4 ms·

> I don't understand the comparison to the iphone and android situation. Because articles like that are pure nonsense. Take the initial paragraphs. We alread

by II2II 6y ago

> I don't understand the comparison to the iphone and android situation. Because articles like that are pure nonsense. Take the initial paragraphs. We already knew that faster processors don't necessarily run hotter. People are simply conflating higher clock speeds with higher performance, while ignoring all of the ways CPU design optimizes computation. Likewise, we already knew that "emulation" doesn't imply that performance will be unbearably slow. There has been enormous amounts of research and development into the problem over the decades, to the point where much of our software is optimized at runtime. None of this is meant to diminish what Apple has accomplished. They were clearly paying attention to details that have been largely ignored or at the very least rarely highlighted by their competitors. Now that it has happened, we will likely see more from the PC industry. Apple will likely have a hard time keeping up unless they have more up their sleeve.

alwillis 6y ago
Likewise, we already knew that "emulation" doesn't imply that performance will be unbearably slow. Apple’s Rosetta 2 doesn't do emulation; it translates the x86 code into ARM code on the fly and runs it, which is why most apps run faster on M1 Macs than they do on Intel Macs--and comparably priced PCs. Now that it has happened, we will likely see more from the PC industry. Probably not. If Intel and AMD were capable of this kind of performance per watt, they’d already be doing it. Years ago. Because the latest x86 chip has to be backwards compatible with 40 years of legacy code, there are certain limitations Intel and AMD just have to live with. Apple will likely have a hard time keeping up unless they have more up their sleeve. It's ironic that it's Apple that will have a hard time keeping up when they've already disrupted Intel and AMD. Remember, it's not just a processor; it's a system on a chip that contains an 8-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine for machine learning tasks and other components. This has obviously been in the works for several years; Apple wouldn't have gone down this path if they didn't believe it would give them a sustainable competitive advantage for years to come. Even with its ridiculous performance, the M1 is the entry-level consumer version of the M series suitable for (in Apple's lineup) entry-level consumer hardware. The M1-based MacBook Air doesn't have a fan and it's faster and more capable now than many (most?) PCs that cost more and run hotter. One thing we know: the M2 will be faster and more capable than the M1 and won't be limited to 16 Gb. We'll probably see M2-based Macs by the summer of 2021.
- dhruvdh 6y ago
  M1 is still just a tablet SoC in a laptop form factor. We don't know what the efficiency will look like after you add all the I/O you need for a real desktop, we don't know how the memory subsystem will deal with 4 more cores that are just as fast. What's the point of having fast cores if you cannot feed them? We don't know how lower yields for bigger chips on the newest nodes will affect their costs. People act like Apple changed the game or is light years ahead of everyone but they literally haven't made a proper desktop-class chip yet. It's not because they don't care about higher core chips or chips with proper IO. They haven't made them because they CAN'T (yet). So yes, Apple does have catching up to do.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    M1 is still just a tablet SoC in a laptop form factor. That wouldn't be good enough for production hardware. The developer units had a previous iPad’s A12 SoC in an enclosure for developers to test things on. For example, the A series doesn't support virtualization because that's not required on a phone or tablet. But the M1 supports this and other laptop/desktop features. Even the A14 only has 4 cores compared to the M1's 8 cores. This isn't just a tablet SoC. We don't know what the efficiency will look like after you add all the I/O you need for a real desktop, we don't know how the memory subsystem will deal with 4 more cores that are just as fast. What's the point of having fast cores if you cannot feed them? Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the Mac mini is a real desktop. And all of the M1 Macs have blazingly fast memory access. Remember, it's an SoC—the memory is on the same die as the CPUs, GPUs and they all have equal access to it. No bus to go across. That's why it's so fast. People act like Apple changed the game or is light years ahead of everyone but they literally haven't made a proper desktop-class chip yet. The M1 already has features no "desktop" chip has, such as 8 instruction decoders. This may not sound like a big deal, but none of the Intel or AMD chips--not the threadripper or the Zen3—has more than 4. Why this matters: "It is because the ability to run fast depends on how quickly you can fill up the ROB with micro-ops and with how many. The more quickly you fill it up and the larger it is the more opportunities you are given to pick instructions you can execute in parallel and thus improve performance. Machine code instructions are chopped into micro-ops by what we call an instruction decoder. If we have more decoders we can chop up more instructions in parallel and thus fill up the ROB faster. And this is where we see the huge differences. The biggest baddest Intel and AMD microprocessor cores have 4 decoders, which means they can decode 4 instructions in parallel spitting out micro-ops. But Apple has a crazy 8 decoders. Not only that but the ROB is something like 3x larger. You can basically hold 3x as many instructions. No other mainstream chip maker has that many decoders in their CPUs." So Intel or AMD will just add 8 instruction decoders to increase their throughput, right? Nope: "However on an x86 CPU the decoders have no clue where the next instruction starts. It has to actually analyze each instruction in order to see how long it is. The brute force way Intel and AMD deal with this is by simply attempting to decode instructions at every posssible starting points. That means we have to deal with lots of wrong guesses and mistakes which has to be discarded. This creates such a convoluted and complicated decoder stage, that it is really hard to add more decoders. But for Apple it is trivial in comparison to keep adding more. In fact adding more causes so many other problems that 4 decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for how far they can go. *This is what allows the M1 Firestorm cores to essentially process twice as many instructions as AMD and Intel CPUs at the same clock frequency.*" As I've said in other threads on HN, there's no way Apple's first laptop/desktop chip should be competitive with AMD, but it is: "As far as I remember from performance benchmarks the newest AMD CPU cores, the ones called Zen3 are slightly faster than Firestorm cores. But here is the kicker, that only happens because the Zen3 cores are clocked at 5 GHz. Firestorm cores are clocked at 3.2 GHz. The Zen3 is just barely squeezing past Firestorm despite having almost 60% higher clock frequency. So why doesn’t Apple increase the clock frequency too? Because higher clock frequency makes the chips hotter. That is one of Apple’s key selling points. Their computers unlike Intel and AMD offerings barely need cooling. In essence one could say Firestorm cores really are superior to Zen3 cores. Zen3 only manages to stay in the game by drawing a lot more current and getting a lot hotter. Something Apple simply chooses not to do." So yes, Apple does have catching up to do. Come again? The Zen3 barely beats the M1, which runs at 60% of the speed and a small fraction of the power. It can essentially process twice as many instructions at the same clock frequency. They're already ahead in many key areas, with performance per watt being the most obvious. There are issues with the x86 architecture, like instructions ranging from 1 to 15 bytes, which limits Intel and AMD from being able to process as many instructions per clock cycle as ARM processors in general and the M1 especially. I’m quoting from the article "Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?", which has a lot more technical details: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2 https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fas...

by II2II 6y ago

alwillis 6y ago

Likewise, we already knew that "emulation" doesn't imply that performance will be unbearably slow. Apple’s Rosetta 2 doesn't do emulation; it translates the x86 code into ARM code on the fly and runs it, which is why most apps run faster on M1 Macs than they do on Intel Macs--and comparably priced PCs. Now that it has happened, we will likely see more from the PC industry. Probably not. If Intel and AMD were capable of this kind of performance per watt, they’d already be doing it. Years ago. Because the latest x86 chip has to be backwards compatible with 40 years of legacy code, there are certain limitations Intel and AMD just have to live with. Apple will likely have a hard time keeping up unless they have more up their sleeve. It's ironic that it's Apple that will have a hard time keeping up when they've already disrupted Intel and AMD. Remember, it's not just a processor; it's a system on a chip that contains an 8-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine for machine learning tasks and other components. This has obviously been in the works for several years; Apple wouldn't have gone down this path if they didn't believe it would give them a sustainable competitive advantage for years to come. Even with its ridiculous performance, the M1 is the entry-level consumer version of the M series suitable for (in Apple's lineup) entry-level consumer hardware. The M1-based MacBook Air doesn't have a fan and it's faster and more capable now than many (most?) PCs that cost more and run hotter. One thing we know: the M2 will be faster and more capable than the M1 and won't be limited to 16 Gb. We'll probably see M2-based Macs by the summer of 2021.

dhruvdh 6y ago
M1 is still just a tablet SoC in a laptop form factor. We don't know what the efficiency will look like after you add all the I/O you need for a real desktop, we don't know how the memory subsystem will deal with 4 more cores that are just as fast. What's the point of having fast cores if you cannot feed them? We don't know how lower yields for bigger chips on the newest nodes will affect their costs. People act like Apple changed the game or is light years ahead of everyone but they literally haven't made a proper desktop-class chip yet. It's not because they don't care about higher core chips or chips with proper IO. They haven't made them because they CAN'T (yet). So yes, Apple does have catching up to do.
- alwillis 6y ago
  M1 is still just a tablet SoC in a laptop form factor. That wouldn't be good enough for production hardware. The developer units had a previous iPad’s A12 SoC in an enclosure for developers to test things on. For example, the A series doesn't support virtualization because that's not required on a phone or tablet. But the M1 supports this and other laptop/desktop features. Even the A14 only has 4 cores compared to the M1's 8 cores. This isn't just a tablet SoC. We don't know what the efficiency will look like after you add all the I/O you need for a real desktop, we don't know how the memory subsystem will deal with 4 more cores that are just as fast. What's the point of having fast cores if you cannot feed them? Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the Mac mini is a real desktop. And all of the M1 Macs have blazingly fast memory access. Remember, it's an SoC—the memory is on the same die as the CPUs, GPUs and they all have equal access to it. No bus to go across. That's why it's so fast. People act like Apple changed the game or is light years ahead of everyone but they literally haven't made a proper desktop-class chip yet. The M1 already has features no "desktop" chip has, such as 8 instruction decoders. This may not sound like a big deal, but none of the Intel or AMD chips--not the threadripper or the Zen3—has more than 4. Why this matters: "It is because the ability to run fast depends on how quickly you can fill up the ROB with micro-ops and with how many. The more quickly you fill it up and the larger it is the more opportunities you are given to pick instructions you can execute in parallel and thus improve performance. Machine code instructions are chopped into micro-ops by what we call an instruction decoder. If we have more decoders we can chop up more instructions in parallel and thus fill up the ROB faster. And this is where we see the huge differences. The biggest baddest Intel and AMD microprocessor cores have 4 decoders, which means they can decode 4 instructions in parallel spitting out micro-ops. But Apple has a crazy 8 decoders. Not only that but the ROB is something like 3x larger. You can basically hold 3x as many instructions. No other mainstream chip maker has that many decoders in their CPUs." So Intel or AMD will just add 8 instruction decoders to increase their throughput, right? Nope: "However on an x86 CPU the decoders have no clue where the next instruction starts. It has to actually analyze each instruction in order to see how long it is. The brute force way Intel and AMD deal with this is by simply attempting to decode instructions at every posssible starting points. That means we have to deal with lots of wrong guesses and mistakes which has to be discarded. This creates such a convoluted and complicated decoder stage, that it is really hard to add more decoders. But for Apple it is trivial in comparison to keep adding more. In fact adding more causes so many other problems that 4 decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for how far they can go. *This is what allows the M1 Firestorm cores to essentially process twice as many instructions as AMD and Intel CPUs at the same clock frequency.*" As I've said in other threads on HN, there's no way Apple's first laptop/desktop chip should be competitive with AMD, but it is: "As far as I remember from performance benchmarks the newest AMD CPU cores, the ones called Zen3 are slightly faster than Firestorm cores. But here is the kicker, that only happens because the Zen3 cores are clocked at 5 GHz. Firestorm cores are clocked at 3.2 GHz. The Zen3 is just barely squeezing past Firestorm despite having almost 60% higher clock frequency. So why doesn’t Apple increase the clock frequency too? Because higher clock frequency makes the chips hotter. That is one of Apple’s key selling points. Their computers unlike Intel and AMD offerings barely need cooling. In essence one could say Firestorm cores really are superior to Zen3 cores. Zen3 only manages to stay in the game by drawing a lot more current and getting a lot hotter. Something Apple simply chooses not to do." So yes, Apple does have catching up to do. Come again? The Zen3 barely beats the M1, which runs at 60% of the speed and a small fraction of the power. It can essentially process twice as many instructions at the same clock frequency. They're already ahead in many key areas, with performance per watt being the most obvious. There are issues with the x86 architecture, like instructions ranging from 1 to 15 bytes, which limits Intel and AMD from being able to process as many instructions per clock cycle as ARM processors in general and the M1 especially. I’m quoting from the article "Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?", which has a lot more technical details: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2 https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fas...