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> Apple's core is simply the biggest core on the market. Have you any source to confirm this? Did you include the L1I and L1D cache? Looking at dieshots, Zen
by avianes 6y ago
> Apple's core is simply the biggest core on the market.
Have you any source to confirm this?
Did you include the L1I and L1D cache?
Looking at dieshots, Zen2 cores seem easily twice as big as Firestorm cores.
But if you have more reliable sources, I'll take it.
And assuming this is true, are you sure it's because of the 8-wide decoder?
I don't understand how you can compare these three different approaches which have nothing to do with each other.
Having more cores, wider vectors or a wider decoder, these are 3 orthogonal things.
The performance gains of these 3 approaches are not for the same applications.
The choice of which of these features we will push depends on the market we are targeting, not on the raw computing power we want to reach.
- dragontamer 6y agoThe size of the register file, the decode and fetch widths, the reorder buffer / retirement queue size... Everything about the M1 is bigger than its competitors (except for Power9 SMT8)
- avianes 6y agoSo you're not talking about the area of the cores, you mean simply bigger in a microarchitectural sense ? Because as I just added in my previous comment (sorry, I don't expect you to reply so quickly) on the dieshots Firestorm cores seems much smaller than the Zen2 cores. The 5nm TSMC can explain this, but probably not completely. And that is why I have a doubt about the following statement: > which will make scaling up to more-cores more difficult. Apple has not yet released a CPU for the desktop. But I don't see anything that prevents them from removing the GPU, Icestorm cores and multiplying the number of Firestorm cores. In fact, Firestorm cores seem to have a remarkably small surface area and very low power consumption and dissipation. Which is very good for scaling up to more cores.