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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 strea

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.
- spijdar 6y ago
  Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM. Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale. My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :( ... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...
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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.

spijdar 6y ago
Hypothetically, with these new memory architectures, you could get the best of both worlds. Best case, you get a huge speed up if everything fits in the high-speed RAM, worst case, you fall back to the "old" RAM. Side note, while Apple charges ridiculous prices for their upgrades, Mac Pros are actually some of the more ""reasonably priced"" computers comparatively. I've looked at HP and Lenovo's equiv. workstations, and you pretty much get screwed by everyone at that scale. My desktop can take up to dual 128 GB sticks but one stick costs over $1,000, so I'm stuck with my 32 GB stick :( ... OTOH, it's pretty insane you can get 128GB of RAM for $1,000 nowadays. I remember when 8GB was a lot and cost several hundred. Time and miniaturization go on I guess...

deleted 6y ago

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