Industry insiders pointed out that Apple replaced Intel's processor with the M1 series, not only because the performance is enough, but also because its power consumption is low enough to effectively save power and help design more compact Macs. BoMing Technology believes that the M1's excellent energy efficiency performance will not only end Intel's PC business, but also lead to the collapse of the entire X86.
First, the Apple M1 breaks the performance shackles of ARM
Apple's M1 ultra has been comparable to Intel's 12th-generation i9 processor in terms of performance, although Geekbench believes that it surpasses the latter, but other performance test software data shows that Intel's i9 is stronger, but this is amazing enough, comparable to it broke the performance shackles of the ARM architecture.
The excellence of the M1 Ultra is that its energy efficiency is too amazing, in the case of performance close to the i9, the power consumption is much lower, the M1 Ultra design power consumption is only 60W, and Intel's 12th generation i9 power consumption reaches 125W, in the case of high load, the power gap between the two will be even greater, not to mention that the M1 Ultra not only has a CPU but also integrates a gpu with excellent performance, so a comparison can be seen that the M1 Ultra's CPU energy efficiency is frighteningly higher.
The emergence of the M1 Ultra means that the ARM architecture can not only replace Intel's PC processors, it points the way for the ARM camp, arm architecture can develop powerful server chips and still have the advantage of low power consumption, which may destroy Intel and AMD's X86 PC processor and server business.
Second, Intel's server chip advantages
Consumers are mainly exposed to Intel's PC processors, in fact, the more important business for Intel is the server business. The server business provides intel with most of the profits, and in the current AMD and its increasingly fierce competition, the importance of the server business is more prominent, Intel still occupies more than 90% of the market share in the server chip market, if you add AMD's server chips, X86 architecture accounts for nearly 99% of the server chip market share.
X86 server chip price is too expensive, in the past decade, due to the fierce competition in the PC processor market, Intel has to continue to reduce the price of PC processors, and in the server chip market is a continuous price increase, because there is no competition, which has led to server suppliers and Internet companies with data centers, etc., but due to the ecological advantages of X86 server chips, and the lack of challengers, they still have to endure Intel's hegemony.
In the past ARM camp has appeared a number of server chip companies to challenge Intel, unfortunately most of them have become martyrs, Qualcomm has also launched server chips but only gave up in one year, and now only Huawei is still insisting, and Huawei has also successfully promoted arm architecture server chips in the domestic market, but the market share is quite limited.
ARM architecture is difficult to break the monopoly position of X86 server chips, on the one hand, ecological problems, on the other hand, the performance of the previous ARM server chips is too weak, and now the emergence of Apple M1 Ultra proves that the ARM architecture can actually develop a chip with enough performance comparable to X86 but still has enough low power consumption, which will prompt more chip companies to develop ARM architecture server chips.
Third, the ARM architecture is expected to end Intel's server chip business
For the data center, energy consumption has become its huge cost, in 2017, a public analysis data shows that the electricity cost of China's data center accounts for 60%-70% of the total cost of data center operation and maintenance, while the electricity used by air conditioners accounts for 40% of it, and the power used in the data center is only about 30% for computing, and the rest are dissipated, and a huge amount of energy is consumed to assist in heat dissipation, which shows how amazing the energy wasted by the X86 server chip is.
The energy occupied by data centers is still rising, because the existing data is in the blowout stage, the demand for data centers is soaring, the energy consumption caused by X86 server chips not only makes it difficult for enterprises to bear the huge burden of energy costs, but also causes huge carbon emissions, in order to reduce the energy consumption of data centers, various Internet companies have come up with many strange tricks, such as Microsoft will set up data centers on the seabed, facebook will set up data centers in cold Sweden. It can be seen how much effort they have made to dissipate heat from the data center.
Today, Apple's M1 ultra consumes only half of the power consumption of the i9, one-third of the server chips of Intel and AMD, but the performance is quite close, which provides a new choice for these data center customers, ARM architecture server chips not only greatly reduce power consumption, greatly reduced heat generation also helps to significantly reduce air conditioning costs, while providing sufficient performance while reducing energy consumption costs can be expected to be more than half, so enough to attract these data centers to accelerate the adoption of ARM architecture server chips.
In this way, the ARM architecture will not only replace the X86 in the PC processor market, but also in the server chip market to destroy the X86, this terrible prospect should not be what Intel wants to see, no wonder Intel has been interested in RISC-V since last year, perhaps it has seen the future of X86 being completely replaced?