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Apple is throwing money at the problem. IC size is directly proportional to cost. They couldn't sell a chip like this at a cost-competitive price on the open m

Apple is throwing money at the problem. IC size is directly proportional to cost. They couldn't sell a chip like this at a cost-competitive price on the open market against AMD/Intel products.

bigdict 6y ago
Is that true? Intel chips are known to be overpriced.
- gruez 6y ago
  Intel probably isn't the best example here, a better comparison would be AMD. Their r&d budget were 20-25% of intel's, yet were able to produce a better performing part with zen3.
  - jhawk28 6y ago
    Intel fabs their own chips. AMD outsources that. Intel is still on 14nm vs AMD's 7nm. It has been a really long time since AMD has even come close to Intel. The question is whether Intel can recover from their slump before AMD can get enough chips out.
    - mamon 6y ago
      >> Intel is still on 14nm Why do people keep saying that? There's a variety of 10nm processors from Intel on the market.
    - sliken 6y ago
      AMDs on a big upswing, design wins in multiple markets from servers down to laptops. The PS5 and Xbox S/X also will help will volumes for the next few years.
DavidSJ 6y ago
Are there any chips like this being sold at all by AMD or Intel? Can you get this performance and power consumption anywhere else?
- robert_foss 6y ago
  The AMD 4900U has similar power consumption and higher multi-threaded performance, but lower single-threaded performance. I expect the AMD part to have quite the bit lower GPU performance since it uses 1/3 of the transistors of the M1, 4.9billion transistors vs 16billion. https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-cpus-destroy-apples-m1-in-cinebench-r23-benchmark-results/ https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-cpus-destroy...
  - pclmulqdq 6y ago
    AMD CPUs are very hard to fully utilize with a single thread, and Intel has always held the single-thread perf crown. Most high-performance use cases are multi-threaded now, so the single-threaded performance delta isn't that significant. The Apple chip is really built for running a snappy GUI: in most of those cases, you need to run ~1M instructions super fast on one thread for a short time. Intel has historically had the crown on this metric, but not any more with all of their problems.
    - robert_foss 6y ago
      AMD Zen3 outperforms everything Intel has in single threaded performance. https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-16-core-zen-3-cpu-obliterates-all-intel-cpus-in-single-core-performance/ https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-16-core-zen-3-cpu-obl... Or are you saying that some operations like FMAs for example are hard to keep a high utilization for?
    - sliken 6y ago
      Historically yes, but not so with the Zen3.
- sliken 6y ago
dev_tty01 6y ago
Hmm. The M1 is about 120 sq mm, substantially smaller than many Intel designs. The current estimate for 5 nm wafers is about $17K (almost certainly high). A single 300 mm wafer is about 70,700 sq mm. If we get die from 75% of that area, that gives us about a $38 raw die cost. Even with packaging and additional testing, I suspect they would be competitive.
- robert_foss 6y ago
  Nice back of the envelope calculation. I think I'd add yield to it though. TSMC had a 90% yield in 2019 for a 18mm2 chip[1]. Assuming a 120mm2 chip would have more defects, and assuming process improvements since 2019, maybe 80% would be an accurate-ish estimate. Found an even better number, [2] list the defect rate as 0.11 / 100m2 => 87%. $38/87% = $43.7 [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15219/early-tsmc-5nm-test-chip-yields-80-hvm-coming-in-h1-2020 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15219/early-tsmc-5nm-test-chi... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-than-7nm-tsmc-update-on-defect-rates-for-n5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...
  - w0mbat 6y ago
    The big skew in availability between 8GB and 16GB models implies to me that yields of perfect chips are lower than Apple expected, with too many ending up in the 8GB bin.
    - acdha 6y ago
      That would imply that the M1 has the DRAM rather than just the controllers on the chip but all of the coverage I've seen says that they are separate chips in the same package.
    - dev_tty01 6y ago
      The DRAM is on separate chips from the M1 processor. The availability skew is probably just a production forecasting error.
    - sliken 6y ago
klelatti 6y ago
As the sister comments have noted they almost certainly could given the size of the die. But in another sense you are right - Apple is throwing money at the problem: their scale and buying power means that they have forced their way to the front of the TSMC queue and bought all the 5nm capacity.

Apple is throwing money at the problem. IC size is directly proportional to cost. They couldn't sell a chip like this at a cost-competitive price on the open market against AMD/Intel products.

bigdict 6y ago

Is that true? Intel chips are known to be overpriced.

gruez 6y ago
Intel probably isn't the best example here, a better comparison would be AMD. Their r&d budget were 20-25% of intel's, yet were able to produce a better performing part with zen3.
- jhawk28 6y ago
  Intel fabs their own chips. AMD outsources that. Intel is still on 14nm vs AMD's 7nm. It has been a really long time since AMD has even come close to Intel. The question is whether Intel can recover from their slump before AMD can get enough chips out.
  - mamon 6y ago
    >> Intel is still on 14nm Why do people keep saying that? There's a variety of 10nm processors from Intel on the market.
  - sliken 6y ago
    AMDs on a big upswing, design wins in multiple markets from servers down to laptops. The PS5 and Xbox S/X also will help will volumes for the next few years.

DavidSJ 6y ago

Are there any chips like this being sold at all by AMD or Intel? Can you get this performance and power consumption anywhere else?

robert_foss 6y ago
The AMD 4900U has similar power consumption and higher multi-threaded performance, but lower single-threaded performance. I expect the AMD part to have quite the bit lower GPU performance since it uses 1/3 of the transistors of the M1, 4.9billion transistors vs 16billion. https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-cpus-destroy-apples-m1-in-cinebench-r23-benchmark-results/ https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-x86-mobility-cpus-destroy...
- pclmulqdq 6y ago
  AMD CPUs are very hard to fully utilize with a single thread, and Intel has always held the single-thread perf crown. Most high-performance use cases are multi-threaded now, so the single-threaded performance delta isn't that significant. The Apple chip is really built for running a snappy GUI: in most of those cases, you need to run ~1M instructions super fast on one thread for a short time. Intel has historically had the crown on this metric, but not any more with all of their problems.
  - robert_foss 6y ago
    AMD Zen3 outperforms everything Intel has in single threaded performance. https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-16-core-zen-3-cpu-obliterates-all-intel-cpus-in-single-core-performance/ https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-16-core-zen-3-cpu-obl... Or are you saying that some operations like FMAs for example are hard to keep a high utilization for?
  - sliken 6y ago
    Historically yes, but not so with the Zen3.
sliken 6y ago

dev_tty01 6y ago

Hmm. The M1 is about 120 sq mm, substantially smaller than many Intel designs. The current estimate for 5 nm wafers is about $17K (almost certainly high). A single 300 mm wafer is about 70,700 sq mm. If we get die from 75% of that area, that gives us about a $38 raw die cost. Even with packaging and additional testing, I suspect they would be competitive.

robert_foss 6y ago
Nice back of the envelope calculation. I think I'd add yield to it though. TSMC had a 90% yield in 2019 for a 18mm2 chip[1]. Assuming a 120mm2 chip would have more defects, and assuming process improvements since 2019, maybe 80% would be an accurate-ish estimate. Found an even better number, [2] list the defect rate as 0.11 / 100m2 => 87%. $38/87% = $43.7 [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15219/early-tsmc-5nm-test-chip-yields-80-hvm-coming-in-h1-2020 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15219/early-tsmc-5nm-test-chi... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-than-7nm-tsmc-update-on-defect-rates-for-n5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-tha...
- w0mbat 6y ago
  The big skew in availability between 8GB and 16GB models implies to me that yields of perfect chips are lower than Apple expected, with too many ending up in the 8GB bin.
  - acdha 6y ago
    That would imply that the M1 has the DRAM rather than just the controllers on the chip but all of the coverage I've seen says that they are separate chips in the same package.
  - dev_tty01 6y ago
    The DRAM is on separate chips from the M1 processor. The availability skew is probably just a production forecasting error.
  - sliken 6y ago

klelatti 6y ago

As the sister comments have noted they almost certainly could given the size of the die. But in another sense you are right - Apple is throwing money at the problem: their scale and buying power means that they have forced their way to the front of the TSMC queue and bought all the 5nm capacity.