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Both of IBM's current chip architectures, Z and POWER9, are indeed interesting.

Apple hasn't shipped their "desktop class" architecture yet.

Perhaps you are frustrated by the design constraints of low power mobile chips. Ok.

But if you're paying attention, architecture wise, it may be of interest to note that Apple's ARM chips, so far, have delivered good performance in their handheld applications by careful attention to sustained memory bandwidth. Competitors went with more CPU cores.

So there's some fun chip architecture to be had, even in 2020.

A desktop Apple architecture might use something like HBM for main memory, rather than DIMMs.

There's lots of room to innovate, out there in consumer computing.



Memory bandwidth is generally kind of needed to take advantage of more cores.

Last time I checked, Z had 500gb/sec; more than 10x Apple's. Kind of wish IBM had won processor wars. Generally speaking whenever I look at their mainframe doodads, then look at the hot garbage being slung over at Amazon or whatever FAANG shit hole, it makes me sad. The company with the best engineers is an also-ran that mostly sells consultant hours. Maybe they'll sell off the mainframe business independent of the rest of the horse shit and it will undergo a renaissance. Doubt it though.




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