Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "How ARM Saved Apple" video.

  1. PowerPC was quite an efficient chip when it came out. The best Intel could do in 1993/1994 was the Pentium 60/66, which came in a huge package the size of a VHS videocassette. By about 1995/1996, though I think Intel had moved to a new process, so the newer-generation Pentium 75 and Pentium 90 were much more performance-competitive, and also power-consumption-competitive even against the new PowerPC 603 and 604 chips. I said at the time, they were probably spending 10× as much on their chip designs as Apple-IBM-Motorola were spending on PowerPC ones, but then, Intel were selling into a market 10× the size, so they could afford more complex chip designs. Nowadays, PowerPC has been subsumed back into IBM’s POWER architecture. And it still offers good price/performance. You will see several POWER-based machines near the top of the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers.
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  2. The company that owns what’s left of the MIPS IP is now called Imagination Technologies. They’ve gone all-in on RISC-V now.
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  3. Apple machines only seem to get their performance by tying everything together into a monolithic mass, so you can’t upgrade anything. Basically all their machines now are glorified laptops.
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  4. Do you mean number zero or digit zero? Digit zero came from India.
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  5. The latest-generation Raspberry Pi 5 has been launched.
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  6. If you want to see how Taiwan might respond to an invasion from you-know-who, just look at Ukraine.
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