5 ms·

What are the technical reasons why the M1 chip is so fast. Does Apple use any exotic tricks? Can Intel and AMD do the same trick in their chips?

jonplackett 6y ago
read the article!
Justsignedup 6y ago
Sounds like apple made multiple specialized processors for specific tasks, built a motherboard around that, and cooked all that into the OS. It's a bit of a cheat since they aren't building a generic computer architecture, but a very very specialized one. This is different with say Windows architecture. In windows vendors work on generic cpus/gpus/motherboards. Some hardware isn't exactly available or uniformally accessible due to drivers and such. This is kind of the huge benefit Apple has by creating the hardware, OS, drivers, languages and libraries.
- zepto 6y ago
  This is what they do with everything. It is the reason for vertical integration. Calling it ‘a cheat’ is somewhat weird. The point is that a general purpose CPU is a bad solution for a personal computer. The neural engine is about processing the ambiguous world that humans occupy so that the human doesn’t have to translate so much for the computer. The GPU is about communicating visually with humans.
  - reallydontask 6y ago
    GP said a bit of a cheat not that it was cheating. Point is that if you try to run a different OS, it will likely run slower, perhaps significantly slower than running macOS
    - zepto 6y ago
      Given that the individual cores benchmark at the very high end of any core available today, this is almost certainly not significant. If another OS doesn’t take advantage of the specialized processors, it will run slower, but only on specialized loads.
    - bee_rider 6y ago
      Anecdotally, I saw some folks on reddit's linux board that were running Linux in virtual machines on the M1 and getting quite decent results.
  - eng2prog 6y ago
    I see Apple following the path of Nintendo. They don't need to compete on performance, their users aren't buying for performance. Vertical integration puts you at tremendous risk of falling behind. The future is keeping Apple "fresh", "cool", etc... While keeping product costs low to compensate for a falling market share. Really says something that Apple is willing to compromise on long term hardware performance.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Can you explain how they are ‘compromising on long term performance’? I don’t see any logic that supports this claim.
    - jitl 6y ago
      How are they following the Nintendo path? These machines are clearly faster than the market segment, and apple is the leader in ARM CPU technology at this point, and they’ve been the mobile CPU leader for about 7 years, whereas Nintendo’s latest offering integrated mostly commodity technology from Nvidia Tegra. I don’t see how you can draw this parallel.
    - ascagnel_ 6y ago
      Nintendo has, since the Wii, shied away from bleeding-edge or custom components, preferring to use cheaper, proven tech that they can more easily maintain but is still strong enough for their needs. Just look at the Switch -- it uses the Tegra X1 in a device that launched in March of 2017, despite the X2 having been available for more than a year. Apple, on the other hand, has been running rings around Qualcomm and other ARM vendors for a while now, and sharing tech makes it all the more important that they continue to be competitive.
      - danbolt 6y ago
        I think only really the SNES/N64 years embodied the cutting-edge solutions associated with novel games. Their whole ethos to entertainment (especially the handheld line becoming the core product in a way) still feels embodied in Yokoi's "lateral thinking with seasoned technology" philosophy.
- eng2prog 6y ago
  Today all of this is exciting, but I have a bad feeling this is going to slide Apple towards a low performance future. They Apple'd themselves and locked themselves in. In 2 years, secrets aside, Apple would need to beat all 3 big dogs to be the top. How long can they sustain that?
  - vb6sp6 6y ago
    Couldn't they could just switch back then?
    - eng2prog 6y ago
      They could at significant expense. But why would they? The users don't buy for performance.
      - vb6sp6 6y ago
        Basically every laptop from here on out is going to be benchmarked against these devices. And battery life seems to be the sleeper performance metric here. Every review is going to be "you could get 6+ more hours if you just bought the macbook"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - rado 6y ago
    Today they overdelivered, why is it then so hard to believe they'll meet the expectations of a scaled up SoC? It's guaranteed.
  - zepto 6y ago
    How do you reach this conclusion? Their individual cores and memory architecture still beat almost everyone else on general purpose loads without any of the specialized engines.
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    They've been sustaining it for many years already, that's how they've gotten to the point of being able to passing up the incumbents. They didn't just start on this path this year, its the culmination of a long play strategy.
- sliken 6y ago
  Apple did optimize for some common use cases, reference counting (as used by objc++), javascript tweaks, and for emulation for rosetta2. However they also made a great general purpose CPU that will run many standard codes impressively quickly for impressively little power.
- NobodyNada 6y ago
  If that were the case, though, we would expect to see performance gains only in areas the M1 is specialized for -- but that's not what we see. The M1's GeekBench scores are impressively high, and general-computing workloads like compiling code are very fast as well, indicating that the M1 is fast in general, not just for specific tasks. There's been a lot of hype about things like "specialized hardware for NSObjects," but AFAIK that's more of a flawed/outdated design on Intel' side than a specialization on Apple's: the "magic" is really just ARM's weaker & more modern memory consistency model, which makes things like reference counting substantially faster.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Yeah and I think it will be quite interesting to see in the years ahead how this kind of highly specialized approach to computing will stack up against the more generic wintel approach, and how customers will respond. Customers may end up with having the choice between a very high performance system at competitive prices, vs an open architecture which has more flexibility in what you add, but which will ultimately cost more and have worse performance. You can see this play out in different markets. Just look at Tesla e.g. They are taking the Apple approach to car making with full vertical integration. They are doing everything from making their own alloys to creating their own machine learning hardware. I think we are at some kind of paradigm shift and the old guard has been caught off guard.
stefan_ 6y ago
They use this one trick that AMD and others hate: they paid TSMC to use up all of their 5nm capacity.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  I have an anecdote possibly related to this. I work for a semiconductor company and we were in pretty good standing with TSMC. All of a sudden we were informed we should longer contact the usual engineers them and a new team of engineers was assigned to us. It was very clear the new staff was their B-team. Rumor around the office the A-team went to support Apple.
  - macintux 6y ago
    The word I learned in years past because of Apple that applies to it in several ways is "monopsony": the ability to control the market for a product by being the dominant buyer of same.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      That is not what monopsony means. Monopsony means there is only one buyer. Apple is one of many buyers. However, they are able to secure the resources since they can pay the most.
      - macintux 6y ago
        Monopsony means there’s a dominant buyer, not just a single buyer. Fortune was talking about it almost 10 years ago. https://macdailynews.com/2011/07/05/how-apple-became-a-monopsonist/ https://macdailynews.com/2011/07/05/how-apple-became-a-monop... Of course they’ve been accused in the Supreme Court of being a monopsonist with regard to the App Store, but that’s a separate discussion. (Update: regrettably my economic theory is weak, so while I think it makes sense to apply the term, after more reading I can't argue the case with a reasonable level of conviction. Certainly there should be some way to describe a buyer who locks up a supply of components to the exclusion of competitors, as Apple has done on multiple occasions dating at least to the original iPod hard drives.)
amq 6y ago
I see two main reasons: - 5nm process (1.8x the density of 7nm [1]) - unified memory directly on the SoC [1] https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/130175-tsmc-5nm-will-improve-logic-density-18x-7nm/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/130175-tsmc-5nm-will-im...
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Unified memory is old, every CPU with an integrated GPU is on unified memory. It's not doing anything at all for M1's general performance. The main reason for M1's performance is just that Apple managed to get an 8-wide CPU to work & be fed. That's it. That's the entirety of the story of the M1. Apple got 8-wide to work, while Intel & AMD are still 4-wide. ARM's fixed length instructions are helping a ton there, but Apple also put in work to feed it. All the other shit about specialized units & unified memory & vertical integration is all irrelevant and mostly wrong. The existing Intel Macbook Airs are all unified memory with specialized hardware units for specialized tasks, too (Intel QuickSync is 9 years old now - dedicated silicon for the specialized task of video encoding). Apple did absolutely nothing new or interesting on that front. Other than marketing. They are magic at marketing. And also magic at making a super wide CPU front-end, with really good cache latency numbers.
  - sliken 6y ago
    That's overly simplified. Larger order buffer, larger caches, lower latency caches, more outstanding loads, etc. They also managed in a cheap platform (mac mini = $700) get 4266 Mhz memory working with about half the latency of any x86-64 I've seen. The mac mini can manage a random cacheline (assuming a relatively TLB friendly pattern) of around 30-33ns. Maybe the usual intel core i7/i9 or ryzen 5000 look rather quaint with their 60ns or higher memory latencies.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      > They also managed in a cheap platform (mac mini = $700) get 4266 Mhz memory working with about half the latency of any x86-64 I've seen. The mac mini can manage a random cacheline (assuming a relatively TLB friendly pattern) of around 30-33ns. Where are you getting those numbers? From https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... "In terms of memory latency, we’re seeing a (rather expected) reduction compared to the A14, measuring 96ns at 128MB full random test depth, compared to 102ns on the A14." Which would put M1's DRAM latency at worse than a modern Intel or AMD desktop, which is measuring around 70-80ns: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jayd16 6y ago
Is this a bot? This is just lifted from the article verbatim. Do I get my Turing tester badge?
chess_buster 6y ago
Did you read the article? Does not seem like it.
gfody 6y ago
IIRC Apple got some exotic automated optimization tech when when they acquired PA Semi - I think it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography. The A chips have always been impressive and the timing lines up.

jonplackett 6y ago

read the article!

Justsignedup 6y ago

Sounds like apple made multiple specialized processors for specific tasks, built a motherboard around that, and cooked all that into the OS. It's a bit of a cheat since they aren't building a generic computer architecture, but a very very specialized one. This is different with say Windows architecture. In windows vendors work on generic cpus/gpus/motherboards. Some hardware isn't exactly available or uniformally accessible due to drivers and such. This is kind of the huge benefit Apple has by creating the hardware, OS, drivers, languages and libraries.

zepto 6y ago
This is what they do with everything. It is the reason for vertical integration. Calling it ‘a cheat’ is somewhat weird. The point is that a general purpose CPU is a bad solution for a personal computer. The neural engine is about processing the ambiguous world that humans occupy so that the human doesn’t have to translate so much for the computer. The GPU is about communicating visually with humans.
- reallydontask 6y ago
  GP said a bit of a cheat not that it was cheating. Point is that if you try to run a different OS, it will likely run slower, perhaps significantly slower than running macOS
  - zepto 6y ago
    Given that the individual cores benchmark at the very high end of any core available today, this is almost certainly not significant. If another OS doesn’t take advantage of the specialized processors, it will run slower, but only on specialized loads.
  - bee_rider 6y ago
    Anecdotally, I saw some folks on reddit's linux board that were running Linux in virtual machines on the M1 and getting quite decent results.
- eng2prog 6y ago
  I see Apple following the path of Nintendo. They don't need to compete on performance, their users aren't buying for performance. Vertical integration puts you at tremendous risk of falling behind. The future is keeping Apple "fresh", "cool", etc... While keeping product costs low to compensate for a falling market share. Really says something that Apple is willing to compromise on long term hardware performance.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Can you explain how they are ‘compromising on long term performance’? I don’t see any logic that supports this claim.
  - jitl 6y ago
    How are they following the Nintendo path? These machines are clearly faster than the market segment, and apple is the leader in ARM CPU technology at this point, and they’ve been the mobile CPU leader for about 7 years, whereas Nintendo’s latest offering integrated mostly commodity technology from Nvidia Tegra. I don’t see how you can draw this parallel.
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    Nintendo has, since the Wii, shied away from bleeding-edge or custom components, preferring to use cheaper, proven tech that they can more easily maintain but is still strong enough for their needs. Just look at the Switch -- it uses the Tegra X1 in a device that launched in March of 2017, despite the X2 having been available for more than a year. Apple, on the other hand, has been running rings around Qualcomm and other ARM vendors for a while now, and sharing tech makes it all the more important that they continue to be competitive.
    - danbolt 6y ago
      I think only really the SNES/N64 years embodied the cutting-edge solutions associated with novel games. Their whole ethos to entertainment (especially the handheld line becoming the core product in a way) still feels embodied in Yokoi's "lateral thinking with seasoned technology" philosophy.
eng2prog 6y ago
Today all of this is exciting, but I have a bad feeling this is going to slide Apple towards a low performance future. They Apple'd themselves and locked themselves in. In 2 years, secrets aside, Apple would need to beat all 3 big dogs to be the top. How long can they sustain that?
- vb6sp6 6y ago
  Couldn't they could just switch back then?
  - eng2prog 6y ago
    They could at significant expense. But why would they? The users don't buy for performance.
    - vb6sp6 6y ago
      Basically every laptop from here on out is going to be benchmarked against these devices. And battery life seems to be the sleeper performance metric here. Every review is going to be "you could get 6+ more hours if you just bought the macbook"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rado 6y ago
  Today they overdelivered, why is it then so hard to believe they'll meet the expectations of a scaled up SoC? It's guaranteed.
- zepto 6y ago
  How do you reach this conclusion? Their individual cores and memory architecture still beat almost everyone else on general purpose loads without any of the specialized engines.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  They've been sustaining it for many years already, that's how they've gotten to the point of being able to passing up the incumbents. They didn't just start on this path this year, its the culmination of a long play strategy.
sliken 6y ago
Apple did optimize for some common use cases, reference counting (as used by objc++), javascript tweaks, and for emulation for rosetta2. However they also made a great general purpose CPU that will run many standard codes impressively quickly for impressively little power.
NobodyNada 6y ago
If that were the case, though, we would expect to see performance gains only in areas the M1 is specialized for -- but that's not what we see. The M1's GeekBench scores are impressively high, and general-computing workloads like compiling code are very fast as well, indicating that the M1 is fast in general, not just for specific tasks. There's been a lot of hype about things like "specialized hardware for NSObjects," but AFAIK that's more of a flawed/outdated design on Intel' side than a specialization on Apple's: the "magic" is really just ARM's weaker & more modern memory consistency model, which makes things like reference counting substantially faster.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
Yeah and I think it will be quite interesting to see in the years ahead how this kind of highly specialized approach to computing will stack up against the more generic wintel approach, and how customers will respond. Customers may end up with having the choice between a very high performance system at competitive prices, vs an open architecture which has more flexibility in what you add, but which will ultimately cost more and have worse performance. You can see this play out in different markets. Just look at Tesla e.g. They are taking the Apple approach to car making with full vertical integration. They are doing everything from making their own alloys to creating their own machine learning hardware. I think we are at some kind of paradigm shift and the old guard has been caught off guard.

stefan_ 6y ago

They use this one trick that AMD and others hate: they paid TSMC to use up all of their 5nm capacity.

GloriousKoji 6y ago
I have an anecdote possibly related to this. I work for a semiconductor company and we were in pretty good standing with TSMC. All of a sudden we were informed we should longer contact the usual engineers them and a new team of engineers was assigned to us. It was very clear the new staff was their B-team. Rumor around the office the A-team went to support Apple.
- macintux 6y ago
  The word I learned in years past because of Apple that applies to it in several ways is "monopsony": the ability to control the market for a product by being the dominant buyer of same.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That is not what monopsony means. Monopsony means there is only one buyer. Apple is one of many buyers. However, they are able to secure the resources since they can pay the most.
    - macintux 6y ago
      Monopsony means there’s a dominant buyer, not just a single buyer. Fortune was talking about it almost 10 years ago. https://macdailynews.com/2011/07/05/how-apple-became-a-monopsonist/ https://macdailynews.com/2011/07/05/how-apple-became-a-monop... Of course they’ve been accused in the Supreme Court of being a monopsonist with regard to the App Store, but that’s a separate discussion. (Update: regrettably my economic theory is weak, so while I think it makes sense to apply the term, after more reading I can't argue the case with a reasonable level of conviction. Certainly there should be some way to describe a buyer who locks up a supply of components to the exclusion of competitors, as Apple has done on multiple occasions dating at least to the original iPod hard drives.)

amq 6y ago

I see two main reasons: - 5nm process (1.8x the density of 7nm [1]) - unified memory directly on the SoC [1] https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/130175-tsmc-5nm-will-improve-logic-density-18x-7nm/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/130175-tsmc-5nm-will-im...

kllrnohj 6y ago
Unified memory is old, every CPU with an integrated GPU is on unified memory. It's not doing anything at all for M1's general performance. The main reason for M1's performance is just that Apple managed to get an 8-wide CPU to work & be fed. That's it. That's the entirety of the story of the M1. Apple got 8-wide to work, while Intel & AMD are still 4-wide. ARM's fixed length instructions are helping a ton there, but Apple also put in work to feed it. All the other shit about specialized units & unified memory & vertical integration is all irrelevant and mostly wrong. The existing Intel Macbook Airs are all unified memory with specialized hardware units for specialized tasks, too (Intel QuickSync is 9 years old now - dedicated silicon for the specialized task of video encoding). Apple did absolutely nothing new or interesting on that front. Other than marketing. They are magic at marketing. And also magic at making a super wide CPU front-end, with really good cache latency numbers.
- sliken 6y ago
  That's overly simplified. Larger order buffer, larger caches, lower latency caches, more outstanding loads, etc. They also managed in a cheap platform (mac mini = $700) get 4266 Mhz memory working with about half the latency of any x86-64 I've seen. The mac mini can manage a random cacheline (assuming a relatively TLB friendly pattern) of around 30-33ns. Maybe the usual intel core i7/i9 or ryzen 5000 look rather quaint with their 60ns or higher memory latencies.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    > They also managed in a cheap platform (mac mini = $700) get 4266 Mhz memory working with about half the latency of any x86-64 I've seen. The mac mini can manage a random cacheline (assuming a relatively TLB friendly pattern) of around 30-33ns. Where are you getting those numbers? From https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... "In terms of memory latency, we’re seeing a (rather expected) reduction compared to the A14, measuring 96ns at 128MB full random test depth, compared to 102ns on the A14." Which would put M1's DRAM latency at worse than a modern Intel or AMD desktop, which is measuring around 70-80ns: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jayd16 6y ago

Is this a bot? This is just lifted from the article verbatim. Do I get my Turing tester badge?

chess_buster 6y ago

Did you read the article? Does not seem like it.

gfody 6y ago

IIRC Apple got some exotic automated optimization tech when when they acquired PA Semi - I think it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography. The A chips have always been impressive and the timing lines up.