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Ask HN: Why can Apple out CPU Intel?
Seems Apple are moving to their own chips for many reasons, but commercial ones aside, I see reports of Apple chips operating at 25-30% better thermal efficiency than their Intel counterparts.
My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the heat/performance ratio? And why couldn't Intel? Is it just that Intel can not embrace ARM or is it an issue of backwards compatibility forced on Intel that makes their chips so inefficient in comparison?
Seems like building a CPU is a very non trivial task and seems this current situation would be similar to Intel making it's own laptops.
- stevespang 6y agoIntel will never cave to ARM's technology being more efficient than theirs, it's a matter of pride and not being able to admit defeat . . . (my ex worked as a manager at Intel 15 years in verification and recently bailed for Apple)
- wmf 6y agoIt's mostly because TSMC's fabs are curently better than Intel's fabs. If Intel's fabs catch up their processors will likely have very similar efficiency to Apple's.
- perl4ever 6y agoSo, dumb question, why can't Intel contract with TSMC then?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThey could, but any money Intel pays TSMC is money they aren't investing in their own fabs. Intel has invested a lot in their fabs, and they really could catch up. It could perhaps be argued that Intel is playing into the sunk-cost fallacy, but I really don't think they're far enough behind for that yet.
- mappu 6y ago- The bad optics would tank their share price - TSMC have limited capacity - Intel's designs are tightly coupled to their own foundry (hence the Skylake rehashes instead of porting the improved Ice Lake architecture back to the 14nm process) - Intel are still improving their own foundry processes. By the time the above could be solved, Intel's own 10nm may be improved, or their 7nm process might be ready
- exmadscientist 6y agoIntel locked their designs not just to their own fabs, but to specific processes. Most other companies don't do this. It buys you better, more optimized performance, but completely prevents design transfer. This really bit Intel when their P1274 ("10nm") did not work for years, leaving manufacturing stuck on P1272 ("14nm")... with microarchitectures designed for P1274 and unable to be easily ported. They could have invested in porting -- it's not impossible, only resource-intensive -- but the manufacturing group kept insisting P1274 was about to enter HVM... for years... so the designs were never ported. In hindsight, this appears to have been a serious blunder.
- jhallenworld 6y agoI'm curious about the design tool different between Intel and TSMC.. it's likely that Intel has non-standard tools. An indication of this is how much time it took to move Altera's FPGAs to Intel's process. https://semiaccurate.com/2019/09/23/altera-releases-stratix-fpgas-years-late/ https://semiaccurate.com/2019/09/23/altera-releases-stratix-...
- kungato 6y agoIs there any a bit bigger writeup/interview about this? Did they abandon this approach or are they still sticking with it?
- wmf 6y agoIntel announced that future cores will be portable to multiple processes, although it's not clear whether that includes non-Intel ones. It is rumored that the upcoming Rocket Lake is a 14 nm backport of Willow Cove that was originally intended for 10 nm.
- topkai22 6y agoLet me answer by way of another question- "Why can't Google move its cloud servers to AWS?" If a major company like that adopged a competitors product, huge numbers of customers would question why they are on the platform/product in the first place.
- goatinaboat 6y agoLet me answer by way of another question- "Why can't Google move its cloud servers to AWS?" I don’t think that’s a good analogy because e.g. Apple does use other cloud providers. There are two sides to the Intel coin, the design itself and the manufacturing process. If people really want the design they won’t care who makes it.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> Apple does use other cloud providers. But unlike Google, they don't have their own cloud.
- topkai22 6y agoExactly. If you want to be pedantic they do sell cloud services but not cloud infrastructure. A more dramatic comparison would be Apple putting android on some of thier devices.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoQue ? Apple have a slew of data centers, they have iCloud which handles mail, messages, storage etc. They use AWS for some stuff but they most certainly do have their own cloud, or Mike Abbot is fooling a Eddie Cue really well.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoOh, so they do, looks like my knowledge was outdated! https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/25/aws-halved-spending-apple-cloud/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/25/aws-halved-spending-apple-clo...
- 0xy 6y agoIntel's ego is way too large. It's essentially an admission of defeat. AMD dumped their fabs years ago and it is without a doubt the best thing they've ever done, and it should be a case study on excellent business management. I'm just an outsider, but it seems like Intel is a slowly sinking ship run by money and operations guys -- in contrast to the brilliant Dr Lisa Su at AMD who actually has an extensive semiconductor background.
- rayiner 6y agoNo. Apple’s architecture is much better too.
- johnklos 6y agoIntel is a one-trick pony. When all you have is x86, then x86 becomes the answer to everything. CISC offered an interesting advantage to RISC - if you have instructions for everything, then given a long enough time frame, you could optimize the heck out of each and every instruction, so the advantages of RISC would be minimal. However, x86 is purely ugly hackery with such ridiculously variable instruction lengths, a paucity of registers and enhancements which have been made more in the interest of marketing than in actual progress (see Linus' recent comments about AVX-512). x86 still could be optimized, but you end up over a long enough time with what we have now - so much extra silicon handling so many edge cases and making attempts to eek tiny performance gains out of an ugly, horrible ISA that even the best of what 2020 has to offer can't compete with a clean architecture like ARM that doesn't have all that crappy legacy. The fact that AMD has outperformed Intel is also telling - AMD went back to the drawing board, probably not just proverbially, and reinvented ways to get that horrible instruction set to perform better, which is probably something Intel has wished they had the foresight to start to do ten years ago. It's also telling that Intel's security has been as bad as it has - it shows that Intel has cared about performance to the precise detriment of security. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars of legacy you have pushing the architecture if you're constantly operating at a pronounced disadvantage. Even now, Intel is pretending that their big / little x86 cores is something new. ARM has been doing that for almost a decade.
- rayiner 6y agox86 has nothing to do with this. x86 decode is a tiny portion of the area on a modern x86 chip. It’s all mapped onto fixed length ops early in the pipeline (and these days, cached in that form) and registers are remapped using hardware you need for out of order execution anyway. The fact that AMD outperformed Intel isn’t “telling”—it disproves your point. Intel’s recent setbacks are due to its process engineering. Intel counts on being one or two steps ahead in the process front. They stumbled with 10mm and that caused the whole development pipeline to seize up. They have a next gen architecture (Sunny Cove) that is stuck on a bad 10nm process, and a prior-gen architecture that’s stuck on a very good but dated 14nm process.
- jki275 6y agoIntel is not alone in speculative execution security flaws. Your indictment of them on this is overwrought -- everyone has security issues.
- coldtea 6y ago>My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the heat/performance ratio? 25-30% is not what I'd call a "massive jump".
- 2fast4you 6y agoThat’s pretty big...
- raasdnil 6y agoAnd more to the point, its in the area of their achilles heel, "heat per performance"... my macbook pro gets pretty toasty.
- coldtea 6y agoRelatively big compared to recent progress maybe. Massive? Hardly. In chip density (and performance) we had Moore's law which doubled the density/performance every 18-24 months. Now THAT was massive...
- pjbster 6y agoIntel could become dominant as a cloud service provider. They have the engineering resources and the facilities to build bespoke datacenters running servers built on their own SoC's running their own ISA on their own Linux kernel. Scrap the idea of selling cpus on the open market; they can optimise their silicon for cloud operations and make the margins on services. If AWS or Microsoft decide they need to have an in-house fab capability, I wonder if Intel will become a takeover target?
- tinus_hn 6y agoIt helps if you don’t have to drag along compatibility with 40 year old obsolete technology.
- flohofwoe 6y ago42 years old obsolete technology isn't that much different than 35 years old obsolete technology though ;)
- spacedcowboy 6y agoApple’s ARM is 64-bit only. And it’s an internal-to-Apple design that doesn’t have to be compatible to ARM in general. Apples burden of backwards compatibility is essentially zero at this point, it’s a totally new architecture.
- wmf 6y agodoesn’t have to be compatible to ARM in general It does now because of Linux VMs. They added back 4K pages, for example.
- magicmouse 6y agoIntel saw the ARM juggernaut coming years ago after they trounced AMD, which was their only serious competition. They knew their chips were faster, but they took too much power for mobile devices. So they have been concentrating exclusively not on performance improvements, but in lowering power consumption, which they have done an excellent job at doing. They have deliberately slowed down their tick/tock speed of development because they know they are reaching the end of the road, and will nothing to improve upon because the physical limits of silicon as a material are being approached. Other materials are possible, but very costly. Apple wants to bring their huge iOS software library to their laptops. OSX has been declining for years as a software market, and fewer products are being made for it. In contrast, Apple has millions of excellent titles in IOS, but they all use ARM instruction set. So this allows them to unify the software availability. The laptop computers Apple sells are a small part of their business, they know that in the future computers are a commodity and won't be profitable, but software will be, and they want to capitalize on their iTunes App Store which is the largest employer of independent software developers in the entire world. It is a bigger publishing entity than all of the US book publishers put together. With a 70% royalty rate paid to authors, it is also the highest paying publisher in the history of the world. It is common in Music and Book publishing to pay around 5% royalties. Steve Jobs really disrupted that industry with a new economic model! Hooray for Jobs! We sure miss him. I bet he would be opening his own bank and credit card, as that industry is ripe for revolution; the credit card companies are still ripping off businesses by taking 3% on a transaction, when 0.3% would be more reasonable given modern technology. The ARM chips, just like intel chips, will be thermally limited in all these laptops. Its very hard to extract the heat without going to water cooling which nobody has the nerve to do.
- Traster 6y agoIt does seem insane that a company would be able to just decide to start doing chip design and could do it better than Intel. But you can see how it happened. Apple obviously went for ARM in the first iPhone using a Samsung chip. It quickly became apparent that Samsung were going to be a competitor, and that the CPU is going to be a differentiator for the iPhone. So in 2008 Apple bought PA Semi, and started building that team up to produce a custom version of the iPhone chip - and that was a massive success, releasing their first chip in the iPhone 4 in 2010. So Apple have been designing their own CPUs for a decade now. Over that time, they've been massively focused on performance through efficiency - because they're concerned about battery life, power dissipation etc. Whereas Intel has been making bank by designing more and more powerful processors for the data centre. Of course Apple don't fabricate their own chips - they go to fabs like TSMC to actually manufacture the chips. Whereas Intel does that themselves. It's worth noting that TSMC is more of a direct competitor to Intel (they fab AMD chips too) and they've been executing their road map better than Intel have for a few years now.
- cgb223 6y agoSo if AMD or Intel wanted to wreck Apple Silicon they could just acquire TSMC? Or are there a lot of other TSMC-like companies?
- samfisher83 6y agoTSMC has a bigger market cap than intel, amd, nvdia etc. Even though Intel generates more cash than all those companies.
- wmf 6y agoBTW the iPod was using Samsung ARM SoCs before the iPhone, so they had even more experience.
- anthony_barker 6y agoThey have a lot of cash are and are looking for growth. The best way is to go up the supply chain. Using arm you tapping into a huge industry of people who know how to make chips. Plus as others said TSMC are ahead of Intel and will actually be making the chips.
- totalZero 6y agoThey can't out-CPU Intel. They can out-CPU Intel's 10nm.
- ksec 6y agoTl;DR, It is TSMC, not Apple. I have been thinking starting a blog on the topic considering how often this question keeps popping up. From a very high level overview. 1. Apple is partnering with TSMC. TSMC is now the leader in leading edge semiconductor manufacturing. A title that used to belong to Intel. 2. TSMC is now a generation ahead of Intel, meaning those thermal efficiency you see comes from using a better node. Nothing much to do with ARM or x86. 3. Both ARM and TSMC has dramatically change the Industry, you can now buy Designs / Blueprints from ARM, ( Or any other IP vendors such as Img PowerVR ) and Fab ( meaning producing them ) them with a Foundry. 4. TSMC is a Pure Play Foundry, meaning the Foundry does not produce their own chip and sell in the market to compete with its customers. A Non Pure Play Example would be Samsung or Intel, where Samsung produce their own Mobile SoC Exynos, and Intel with their x86 Chip. If you were Qualcomm producing your chip in Samsung's Fab, you are directly competing with them. 5. Apple now has the volume, or economy of scale to produce CPU themselves. Apple makes more silicon in unit volume than Intel per year. So the inevitable Question: Why Doesn't Intel go to TSMC then? Intel would earn more margins by producing it themselves. Second being moving these designs take years, especially for Intel which have their own design tools in house. Intel cares about margins, and you can tell from their investor meetings.
- ekr 6y agoWhile TSMC is cleary a big part of the reason, it still doesn't explain why there's such a big performance gap between Apple's SoCs and the rest of the competitors in the ARM smartphone SoCs field. Apple is often leading the likes of Samsung, Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek by a whole generation in IPC or single threaded performance.
- ksec 6y agoApple's has much better CPU core budget than Qualcomm's counterpart. Before 5G, All Qualcomm's SoC has integrated Modem within. Mean while Apple has Modem as separate piece of Silicon. ARM has been very up front about it. It is not that they cant design much higher IPC CPU Core, they are designing around the transistor budget that their customers are focusing.
- 6y ago
- devxpy 6y agoThere's a lot of contribution here from Jim keller, a.k.a. the silicon ronin. He was the one who designed A4/A5 - the very first apple silicon, that I distinctly remember having performance on par with other offerings at the time.
- devxpy 6y agoHmm, maybe am I wrong on this? Can the down-voter educate me?
- techiefreak21 6y agoits all about architecture of chips . apple has technology to achieve it & that doesnt mean intel is not having thier technology to make it possible its all about company usp . if they will get their ROI then they will continue otherwise just take an example if intel will make performance base chip same price as apple ? which one you will prefer ?