Thursday, June 25th 2020
Bad Intel Quality Assurance Responsible for Apple-Intel Split?
Apple's decision to switch from Intel processors for its Mac computers to its own, based on the Arm architecture, has shaken up the tech world, even though rumors of the transition have been doing rounds for months. Intel's first official response, coupled with facts such as Intel's CPU technology execution being thrown completely off gear due to foundry problems; pointed toward the likelihood of Intel not being able to keep up with Apple's growing performance/Watt demands. It turns out now, that Intel's reasons are a lot more basic, and date back to 2016.
According to a sensational PC Gamer report citing former Intel principal engineer François Piednoël, Apple's dissatisfaction with Intel dates back to some of its first 14 nm chips, based on the "Skylake" microarchitecture. "The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem," says Piednoël. It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad. When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place," he adds.
It was around that time that decisions were taken at the highest levels in Apple to execute a machine architecture switch away from Intel and x86, the second of its kind following Apple's mid-2000s switch from PowerPC to Intel x86. For me this is the inflection point," says Piednoël. "This is where the Apple guys who were always contemplating to switch, they went and looked at it and said: 'Well, we've probably got to do it.' Basically the bad quality assurance of Skylake is responsible for them to actually go away from the platform." Apple's decision to dump Intel may have only been more precipitated with 2019 marking a string of cybersecurity flaws affecting Intel microarchitectures. The PC Gamer report cautions that Piednoël's comments should be taken with a pinch of salt, as he has been among the more outspoken engineers at Intel.Image Courtesy: ComputerWorld
Source:
PC Gamer
According to a sensational PC Gamer report citing former Intel principal engineer François Piednoël, Apple's dissatisfaction with Intel dates back to some of its first 14 nm chips, based on the "Skylake" microarchitecture. "The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem," says Piednoël. It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad. When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place," he adds.
81 Comments on Bad Intel Quality Assurance Responsible for Apple-Intel Split?
On top of that, why Apple ARM over AMD x86? Apple already had a strong relationship with AMD over Radeon so it would make sense to extend that to include CPUs.
The more plausible explanation is that, yes, it's engineering but it's Apple's engineering, not Intel's. Since the first MacBooks were sold, Apple has had serious engineering and quality control problems with their products from inadequate cooling to bad solder joints to bad design. The one product Apple hasn't had any major engineering problems with was the iPad. By eliminating their partnership with Intel, they can expand on the one product they have that isn't fundamentally flawed and increase profit margins in the process.
We are suppose to believe you over him?
So it does matter if you are going to say he is wrong provide a reason why and how.
Some random on a forum calling him out saying its fake news is laughable.
And I'm sorry that calling out Apple on its BS makes you feel personally attacked... wait, no I'm not. If your ego is so tied to a faceless multinational corporate's products that you take any criticism of said corporation personally, guess what - that's your issue, not mine!
Wendell sure isn't full of shit when it comes to knowing what's what.
Here's my take at this whole APPLE fiasco.
Apple wants full control of everything they make. PERIOD. let's look at Dialog Semi they make the Power ICs for their iPhones, responsible for batteries and all, when they got caught red handed with Throttlegate the top execs threw the Dialog Semi under the bus, same for the company which used to make them the Sapphire glass GT Advanced, bankrupt now. Same for Imagination IP after poaching key personnel that company is now sold to a Chinese firm.
Every single OEM that does business with Apple gets caught in the cross fire and gets shoved into blackhole because of deep pockets. Apple poaches a lot from their own supplier companies. Look at the Qualcomm spat. That scales long way back, it was WiMax that Apple was threatening to use form Intel instead of Qualcomm technology and now Qcomm's royality scheme was demanding money from Apple because their phones were selling at higher profits, Apple didn't like it. Bam, that whole fiasco happened. Even that Hock Tan at Broadcom was in hands with Apple when CFIUS intervention happened to stop the hostile takeover, because Apple would benefit for the LTE patents that Hock Tan would sell to them, it's all over at EE of this history. And also that Intel 5G IP purchase for mobile, stupid Intel made a big mistake there, instead of keeping it to them they sold it to Apple, this all happens because of the top brass who gets sold out, best eg is Stephen Elop, Nokia ex-MS employee sold the company to them and we all know what happened, bad management at Nokia and MS lack of focus and open nature they lost everything on mobile.
This BS corporation that tells privacy is our first was responsible for the KickAssTorrents site owner Polish citizen extradition to USA from IP trace linked to Apple. We know blackmarket devices break iPhone's crypto too, this all security BS drama is just a face of this faceless corporate, a blackbox is always a blackbox and putting trust into them is foolish esp with Apple where 100% of any of their services cannot be used unless you sign into their system.
Now back to present, they pump more money into these Chinese firms like BOE as well to make their displays for cheap, like LG got dethroned recently from LCD top rank since BOE is approaching, all thanks to Apple cash influx, you may ask why ? Because they want profit margins to be the as much as efficient as possible. They do every single damn thing for money and their gains only. All this pandering in the WWDC and every single thing that their CEO does is just a PR mask corporate talk. This Intel/Apple split was there in news since a long time, and since Apple already pays hefty amounts of money to Adobe, MS and other comapnies to make the software optimzied for Apple like first party solutions they thought instead of doing this BS and getting caught by using cheap bs VRM components in their piss poor trash BGA cooling systems and paying money to Intel, paying to lawyers atop for all their sneaky BS practices. And most important of all they are getting their major profits from iPhone 57%, and their new Services business is 17.7%, Mac is just at sub 10%, and to pay such huge amounts doesn't make any sense. Plus Mac OS X is not the same old Macintosh OS anymore, their 32bit hammer drop and more of iOS crap shoved into the Macintosh OS and the BGA BS of it with less I/O and T2 guarding everything, users who use that Mac as a *nix substutue are falling, its just a fancy POS machine in majority of the corporations, enterprises. That's the reason. And we know how much expensive their A series cores take and they even pumped so much of money into TSMC for the R&D of 7nm, that money ROI is expected very much, that's why they make all their second class products (not iPhones) use older processors ALWAYS. So this is a natural step towards their maximum efficiency.
The whole ARM vs x86 is an overblown discussion, esp that Anandtech's SPEC BS scores. Any top flagship Android phone trails so much in SPEC but when it comes to the Application performance including the friggin first party apps like Camera and all, the iPhone A series SoCs don't beat the Android flagships in any form, its just a BS metric. Until a Cinebench or Blender, or any OpenGL / Vulkan (their own Metal BS) performance comes their A series BS can shove where sun doesn't shine, ARM is always custom and lockeddown hard, Bootloader gets locked on many phones now on Android unlike Nexus days, x86 enjoys decades of software optimization and library to choose from and massive Windows Win32 ecosystem, sadly UWP trash is coming lately. People who are like we want ARM in our PCs are fools and the ones who beleive that Google and MS should chase same BS are even bigger idiots because they don't have the same business line or principles or even the R&D investments, Qualcomm of all invested millions into Server ARM race and canned it entiurely from the heralding by Cloudflare marketing. Imagine people thinking MS and Google will build these processors. Ultimate fools lmao.
There are so many reasons this is happening, blaming Intel is just one part, I bet there are all sorts of bugs in their hardware design, but keeping it under wraps and in their walled garden means few will have the full story.
Simply put, Apple earns more on their hardware and retains more control if they use their own chips. It’s a business decision and always has been with Apple. It just so happened that they had a really good run between (roughly) 2003-2013, where each change and new product benefitted both consumers and their bottom line. Now people get up in arms and feel compelled to find reasons when Apple makes decisions like this. Apple makes products to benefit Apple, they don’t care about which processor architecture or it’s relative performance so long as it brings in more money.
We already design and fab our own chips
What is the cost of a more powerful arm design and the production wafers, and the product engineering therafter ?
What is the cost of buying chips form intel, and the product engineering therafter ?
Whichever one costs less is better for the books. the end.
Same story?
edit: I mean the being able to use it part
What you were describing in your previous post sounds like the opposite of that - the ability to run AVX code on hardware without AVX support. This will not work, as the CPU doesn't understand the instructions and thus can't process them. Sure, there might exist translation layers, emulation and similar workarounds in some cases, but they are rare and inevitably tank performance far worse than writing code for a lower common denominator instruction set. The whole point of added instruction sets like AVX is to add the option to run certain specific operations at a higher performance level than could be done with more general purpose instructions - but you can of course do the same work on more general purpose instructions, just slower and with different code.
We had a defective skylake unit CPU right here on TechPowerup, don't recall the thread. It's darn near the only real true-blue defective CPU I have seen. I can buy this.He says that word, but I don't think he knows what it means.