I can't agree with the characterisation here that only Apple can make decent Arm cores. Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't. Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.
However, there is a real challenge here and that's who has the capability and incentives to make laptop and desktop Arm cores. Microsoft probably, but hard to see many other firms doing so.
So a scenario where Apple gains a material lead in desktop and laptop performance over everyone else and grows market share as a result seems quite credible.
> Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't.
How does hyperthreading change the story here? The 32-core CPU is the one that had hyperthreading while the 64-core one didn't. Hypthreading is widely regarded as being around +20% performance for multithreading-friendly workloads. Either way, the per-core performance of the 32-core x86 CPU is nearly 2x that of the 64-core ARM one. That's not a good look for being desktop-viable.
Especially when the 32-core x86 cpu also comes in a 64-core variant. And then a 2P 64-core variant even. You can have double the CPU cores that are each 2x faster than the Graviton 2 CPU cores.
Which gets back to only Apple has managed to get ARM to have good per-core performance so far.
> Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.
The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.
Disclosure: I work at AWS building cloud infrastructure
> The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.
c6g.16xlarge is more than 10% cheaper than m6g.16xlarge (and c5a.16xlarge). It also provides more EBS and network bandwidth, and provides 64 cores versus 32 cores with SMT.
I actually agree that x86 will dominate the desktop for quite a while yet. I also agree that EPYC has materially better performance than the Graviton - Rome is very impressive.
Just can't agree though that only Apple has the ability to make desktop / server Arm parts that don't have 'terrible' per core performance. The real issue is who has the economic incentive to build competitive desktop parts - I don't see anyone who would see it as worthwhile.
That's the fundamental problem with the Apple monopoly. I would be perfectly happy if I could use an non-Apple laptop with an outdated Apple SoC. However, since only Apple gets access to their SoCs everyone is worse off.
c5a and m6g instances are the same price, but m6gs have twice as much memory. c6g instances are a better point of comparison for c5a – same vCPU count still, same memory, marginally better network at 8xlarge and up, and about 88% of the price.
However, there is a real challenge here and that's who has the capability and incentives to make laptop and desktop Arm cores. Microsoft probably, but hard to see many other firms doing so.
So a scenario where Apple gains a material lead in desktop and laptop performance over everyone else and grows market share as a result seems quite credible.