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If you believe that, then you've either been accidentally ignoring Apple's chip R&D over the past three years, or intentionally spinning it against them out of

by 013a 6y ago

If you believe that, then you've either been accidentally ignoring Apple's chip R&D over the past three years, or intentionally spinning it against them out of some more general dislike of the company. The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan. The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling. We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.

pja 6y ago
The Ryzen 9 is a 16 (32 hyperthreads) core CPU, the A14 is a 2 big / 4 little core CPU. Power draw on an integer workload per thread seems roughly equivalent.
hajile 6y ago
Not all geekbench scores are created equal. Comparing ARM and x86 scores is an exercise in futility as there are simply too many factors to work through. It also doesn't include all workload types. For example, I can say with 100% confidence that M1 has nowhere near 32MB of onboard cache. Once it starts hitting cache limits, it's performance will drop off a cliff as fast cores that can't be fed are just slow cores. It's also worth noting that around 30% of the AMD power budget is just Infinity Fabric (hypertransport 4.0). When things get wide and you have to manage that much wider complexity, the resulting control circuitry has a big effect on power consumption too. All that said, I do wonder how much of a part the ISA plays here.
- 013a 6y ago
  M1 has 16MB of L2 cache; 12MB dedicated to the HP cores and 4MB dedicated to the LP cores. Another important consideration is the on-SOC DRAM. This is really incomparable to anything else on the market, x86 or ARM, so its hard to say how this will impact performance, but it may help alleviate the need for a larger cache. I think its pretty clear that Apple has something special here when we're quibbling about the cache and power draw per core differences of a 10 watt chip versus a 100 watt one; its missing the bigger picture that Apple did this at 10 watts. They're so far beyond their own class, and the next two above it, that we're frantically trying to explain it as anything except alien technology by drawing comparisons to chips which require power supplies the size of sixteen iPhones. Even if they were just short of mobile i9 performance (they're not), this would still be a massive feat of engineering worthy of an upgrade.
  - john_alan 6y ago
    Really interesting analysis. So you expect the M1 MBP will outpace the more expensive Intel 13 MBP they are selling for more money!! How would that not destroy sales of their “higher end” intel MBP 13? If so do you think it will be better across most workload types?
    - julienb_sea 6y ago
      I don't see why they would care that they are destroying sales of the intel MBP 13. Let consumers buy what they want - the M1 chip is likely far higher profit margins than the intel variant, and encouraging consumers to the Apple chip model is definitely a profit driver. Some people especially developers may be skeptical of leaving x86 at this stage. I think the smart ones would just delay a laptop purchase until ARM is proven with docker and other developer workflows. Another consideration - companies buying Apple machines will likely stay on Intel for a longer time, as supporting both Intel and ARM from an enterprise IT perspective just sounds like a PITA.
      - theptip 6y ago
        Docker runs in a VM on MacOS anyway, it’s not running on bare metal. Is instruction-set even relevant in that world?
imtringued 6y ago
Last time I checked the TDP/frequency curve of Apple's chips was unimpressive [0]. If you crank it up to 4Ghz it's going to be as "bad" or even worse than a Ryzen CPU in terms of power consumption per core. There is no free lunch. Mobile chips simply run at a lower frequency and ARM SoCs usually have heterogenous cores. >but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. This just means you know nothing about processor performance or benchmarks. If it was that easy to increase performance by a factor of 3x why hasn't AMD done so? Why did they only manage a 20% increase in IPC instead of your predicted 200%? [0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve_575px.pn...
- willyt 6y ago
  Isn’t this a RISC vs CISC thing though? AMD and Intel use a lot of complicated stuff to emulate the x86 instructions with a VM running on a RISC core. Apple controls hardware and software including LLVM so they compile efficient RISC code right from the get go. It’s their vertical integration thing again.
  - willyt 6y ago
    Don't just downvote me, explain. I'm asking because I'm interested. Why is my hypothesis wrong?
  - JVIDEL 6y ago
    You got a point in the optimization part, it's difficult to compare both chips when you're running on completely different OSs, specially when one of them ruins a specially optimized OS like ios The closest it could get I think would be running a variant of Unix optimized for the Ryzen.
  - willyt 6y ago
    RISC v CISC https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/ https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/05/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/05/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-...
harrisonjackson 6y ago
My point was this is marketing spin. There's no way to say what "faster" means or what 98% they used. Is it faster than 98/100 models? or faster than 98% of the 261M laptops sold in 2019? "faster than 98% of laptops sold last year" is a nice quotable soundbyte that will be spread without any of those details. I'm actually a big fan of Apple's products. I'm sure all the numbers, R&D, and benchmarking will prove the M1 to be impressive.
vonseel 6y ago
I don't know much about this stuff but if all this is true then I don't see what's holding AMD / Intel back. Can't they just reverse-engineer whatever magic Apple comes up with, and that will lead to similar leaps in performance?

by 013a 6y ago

pja 6y ago

The Ryzen 9 is a 16 (32 hyperthreads) core CPU, the A14 is a 2 big / 4 little core CPU. Power draw on an integer workload per thread seems roughly equivalent.

hajile 6y ago

Not all geekbench scores are created equal. Comparing ARM and x86 scores is an exercise in futility as there are simply too many factors to work through. It also doesn't include all workload types. For example, I can say with 100% confidence that M1 has nowhere near 32MB of onboard cache. Once it starts hitting cache limits, it's performance will drop off a cliff as fast cores that can't be fed are just slow cores. It's also worth noting that around 30% of the AMD power budget is just Infinity Fabric (hypertransport 4.0). When things get wide and you have to manage that much wider complexity, the resulting control circuitry has a big effect on power consumption too. All that said, I do wonder how much of a part the ISA plays here.

013a 6y ago
M1 has 16MB of L2 cache; 12MB dedicated to the HP cores and 4MB dedicated to the LP cores. Another important consideration is the on-SOC DRAM. This is really incomparable to anything else on the market, x86 or ARM, so its hard to say how this will impact performance, but it may help alleviate the need for a larger cache. I think its pretty clear that Apple has something special here when we're quibbling about the cache and power draw per core differences of a 10 watt chip versus a 100 watt one; its missing the bigger picture that Apple did this at 10 watts. They're so far beyond their own class, and the next two above it, that we're frantically trying to explain it as anything except alien technology by drawing comparisons to chips which require power supplies the size of sixteen iPhones. Even if they were just short of mobile i9 performance (they're not), this would still be a massive feat of engineering worthy of an upgrade.
- john_alan 6y ago
  Really interesting analysis. So you expect the M1 MBP will outpace the more expensive Intel 13 MBP they are selling for more money!! How would that not destroy sales of their “higher end” intel MBP 13? If so do you think it will be better across most workload types?
  - julienb_sea 6y ago
    I don't see why they would care that they are destroying sales of the intel MBP 13. Let consumers buy what they want - the M1 chip is likely far higher profit margins than the intel variant, and encouraging consumers to the Apple chip model is definitely a profit driver. Some people especially developers may be skeptical of leaving x86 at this stage. I think the smart ones would just delay a laptop purchase until ARM is proven with docker and other developer workflows. Another consideration - companies buying Apple machines will likely stay on Intel for a longer time, as supporting both Intel and ARM from an enterprise IT perspective just sounds like a PITA.
    - theptip 6y ago
      Docker runs in a VM on MacOS anyway, it’s not running on bare metal. Is instruction-set even relevant in that world?

imtringued 6y ago

Last time I checked the TDP/frequency curve of Apple's chips was unimpressive [0]. If you crank it up to 4Ghz it's going to be as "bad" or even worse than a Ryzen CPU in terms of power consumption per core. There is no free lunch. Mobile chips simply run at a lower frequency and ARM SoCs usually have heterogenous cores. >but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. This just means you know nothing about processor performance or benchmarks. If it was that easy to increase performance by a factor of 3x why hasn't AMD done so? Why did they only manage a 20% increase in IPC instead of your predicted 200%? [0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve_575px.pn...

willyt 6y ago
Isn’t this a RISC vs CISC thing though? AMD and Intel use a lot of complicated stuff to emulate the x86 instructions with a VM running on a RISC core. Apple controls hardware and software including LLVM so they compile efficient RISC code right from the get go. It’s their vertical integration thing again.
- willyt 6y ago
  Don't just downvote me, explain. I'm asking because I'm interested. Why is my hypothesis wrong?
- JVIDEL 6y ago
  You got a point in the optimization part, it's difficult to compare both chips when you're running on completely different OSs, specially when one of them ruins a specially optimized OS like ios The closest it could get I think would be running a variant of Unix optimized for the Ryzen.
- willyt 6y ago
  RISC v CISC https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/ https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/05/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/05/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-...

harrisonjackson 6y ago

My point was this is marketing spin. There's no way to say what "faster" means or what 98% they used. Is it faster than 98/100 models? or faster than 98% of the 261M laptops sold in 2019? "faster than 98% of laptops sold last year" is a nice quotable soundbyte that will be spread without any of those details. I'm actually a big fan of Apple's products. I'm sure all the numbers, R&D, and benchmarking will prove the M1 to be impressive.

vonseel 6y ago

I don't know much about this stuff but if all this is true then I don't see what's holding AMD / Intel back. Can't they just reverse-engineer whatever magic Apple comes up with, and that will lead to similar leaps in performance?