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The CPU gains on ARM have been increasing consistently year over year for the past decade. People have posted benchmarks of the A11/ A12/ A13 versus Intel for a

The CPU gains on ARM have been increasing consistently year over year for the past decade. People have posted benchmarks of the A11/ A12/ A13 versus Intel for a while so this has been pretty obvious. It's just surfacing because suddenly we have a desktop CPU with desktop software like compilers and other things where it's more obvious outside of benchmark tools. Apple is just jumping onto their existing ARM track, once they migrate their product line, which has surpassed Intel. Once they've migrated all their lines to ARM, the performance gains will be more like they have been on the iPhone/ iPad over the past few years. Mostly 20-30%/ year.

sudhirj 6y ago
Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Yes, ARM is one piece of many. (Commented about this above) Though I suspect if Qualcomm were able to source a TSMC 5nm chip, it would be more competitive with Apple than Intel is at this point though. Apple has a lot of other things going for it where Qualcomm lags (the Secure Enclave, graphics performance, audio and photo processing, the neural engine etc etc)
  - selectodude 6y ago
    Debatable. Qualcomm operates under a strict transistor budget because their chips lack a dedicated customer willing to pay what it costs to develop an ultra-wide CPU like this. Apple knows they're going to sell 100+ million of whatever core they make so they're able to more easily amortize and justify the costs of development. Intel gets no such benefit of the doubt. I have no idea what on earth is going on over there.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Agreed. What I was trying to get at is that the ARM designs plus the TSMC fabs are a big part of Apple's success here. The pieces are out there where someone else could put together an ARM based package that's more competitive with Apple. In retrospect, maybe it's more likely to see something like this from Nvidia than Qualcomm. Even then, it's hard to say how competitive that CPU would be. Just based on Microsoft's Surface with it's half-assed Qualcomm CPU, it seems feasible though.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Qualcomm spend their time and energy on gaining monopoly lock-ins via standards committees, not building better chips.
  - robotnikman 6y ago
    Qualcomm seems to be stagnating just like Intel at the moment, it will be a few years until high performance ARM chips come to non-Apple devices, unless Microsoft can strong arm them for their Surface line I'm guessing the high performance ARM chips for non-Apple devices will be coming from Nvidia or Samsung in the future
bryanlarsen 6y ago
IMO, this has little to do with it being ARM. 30 years ago ARM had a significant micro architectural advantage in performance per watt, but in this era of 10 billion transistor chips, that advantage has disappeared. x86_64 rationalized the x86 architecture and decode is such a small fraction of the power budget that it really doesn't matter anyways. What does matter, IMO: - assembling a killer team - 5nm process - high speed, low latency DRAM - big-little
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Yes, a combination of things around Apple's A series CPUs. ARM has been improving much faster than Intel. Apple has been executing ARM much better than anyone else. Apple's auxiliary processors and integration have been top notch. TSMC has been crushing Intel in getting to 5nm.
- epistasis 6y ago
  I'm no expert, but the only big architectural differences are a massively larger decoder and a reorder buffer that's several times as large as x86 designs. If these are actually the reasons for the performance difference, and it's difficult to do these on x86 because of the instruction set, it seems to this amateur that ARM64 really does have an advantage over x86.
  - twoodfin 6y ago
    Don't forget ARM's more relaxed memory model vs. x86's TSO.
    - unsigner 6y ago
      One of the reasons Rosetta 2 works so well is Apple silicon sticks to the more restricted x86 memory model.
      - enzo1982 6y ago
        Does it? Apple's documentation seems to disagree [1]: "A weak memory ordering model, like the one in Apple silicon, gives the processor more flexibility to reorder memory instructions and improve performance, but doesn’t add implicit memory barriers." [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/addressing_architectural_differences_in_your_macos_code https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/addr...
AgloeDreams 6y ago
I think another shock here is that a lot of people discredited the ability of ARM cpus as well. Back when the iPad Pro with the A10X came out, Apple claimed it was faster than half of all Laptops sold and people in the PC space were yamming on and on about how numbers don't show how much better x86 cpus are at 'desktop stuff' and that ARM cpus can't equal x86, even with the same thermal envelope and shouldn't ever be compared. Ironically, many are now stating that the reason why they are so good is because of ARM, which isn't true either lol.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >people in the PC space were yamming on and on about how numbers don't show how much better x86 cpus are at 'desktop stuff' and that ARM cpus can't equal x86, even with the same thermal envelope and shouldn't ever be compared. It needs 30W at 4 cores 3.2Ghz. Ryzen needs around 5W per core but it's on a worse process. The entire system does use less power than a x86 system but that has nothing to do with the processor. It's more about how the SoC is arranged and that RAM is (almost) on the same package. It means they can get away with higher bandwidth and lower power consumption for the entire system. The idea that it's all about the processor is completely wrong. Yet all we have heard is how fanboys cry it's going to be 3x faster than desktop CPUs because of misleading TDP numbers.
  - AgloeDreams 6y ago
    As far as we know, all four large cores at max plus the 4 small is ~20W. Whole chip max power use is 30W including GPU and the ML processor. Ryzen also blows a lot of power on things other than cores but AMD is absolutely the closest to this however. The hard thing for them is that the Big/Little arch is a huge advantage for battery use at idle. I would say the game being played here is that Apple is betting on this to scale all the way up for fast burst but they know that the real advantage is that their cores can also scale much much lower than anything out there. Less about magical performance gains and more about remarkable power use paired with much better power management lessons learned by making smartphones. Qualcomm could do this too if they actually cared about it.

sudhirj 6y ago

Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Yes, ARM is one piece of many. (Commented about this above) Though I suspect if Qualcomm were able to source a TSMC 5nm chip, it would be more competitive with Apple than Intel is at this point though. Apple has a lot of other things going for it where Qualcomm lags (the Secure Enclave, graphics performance, audio and photo processing, the neural engine etc etc)
- selectodude 6y ago
  Debatable. Qualcomm operates under a strict transistor budget because their chips lack a dedicated customer willing to pay what it costs to develop an ultra-wide CPU like this. Apple knows they're going to sell 100+ million of whatever core they make so they're able to more easily amortize and justify the costs of development. Intel gets no such benefit of the doubt. I have no idea what on earth is going on over there.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Agreed. What I was trying to get at is that the ARM designs plus the TSMC fabs are a big part of Apple's success here. The pieces are out there where someone else could put together an ARM based package that's more competitive with Apple. In retrospect, maybe it's more likely to see something like this from Nvidia than Qualcomm. Even then, it's hard to say how competitive that CPU would be. Just based on Microsoft's Surface with it's half-assed Qualcomm CPU, it seems feasible though.
rodgerd 6y ago
Qualcomm spend their time and energy on gaining monopoly lock-ins via standards committees, not building better chips.
- robotnikman 6y ago
  Qualcomm seems to be stagnating just like Intel at the moment, it will be a few years until high performance ARM chips come to non-Apple devices, unless Microsoft can strong arm them for their Surface line I'm guessing the high performance ARM chips for non-Apple devices will be coming from Nvidia or Samsung in the future

bryanlarsen 6y ago

IMO, this has little to do with it being ARM. 30 years ago ARM had a significant micro architectural advantage in performance per watt, but in this era of 10 billion transistor chips, that advantage has disappeared. x86_64 rationalized the x86 architecture and decode is such a small fraction of the power budget that it really doesn't matter anyways. What does matter, IMO: - assembling a killer team - 5nm process - high speed, low latency DRAM - big-little

ogre_codes 6y ago
Yes, a combination of things around Apple's A series CPUs. ARM has been improving much faster than Intel. Apple has been executing ARM much better than anyone else. Apple's auxiliary processors and integration have been top notch. TSMC has been crushing Intel in getting to 5nm.
epistasis 6y ago
I'm no expert, but the only big architectural differences are a massively larger decoder and a reorder buffer that's several times as large as x86 designs. If these are actually the reasons for the performance difference, and it's difficult to do these on x86 because of the instruction set, it seems to this amateur that ARM64 really does have an advantage over x86.
- twoodfin 6y ago
  Don't forget ARM's more relaxed memory model vs. x86's TSO.
  - unsigner 6y ago
    One of the reasons Rosetta 2 works so well is Apple silicon sticks to the more restricted x86 memory model.
    - enzo1982 6y ago
      Does it? Apple's documentation seems to disagree [1]: "A weak memory ordering model, like the one in Apple silicon, gives the processor more flexibility to reorder memory instructions and improve performance, but doesn’t add implicit memory barriers." [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/addressing_architectural_differences_in_your_macos_code https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/addr...

AgloeDreams 6y ago

I think another shock here is that a lot of people discredited the ability of ARM cpus as well. Back when the iPad Pro with the A10X came out, Apple claimed it was faster than half of all Laptops sold and people in the PC space were yamming on and on about how numbers don't show how much better x86 cpus are at 'desktop stuff' and that ARM cpus can't equal x86, even with the same thermal envelope and shouldn't ever be compared. Ironically, many are now stating that the reason why they are so good is because of ARM, which isn't true either lol.

imtringued 6y ago
>people in the PC space were yamming on and on about how numbers don't show how much better x86 cpus are at 'desktop stuff' and that ARM cpus can't equal x86, even with the same thermal envelope and shouldn't ever be compared. It needs 30W at 4 cores 3.2Ghz. Ryzen needs around 5W per core but it's on a worse process. The entire system does use less power than a x86 system but that has nothing to do with the processor. It's more about how the SoC is arranged and that RAM is (almost) on the same package. It means they can get away with higher bandwidth and lower power consumption for the entire system. The idea that it's all about the processor is completely wrong. Yet all we have heard is how fanboys cry it's going to be 3x faster than desktop CPUs because of misleading TDP numbers.
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  As far as we know, all four large cores at max plus the 4 small is ~20W. Whole chip max power use is 30W including GPU and the ML processor. Ryzen also blows a lot of power on things other than cores but AMD is absolutely the closest to this however. The hard thing for them is that the Big/Little arch is a huge advantage for battery use at idle. I would say the game being played here is that Apple is betting on this to scale all the way up for fast burst but they know that the real advantage is that their cores can also scale much much lower than anything out there. Less about magical performance gains and more about remarkable power use paired with much better power management lessons learned by making smartphones. Qualcomm could do this too if they actually cared about it.