Ask Paul: June 26 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Not surprisingly, this week’s Apple announcements have triggered a wave of questions. So let’s dive right in.
PC performance
ErichK asks:

Paul -- do you think we'll ever hit a wall with how sophisticated and fast computers will get? After all these days we almost take for granted that even an average PC has more power than a mainframe from the early '90s. Engineers have to work so hard to give us these gains. I just wonder if it's ever going to come to an end, or at least plateau a great deal. Plus, it takes a large team of people nowadays just to make one chip. It's like an operating system -- I sometimes wonder if Windows will keep expanding to a point where the collective IQ of the people that work on it will not be enough to handle it. (Of course, there's some hope -- seems like every year, there's a new contender for the top of the supercomputer list.)

In writing the article about AMD’s energy efficiency milestone, I had to look up Moore’s Law because I was curiously vague on the timeframe for that prediction. As it turns out, that is because the “law” has changed over time: When it was first introduced, Moore said that the number of components in integrated circuits would double every year. But that was modified over time to 18 months and then 2 years. Today, we pretty much don’t really talk about Moore’s Law anymore, in part, I think, because the performance gains are really slowing down. Even a several year-old PC would probably be fine for virtually anyone.

These days, the talk is about performance-per-watt, which his a deliciously skewed way to describe performance, because it values low-power---i.e. ARM chips---over actual power. But PCs and workstations aimed at gamers, engineers, developers, and other power users literally just need performance, energy-efficiency be damned. And this is one of the biggest unknowns of the Apple transition, how it will maintain/improve on performance on desktop systems.

But with regards to Windows, Microsoft, like Apple, has long understood that mainstream personal computing was all heading to thin, light, and portable, ideally in devices with no fans. And that was what was behind the ARM push, fundamentally, to force Intel to compete effectively in that space and have multiple suppliers of chipsets that could meet that need. That Apple can just go it alone in this area has got to be frustrating to Microsoft.

The next year or so is going to be very interesting.
Windows on Intel silicon
lvthunder asks:

Do you think Microsoft will make Windows 10 work on the Apple based silicone? If they want competition in the chip space pitting Apple, Qualcom, Intel, and AMD go at it would be great.

So there are two possibilities here. That Microsoft would literally partner with Apple to make it a fourth supplier for chips that come inside Windows-based PCs, and that Microsoft would port Windows 10 on ARM to Apple silicon so that it could run on Macs.

But ...

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