tolerance for incompatibility and ARM, whilst great in controlled environments, just cannot compete with Intel architecture in compatibility.
Alas, feels like signaling to support the overheated hype and trillion dollar valuation.<p>Real competition in this space would be really good. The shape of mass computing is inceasingly a tortured collusion game rather than a true market.<p>Anybody who used a raspberry pi knows that the desktop computing landscape is not what it used to be. For peanuts you can have a rock-solid linux PC that covers the computing needs of like the 99% of people.<p>With a convergent OS you'd also cover the mobile use case, where conveniently Arm is already the norm.<p>The future will not look like the past but speculators beware, timing earthquakes is not possible.
DOA. It's one thing for Apple with full vertical integration to succeed, quite another for NVidia to make any inroads where they have no control over the OS stack. The Windows ARM version is not going to save them.
I really want a sever with the absurd memory bandwidth/latency that an m1/m2 have.<p>Just not a lot of benchmarks here that reflect what happens in the real world unfortunately
I'm sure this will be dependent on lots of signed closed-source firmware like Intel and AMD platforms, but there's always room for NVIDIA to surprise me, break character and do the opposite. It would attract a lot of people to the platform who want or need open firmware.
Maybe NVIDIA is aiming for servers and the like here, not the mainstream market. So the flawless support for Windows and drivers and their own GPUs for gamers etc is less of a concern?<p>Fascinating developments though... we would all benefit from chipsets converging towards a similar architecture.
It seems Nvidia was trying to unify cloud computing (GPU + CPU + whatever-PU), and put those beasts in data centres.<p>Is this "PC" processor still aiming for data centres or desktops? It's not surprising at all if it's the former one.
Something like an Apple M-Series, but with enough RTX cores bolted on to provide, say, PS5 levels of GPU... that could be pretty compelling. I like my M1 Studio a ton, but I do wish it had a bit more GPU.
I wouldn't hold my breath too much. Before even talking about software and backward compatibility which is quite important for windows users (at least the one who are going to buy at high price/margins) it must be competitive from a performance standpoint.<p>If we look at what Apple has done with their ARM chips, outside of power consumption they rarely win on performance. It is mostly software optimized to use their specialized hardware compute block that get any advantage from Apple Silicon. Their ARM CPU are not that special, especially since they make it hard to sort CPU from GPU and other hardware co-processor. When you go look in detail in the various benchmark numbers you realize the CPU part performs at most like a mid-range laptop CPU.
And their GPU (that gets used to "win" some CPU benchmark) is weak when you consider the price but admittedly that is not going to be a problem for NVidia.<p>People say Apple successfully transitioned but it is mostly because they leave no choice to their customers. In other words, they do not have to compete. I doubt they would have sold much Apple Silicon desktop if those were to compete with equivalent Intel + dGPU machines; particularly considering the price premium.
Compared to the golden iMac era, it seems like they do not sell much of them in the first place, and it sort of makes my argument.<p>NVidia will not have this luxury that Apple has. They will have to compete on both performance and price. Apple did not really succeed; I doubt they will. But maybe their chip designers are so much better than Apple's or less focus on power consumption will allow them to unlock more performance from ARM.
But this is old history, and it seems to just repeat itself. Apple just went back to their Motorola "G" days where they pretend that they are competitive but in fact when you do run software that exists cross platform and is not unfairly optimized for the Apple platform it is rarely true.
NVidia won't be able to create a marketing spin around this and still sell their stuff at a massive premium. It is unlikely that PCs will switch to ARM because there are not that many benefits but quite a bit of hassle and cost involved.<p>It is like the rotary engine that has some advantages over traditional piston engines but in the end are very rarely worth the tradeoffs which is why it is stuck in niche applications (at best, mostly unused actually).
By the way,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver</a> : "Project Denver was originally intended to support both ARM and x86 code using code morphing technology from Transmeta, but was changed to the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set because Nvidia could not obtain a license to Intel's patents"