9 ms·

It's not just "ARM is fast," though—Apple's ARM chips in particular beat the pants off their ARM competitors. (See benchmarks of any iPhone compared to flagship

by s3cur3 6y ago

It's not just "ARM is fast," though—Apple's ARM chips in particular beat the pants off their ARM competitors. (See benchmarks of any iPhone compared to flagship Android devices.) I don't think you should expect similar levels of performance from a run-of-the-mill ARM chip on the desktop (though I'm happy to be shown benchmarks to the contrary).

HJain13 6y ago
It depends on what you're comparing: A14 on phones have a Multi Core score which would be quite comparable to Snapdragon 888 (extrapolating a 20% boost over SD865) that was just announced all while A14 being clocked higher (3.0ghz 4 core vs 2.84 x 1, 3 x 2.4) comparing performance cores. Single thread OTOH Apple wins comfortably but I would suspect X1 to reduce the lead a bit. As for AI performance Apple claimed 11 TOPs, while Qualcomm claims 25 TOPs
- jcheng 6y ago
  A14 has two performance cores.
simias 6y ago
Apple's ARM SoCs are definitely ahead, but it's not like the competition is hugely far behind. Top of the line Android phones and tablets perform well enough for most desktop tasks IMO. It's mostly the software and I/O that makes them unusable as such.
- zepto 6y ago
  The numbers say otherwise.
  - ChrisLTD 6y ago
    The numbers show that the other chips are slower, but they don't show that they are "unusable".
    - wk_end 6y ago
      x86 chips aren’t “unusable” either, and if these other ARM chips wanted to compete in the desktop space they’d be just as - or more - “hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy”. ISA just doesn’t matter half as much as microarchitecture.
      - egsmi 6y ago
        And those x86 are only still usable because M1 hasn’t been out long enough for the new software, that needs the speed to be “useable”, to be written.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        5nm process would help a lot.
    - unsigner 6y ago
      Put it this way: if the new Macs had the performance of the fastest Qualcomm ARM cores available today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - simias 6y ago
    To be clear I'm not talking benchmarks, I have no idea what the raw numbers are. I'm talking about my personal experience using ARM SoCs. Specifically I've worked with Tegra chip and they're powerhouses for instance, I could definitely see myself do my day-to-day development on such a chip.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. It didn't take long for Android to discover touch screens once Apple made it clear that they were dramatically better. Similarly, it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without infringing on any particular patents. Even if they did have to spend the same R&D expense to get there, Apple has already derisked it. So they have a small fraction of Apple's expense and none of the risk, so I would fully expect to see M1 competitive chips come out in a few years' time. This isn't to say that they'll catch up with Apple completely; only that they'll be able to recoup a significant amount of the gap in a relatively short period of time such that there will be a similar breakthrough in the PC market (this is effectively what TFA is predicting as well, if that lends me any credibility).
    - scarface74 6y ago
      If it were so easy, why are all of the other ARM manufacturers years behind?
    - snazz 6y ago
      In my opinion, Apple "derisked" high-performance ARM chips with the A9-ish era five years ago. Other companies have had a long time to spend catching up to Apple mobile chips, and they haven't.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        That's a completely reasonable challenge, and I might be wrong. My very amateur speculation is that, in the mobile space, Apple got incrementally better over time. Rank-and-file Android users didn't really notice the performance gap and thus didn't demand faster chips. M1 changed expectations for the laptop market virtually overnight, and rank-and-file users will expect M1 performance, battery life, etc. I think this represents an enormous market opportunity for PC manufacturers and thus chip suppliers that didn't really exist circa A9. My key assumption is that there's some pareto principle at play--80% of the M1's performance gains over the next best generic ARM chip are due to a handful of key innovations while the remaining 20% come from a long tail of incremental improvements. This would mean that generic manufacturers could copy those handful of key innovations (modulo IP rights, which might be another fatal flaw in my speculation) and recoup 80% of that performance gap in just a few years. If that assumption is bad and the performance is entirely an accumulation of lots of minor innovations over time, then I suspect it will take chip manufacturers quite a lot longer to catch up.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the CPU compared to flexible and huge RAM potential devices seems dishonest. Unless Apple manages to squeeze 128GiB of RAM on their chip, at least. I want to see what my Blender workstation looks like on Apple's Architecture. Where i purpose built a huge CPU, GPU, and RAM for Blender rendering and large scenes. I suspect Apple will start seeing huge falloffs in the SoC design under larger workloads. Apple is dominant in making phones though. And this Laptop is designed like a Phone. So yea, it's amazing for that.
    - spijdar 6y ago
      Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining. The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall. Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
      - adkadskhj 6y ago
        Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale. Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says: > including automobile-priced Mac Pros That's rough.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Probably because there's basically no competition in the ARM space, especially in non-mobile. I'd like to see what amd and intel can do with ARM before saying apple will continue to be king.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Qualcomm, Samsung, Cavium/Marvell, and nVidia don't count? Not to mention ARM's own cores...
  - wmf 6y ago
    They don't count in the PC space. For desktop PCs there's just the Mac mini and various hacker boards. For laptops there's the new MacBooks and the mediocre Qualcomm 8cx/SQ2 and nothing else.
    - cestith 6y ago
      There's Exynos.
      - vetinari 6y ago
        Exynos is dead.
      - wmf 6y ago
        No, there aren't any PCs running Exynos.
        cestith 6y ago
        That's true if you consider Chromebooks not to be PC-class machines.
    - ghettoimp 6y ago
      For other ARM manufacturers, I wonder how much of this is a software problem. I mean, what would the market be for a super-fast ARM laptop/desktop machine? It would run Windows RT, I guess? How much better than Intel/AMD would the ARM machine need to be to justify buying it and running that? It seems like the M1's "magic" is not just the chip, but very much also the Rosetta thing.

by s3cur3 6y ago

HJain13 6y ago

It depends on what you're comparing: A14 on phones have a Multi Core score which would be quite comparable to Snapdragon 888 (extrapolating a 20% boost over SD865) that was just announced all while A14 being clocked higher (3.0ghz 4 core vs 2.84 x 1, 3 x 2.4) comparing performance cores. Single thread OTOH Apple wins comfortably but I would suspect X1 to reduce the lead a bit. As for AI performance Apple claimed 11 TOPs, while Qualcomm claims 25 TOPs

jcheng 6y ago
A14 has two performance cores.

simias 6y ago

Apple's ARM SoCs are definitely ahead, but it's not like the competition is hugely far behind. Top of the line Android phones and tablets perform well enough for most desktop tasks IMO. It's mostly the software and I/O that makes them unusable as such.

zepto 6y ago
The numbers say otherwise.
- ChrisLTD 6y ago
  The numbers show that the other chips are slower, but they don't show that they are "unusable".
  - wk_end 6y ago
    x86 chips aren’t “unusable” either, and if these other ARM chips wanted to compete in the desktop space they’d be just as - or more - “hot and/or slow, clunky, noisy”. ISA just doesn’t matter half as much as microarchitecture.
    - egsmi 6y ago
      And those x86 are only still usable because M1 hasn’t been out long enough for the new software, that needs the speed to be “useable”, to be written.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      5nm process would help a lot.
  - unsigner 6y ago
    Put it this way: if the new Macs had the performance of the fastest Qualcomm ARM cores available today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- simias 6y ago
  To be clear I'm not talking benchmarks, I have no idea what the raw numbers are. I'm talking about my personal experience using ARM SoCs. Specifically I've worked with Tegra chip and they're powerhouses for instance, I could definitely see myself do my day-to-day development on such a chip.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  When iPhone came out in 2007, Android was still an OS for BlackBerry like devices. It didn't take long for Android to discover touch screens once Apple made it clear that they were dramatically better. Similarly, it's not like other ARM chip manufacturers are going to have to go through all of the same R&D expense to figure out how to make chips that are comparably fast--they just need to copy what Apple did without infringing on any particular patents. Even if they did have to spend the same R&D expense to get there, Apple has already derisked it. So they have a small fraction of Apple's expense and none of the risk, so I would fully expect to see M1 competitive chips come out in a few years' time. This isn't to say that they'll catch up with Apple completely; only that they'll be able to recoup a significant amount of the gap in a relatively short period of time such that there will be a similar breakthrough in the PC market (this is effectively what TFA is predicting as well, if that lends me any credibility).
  - scarface74 6y ago
    If it were so easy, why are all of the other ARM manufacturers years behind?
  - snazz 6y ago
    In my opinion, Apple "derisked" high-performance ARM chips with the A9-ish era five years ago. Other companies have had a long time to spend catching up to Apple mobile chips, and they haven't.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      That's a completely reasonable challenge, and I might be wrong. My very amateur speculation is that, in the mobile space, Apple got incrementally better over time. Rank-and-file Android users didn't really notice the performance gap and thus didn't demand faster chips. M1 changed expectations for the laptop market virtually overnight, and rank-and-file users will expect M1 performance, battery life, etc. I think this represents an enormous market opportunity for PC manufacturers and thus chip suppliers that didn't really exist circa A9. My key assumption is that there's some pareto principle at play--80% of the M1's performance gains over the next best generic ARM chip are due to a handful of key innovations while the remaining 20% come from a long tail of incremental improvements. This would mean that generic manufacturers could copy those handful of key innovations (modulo IP rights, which might be another fatal flaw in my speculation) and recoup 80% of that performance gap in just a few years. If that assumption is bad and the performance is entirely an accumulation of lots of minor innovations over time, then I suspect it will take chip manufacturers quite a lot longer to catch up.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Do they? Because i have yet to see any numbers that aren't clearly the result of a massively streamlined SoC. Yes the ARM chip is great, but the RAM is blazing, tiny, and more close to the ARM chip than anything out there for x86, right? I'll be interested to see if Apple can keep this up with 128GiB of RAM and a beefy GPU. So far to me M1 is great, ARM is great, but comparing a tiny amount of RAM soldered onto the CPU compared to flexible and huge RAM potential devices seems dishonest. Unless Apple manages to squeeze 128GiB of RAM on their chip, at least. I want to see what my Blender workstation looks like on Apple's Architecture. Where i purpose built a huge CPU, GPU, and RAM for Blender rendering and large scenes. I suspect Apple will start seeing huge falloffs in the SoC design under larger workloads. Apple is dominant in making phones though. And this Laptop is designed like a Phone. So yea, it's amazing for that.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Architectural analysis of the chip [0] suggests it is a massive improvement as a general purpose CPU, not just because of Apple's vertical integration and streamlining. The magnitude of extra ROB entries, having an 8x wide instruction decoder, that massive L1I cache, and such fat cores with lots of ALU and other op units while simultaneously keeping over a 3GHz clock is a phenomenal architectural improvement overall. Apple may not need to add more RAM locally. Other silicon designers like IBM with POWER10 are moving to serial memory with massive "L4" caches, seen previously with their Centaur memory controllers. I can see Apple using OMI or a similar serial memory bus to add extra memory, using 16/32/etc GB of PoP RAM for caching reads and writes to slower off-chip memory. I expect Intel and AMD will eventually move to a similar memory model, at least in server grade hardware. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
    - adkadskhj 6y ago
      Yea and to be clear i'm not saying it's not awesome. I'm just saying that a lot of things - like real world benchmarks of programs/etc - massively benefit from the proximity and speed of the RAM. Proximity seems to be a very difficult beast to scale. Works great in small scale, horrible in large scale. Sidenote, even if Apple rolled out 128GiB tomorrow i probably couldn't afford it. As the OP says: > including automobile-priced Mac Pros That's rough.

colinmhayes 6y ago

Probably because there's basically no competition in the ARM space, especially in non-mobile. I'd like to see what amd and intel can do with ARM before saying apple will continue to be king.

mlyle 6y ago
Qualcomm, Samsung, Cavium/Marvell, and nVidia don't count? Not to mention ARM's own cores...
- wmf 6y ago
  They don't count in the PC space. For desktop PCs there's just the Mac mini and various hacker boards. For laptops there's the new MacBooks and the mediocre Qualcomm 8cx/SQ2 and nothing else.
  - cestith 6y ago
    There's Exynos.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      Exynos is dead.
    - wmf 6y ago
      No, there aren't any PCs running Exynos.
      - cestith 6y ago
        That's true if you consider Chromebooks not to be PC-class machines.
  - ghettoimp 6y ago
    For other ARM manufacturers, I wonder how much of this is a software problem. I mean, what would the market be for a super-fast ARM laptop/desktop machine? It would run Windows RT, I guess? How much better than Intel/AMD would the ARM machine need to be to justify buying it and running that? It seems like the M1's "magic" is not just the chip, but very much also the Rosetta thing.