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The real breakthrough will be when another chipmaker can come anywhere close to the M1. Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close. The C
by wffurr 6y ago
The real breakthrough will be when another chipmaker can come anywhere close to the M1. Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close. The Cortex X is a baby step in the direction of the M1, but the M1’s architectural advantages (gigantic memory bandwidth, 8-way decode, re-order buffers twice as deep, specialized instructions for x86 translation and reference counting atomics, and so on) remain untouched.
Hopefully this lights a fire under some of the other chipmakers and they’ll adjust course, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are. It’s been that way in smartphones for a long time now, and now it’s coming to laptops and desktops.
- nextos 6y agoAMD Ryzen 7 5800U is, according to leaked benchmarks, not too far from M1.
- akmarinov 6y agoInteresting - what’s the power consumption on it?
- terramex 6y agoPrevious gen (4800U) was 15W TDP by default (configurable between 10W and 25W). This new one (5800U) was not yet officially announced.
- my123 6y agoSadly, TDP is far from held on those. What you get at 15W is the base clock present at: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-apus-7nm-8core-on-both-15w-and-45w-coming-q1 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-a... For the Ryzen 7 4800U, that's just 1.8GHz. 4.2GHz which is the turbo clock blows through that limit by a lot. (of course that's for multi-core workloads) For Ryzen 5th generation, we have this for per-core only power draw, without the I/O: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di... We can see from the graph at https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575p... that to reach 6.6W per core, the clock has to fall to 3.8GHz. At such a clock, Zen 3 is way behind the Apple M1 performance wise.
- kmeisthax 6y agoMakes sense. The real story with M1 isn't so much about how amazingly innovative Apple's CPU design is (although it is pretty good), as much as how Intel has rested on their laurels for 5 years. Now, if only AMD could bring back that ARM Zen design that they cancelled a few months before Ryzen 1st Gen...
- nextos 6y agoThe M1 is great because it's fanless. AMD Ryzen is superb on workstations, but let's see if they can deliver a nice fanless or low power option. I hope they do.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThe Ryzen mobile chips, including the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800U mentioned above, have a low 10W (configurable up to 25W) TDP. That's in the ballpark of Apple's chip.
- my123 6y agoThat number isn't very meaningful - because it applies to the base clocks only... which is a big catch. Go beyond that and the power usage balloons quickly (won't repeat myself, see my other comment on this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25231798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25231798). On laptops, more power efficiency maps directly to increased performance (turbo clocks provide higher performance in bursts or at the expense of your laptop's fans sounding like a jet turbine).
- Kye 6y agoMy laptop with a Ryzen 5 4500U is only fan-free at idle. OEMs would need to do some serious work on cooling to make that work.
- gameswithgo 6y agoif 7nm Zen3 is close, then 5nm can probably match without a fan.
- MengerSponge 6y agoIt is super exciting, but when do you think 5800 powered laptops will be widely available? April or May of next year? Close to 6 months after M1 powered machines.
- unix_fan 6y agoPower consumption is the key factor here.
- Joeri 6y agoIf the ARM chipmakers haven’t bothered to invest to catch up to Apple’s A series in order to compete better in the large phone and tablet market, they’re not likely to invest to catch up to the harder to reach M series in the smaller PC market. There is a fair chance the M1 will be remarkable in how little impact it has on the rest of the industry.
- smarx007 6y agoI am pretty sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX beats the stuff out of M1 and has the numbers to prove it. The question if there will be a good deal for Fujitsu to even consider consumer segment. And of course how much work would it take to scale it down from 48 cores to 8 cores and keep the power efficiency (Fugaku has the first place in Green500 list).
- wmf 6y agoA64FX will only beat M1 when using SVE. For desktop workloads it's probably no contest. But at least it has 32GB RAM!
- smarx007 6y agoThe OP was criticizing all vendors for dropping the ball on "gigantic memory bandwidth, 8-way decode, re-order buffers twice as deep, specialized instructions for x86 translation and reference counting". A64FX has all that (incl. assistant cores in addition to the regular ones and on-chip RAM with HBM interface) AND SVE, not just bare SVE as your comment seems to imply. And of course a big redesign would be necessary, I never implied it's ready to be put in the next MS Surface. But screaming that all processor vendors are 100 years behind Apple is a bit questionable. So my thoughts were: cool, Apple is bringing some of the processor developments to mass market that I didn't think would hit the market for another 5 years. I am just a bit sad to see everyone (esp on HN) saying it was never seen before.
- wffurr 6y agoThe Fujitsu chip is amazing too! But I am only familiar with common desktop and laptop CPUs, not HPC specialty hardware. Sounds like part of the special sauce in the M1 is bringing supercomputer architecture to laptops. That seems like an amazing feat too. Also, I don't think I was "screaming" about "100 years". Maybe you are thinking of someone else's comment?
- gumby 6y ago> Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close. Don't count on the Mediateks of the world to spend any time on this market. Most of the licensees are focusing on high volume embedded cases where they an try to drag themselves above the commodity pricing floor by providing a package of SoC and (in my experience crappy) drivers and an android port. In fact "package" is the key word: they typically won't sell you the chip in a useful way (i.e. no data sheets) but instead want to sell you a reference board with ported software running on top. Apple is unusual in that they have two value add products that matter and have managed to, over time, build the capability to handle it. The economic calculus for them is quite different from that of the merchant chip vendors. There are a few possible alternatives like Qualcomm and Nvidia (!!) but the market dynamics aren't the same for them. It is possible that an Nvidia/microsoft relationship could develop somewhat similar to the Intel/Mcrosoft partnership, but unlikely. The market is different and the regulatory environment may become different. Terminal devices (laptops, desktops, phones) aren't really where the money is any more (except for Apple, an exception on several dimensions) so the push for such a partnership is diminished. More likely is a partnership addressing cloud datacenters between say MS or Amazon and Nvidia, but nobody is going to be willing to allow one chip vendor to have any say over their destiny. It would make sense for one of the top cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, IBM) to buy Nvidia but that would never be allowed.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoAnother option is AMD. Originally they were going to have a Zen variant that ran ARM. They shelved that plan once the x86 version of Zen showed promise, but there are rumours that the plan continues on the back burner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12
- pavlov 6y agoNow that Nvidia owns ARM and presumably has an eye on the data center market, maybe they’ll invest in desktop grade core designs?
- McP 6y agoSlow down, Nvidia doesn't own Arm yet
- amelius 6y ago> In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are. How well is this chip suited for development? E.g. how fast can it do a full parallel compile of (say) gcc, compared to an Intel/AMD machine?
- da_big_ghey 6y agoA few days ago, there was a story showing that it was twice as fast to compile Rust compared to the 2019 Macbook Pro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25126394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25126394 Since Rust is LLVM-based, there should be a substantial performance improvement for Clang as well.
- amelius 6y agoWas that a full parallel build (using all available cores)? Because that's what counts for me, as a developer.
- da_big_ghey 6y agoI believe so, as cargo defaults to the number of cores, as per this issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2805 https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2805 For what it's worth, this guy noticed a nearly 2x speedup in compiling OpenSSL, which is C code, so I assume GCC or Clang: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1331732592958214145 https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1331732592958214145 This suggests, though it does not prove, that the performance improvement for code compilation is likely not exclusive to a single language.
- GeekyBear 6y agoThe battery life is just as impressive as the performance. >After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery. In comparison, I could have gotten through about 3 on the 16” and the 13” 2020 model only had one go in it. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
- TimTheTinker 6y ago> specialized instructions for x86 translation That sounds absolutely fascinating. Do you have any references I could read further on that?
- bonzini 6y agoThey have a special mode for strongly-ordered memory accesses (IBM did something similar on POWER, also for the sake of porting x86 applications).
- totalZero 6y agoI'm still not sure that M1 is much of a quantum leap, and I haven't been able to get my hands on one to try it. I went to an Apple Store on Wednesday, but they were unwilling to let me see the device without a shopping appointment (store was empty of customers except for me and one other person). They only let me in the door because I was picking up an online order. I'm not willing to describe M1 as "untouched" without actually using it in the real world for a couple of weeks. My question to you is, have you used M1 in the real world for a couple of weeks, or are you basing your comments on the benchmarks that have been published by tech journalists?
- wffurr 6y agoI don’t have one, but the benchmarks, both synthetic and reports of real world usage, along with the architectural differences, are quite compelling. I don’t think humans are capable of a conspiracy on the scale required to generate this much positive coverage across the board. Even the contrarian takes admit the performance advantages. What you’re describing at the store is standard procedure for a retail location during the pandemic. Easy enough for you to make a shopping appointment if you’re actually interested. Personally, I’m holding out for Parallels. I have some Windows-only software that’s required for work; even after Parallels with Windows on ARM64 is available, I’ll have to see about having that software recompiled for ARM64 or if it will run under Microsoft’s x64 emulation in Parallels. My other Mac is a 2013 Mac Pro that still works fine, but I am curious to compare compiling benchmarks with the new Mini. Maybe by the 2nd gen with more RAM is released, it will be qualified for corp use.
- spookware 6y agoWhen Apple, Google, and all ARM based things actually run something other than Angry Birds, Chinese Adware Strange Rope Hero and Pokemon ripoff games for babies with video and malware app adds and closed "walled garden" "app store" ecosystems where you have to pay $10 or more for even an mp3 or video player, let me know. Otherwise all this mysterious "performance" is even more useless than a 75mhz Pentium from 1996. When anyone can actually program for ARM without "licensing fees" also let me know.
- wffurr 6y agoWow what a gross mischaracterization of macOS to say nothing of Android and iOS. If that’s all you think is on the app stores (which is not required on any of these OSes!), then you need to broaden your horizons and look around. There are lots of great apps on all these platforms that do all kinds of excellent useful stuff. Regarding programming for ARM, last I checked you can just specify the target architecture in Go or Rust and off it goes. For C and C++, it’s as easy as sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf If you’re waiting for systems like this that can run FreeBSD, well, you’re in for a wait. How long is the actual point of my post - who knows when hardware of this caliber with open drivers will be available or common.
- aldanor 6y agoMany macOS users don't have a single App Store app installed, or a few free default Apple ones. Don't talk out of your ass please.