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Apple Preps Next Mac Chips with Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs
- varispeed 6y agoIt will be interesting to watch people trade their privacy for convenience. I just hope that Intel wakes up and give new architecture a push or maybe they'll start licensing x86 in a similar way that ARM does and we could finally get more players in the PC space.
- rbanffy 6y agoIt's not like Intel is stellar in terms of privacy. If you want to actually be secure, you'll need something where everything is de-blobbed and open, such as the POWER9 workstations from Raptor.
- varispeed 6y agoI missed this arch. It looks awesome!
- danieldk 6y agoIt's not like Intel is stellar in terms of privacy. I think the grandparent means that using an M1 implies using macOS, which had its share of potential privacy issues recently (regularly phoning home on launching apps, having Apple service circumvent VPNs and application firewalls).
- klelatti 6y agocough Intel Management Engine cough
- rbanffy 6y agocough Windows telemetry cough
- Grazester 6y agoIt X86-64 not being as locked down we can install any compatible OS desired. One is not limited to Window!
- klelatti 6y agoSame is true for the M1!
- ben-schaaf 6y agoUntil the point in time where Apple decides to publish documentation so that drivers can be written in order to actually run other operating systems, the M1 will remain as locked down as any iPhone - minus finding a way to jailbreak. X86 is on a completely different level, see: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware-specification-prms https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware-specific...
- klelatti 6y agoIt's a matter of opinion I suppose but in my view 'locked down' is not the same as not providing driver support. The former implies actively preventing people from running other OSs on the hardware - which they could have done but chose not too.
- Grazester 6y agoWe can install Linux on the M1 now? Is there something I missed?
- vetinari 6y agoIME is strictly local, and is concerned with handling the hardware. AMT, built on top of IME is not, it has networking, but if you have AMT, you know very well, because you paid extra for it. None of the above is at the same level as phoning home or ignoring the user's firewall.
- josephg 6y agoAt least Apple’s certificate checks are (ostensibly) anonymised. Windows telemetry is explicitly designed to build a personalised profile about you for advertisers. There are a lot of options you can disable throughout windows’ control panel, but I’d be shocked if you can actually turn all of it off for good without registry tweaks.
- vetinari 6y agoThat's why I addressed Intel IME, not Windows telemetry. I put Windows telemetry into same bag as the Apple calling mothership.
- klelatti 6y agoNeither Apple or Microsoft are in the right on this - but given the multiple issues associated with it neither is IME.
- valuearb 6y agoIn the same bag?!? You are really jumping through hoops to try to make a platform designed to protect your privacy equivalent to one designed to sell it.
- fsflover 6y agocough https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner cough
- klelatti 6y ago> me_cleaner currently works on most of the Intel platforms; while this doesn't mean it works on all the boards (due to the different firmware implementations)
- sneak 6y agoFaster isn't just convenience. It's also lower power consumption for the same compute, which means a smaller/lighter battery, or longer runtime at the same weight. This is not a privacy-vs-convenience battle, sadly; this is a very carefully planned circumstance where you can maintain privacy, or you can be effective in life. It's already impossible to use most mobiles in a private fashion, and within a few years, effective desktop computing will be exactly the same way. You're going to have to provide ID to do anything with a "normal" phone or computer. Recently I learned that Apple will only give out NetworkExtension API entitlements for apps (that are required for VPN apps to work on macOS) to apps distributed via the Mac App Store. Aside from the obvious antitrust issues here (you can't self-distribute VPN apps, or run a competing app store that can distribute apps with the same functionality as Apple's), this means that you can't get access to e.g. the WireGuard app on macOS without IDing yourself to Apple to get an Apple ID and installing it via the Mac App Store. Want privacy via a VPN? You're going to have to show ID first.
- danieldk 6y agoFaster isn't just convenience. It's also lower power consumption for the same compute, which means a smaller/lighter battery, or longer runtime at the same weight. As has been discussed in various threads the last few weeks, the difference in power efficiency is not that large compared to recent AMD Ryzen APUs, accounting for a move from 7nm to 5nm node.
- nojito 6y agoOnly because measuring M1 power consumption can only be done from the wall.
- danieldk 6y agoI surely hope that this is one of the outcomes of Apple and Amazon's ARM push. Perhaps Intel will realize that's it is better to have competition on its own architecture than complete ecosystems moving to foreign architectures. One could well argue that ARM/RISC is more elegant. But x86_64 besides backwards compatibility has the large benefit that it is an open platform when it comes to operating systems. Moving to ARM will be an excuse for many vendors to lock bootloaders to their blessed software (such as the iOS/Android ecosystems).
- klelatti 6y agoSorry, not going to happen. Why would Intel add more competitors into a market where it has a duopoly?
- danieldk 6y agoWhich scenario is better for Intel? - The server and desktop markets move to ARM. The AArch64 instruction set becomes the default that people develop and deploy on. Optimizing for x86_64 CPUs becomes an afterthought. Intel only sells CPUs to organizations that have legacy systems somewhere that cannot be emulated. Intel has to enter the highly commoditized ARM market to stay competitive. - The server and desktop markets largely stay on x86_64 as a result of Intel licensing x86_64 to three other vendors, increasing competition. The market is not commoditized, because Intel can decide who they license x86_86 to and also control extension to the instruction set. They lose market share due to the increased competition. But they can compete on their own architecture that they control. Of course, these are extremes. But given that the current fastest supercomputer uses ARM and Apple showed that ARM is fit for the desktop, I am pretty sure that Intel is (or should be) worried about the first scenario.
- klelatti 6y agoThe one thing that Intel has at the moment is x86 and the historic effort that has gone into generating and optimising code for the x86 instruction set. Sharing that with three other vendors (think three other AMDs all competing with Intel) would catastrophically undermine their CPU business. In any event it's too late. They maybe had an chance of fending off Arm a few years ago - by the time any licensing now kicks in Arm will have established itself in the server / PC market. So the only sensible strategy for Intel is to make the most of x86 whilst they can.
- f6v 6y agoHas nothing to do with Intel, I guess? PC = Windows for most people, I heard them complaining about ads running in their OS. But what are you gonna do? Switch to Ubuntu?
- rbanffy 6y agoI'm very curious about the chips with external memory and how they'll do WRT performance in the high-end. Do we have a measurement of how much M1 spends waiting for memory after an L3 miss?
- rsynnott 6y agoThe memory that the M1 uses is quite fast for LPDDR4X, but there's nothing _that_ special about it. Moving it off-package shouldn't have a significant impact.
- rbanffy 6y agoTrue. Two LPDDR4X channels (at ~35GBps) would give the M1's ~70GBps memory bandwidth. I wonder if the tight packaging allows it to play with latencies being shorter.
- masklinn 6y agoThe M1 just uses on-package memory, it’s nothing really special, it only avoids routing through the motherboard (which is convenient): instead if soldering the ram next to the SOC, it’s soldered onto the SOC.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoIt may have electrical benefits too - the capacitance of the line will likely be lower, and possibly the drive-strength might be lower. Both of those might figure into the power management of the chip... But overall, yeah, it's not as though the RAM is part of the chip, it's just part of the package. Not a lot to see here.
- sneak 6y ago> If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public. Yeah, it's definitely non-public that Apple's about to put best-in-class chips in their desktop machines. Totally secret. Don't tell anyone, Bloomberg! https://www.epsilontheory.com/why-am-i-reading-this-now/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/why-am-i-reading-this-now/ Reminder: it was also Bloomberg who ran that very likely bogus and unsubstantiated story/psyop about the scary backdoor chips on the SuperMicro boards, and refused to retract it. When they do very obvious marketing fluff pieces like this, they lose even more credibility as a "legitimate news source" in my view, even if this ad they're running for Apple's upcoming hardware is 100% factually accurate.
- lnsp 6y agoThe article seems to be poorly informed. > Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel-powered hardware. I don't even remember the last Apple hardware with Nvidia graphics. > Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which has been gaining market share at Intel’s expense, offers standard desktop parts with as many as 16 cores, with some of its high-end chips for gaming PCs going as high as 64 cores. Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming. > Company tests faster performing processors than Intel’s best. Well if I'm correct AMD currently sits on top of the CPU ranking (and Intel 11th gen doesn't seem to be changing that as far as the leaks go), so AMD is the one to beat. > Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs Weird conclusion to draw considering the statements above. I would expect the performance to be on-par with the high end chips, but with lower energy consumption. The article seems to imply that it will outperform 280W+ CPUs.
- Traster 6y agoI agree this article is sloppily written, Gurman has a strong track record of having the inside scoop on Apple's plans. Essentially all this article is really saying is "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product". That's it. There's no clue about discrete graphics, NUMA, power budgets etc. It could be that that new mac pro is heading back towards the non-expandable trash-can style design. All they really know is that there's going to be something in the mac pro space in 2022 and that's the last direct replacement to Intel Macs Apple are making.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product" Even this piece of info can be extrapolated from statement's Apple has made public. They've said they were migrating their entire product line within 2 years. The Mac Pro is part of that product line. The only questions are how Apple is going to get there and on that front it's pretty clear this article is pure speculation. Will the Mac Pro have integrated graphics or a discrete GPU? Maybe someone at AMD knows this based on order volume? Likewise, are they using external RAM, soldered on the logic board, or user-serviceable RAM? How is performance going to compare to current top end processors? Those are the only questions, and the answers here are pure speculation. It's likely only a handful of people at Apple even know the answers to these things.
- haunter 6y agoYeah but can I play Cyberpunk 2077 on it?
- tecleandor 6y agoNot yet.
- Nick_vh 6y agoWith Stadia you can!
- haunter 6y agoWell I don't live in a blessed country so not https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852?hl=en
- invalidusernam3 6y agoHow about nvidia geforce now? Cyberpunk is coming to that apparently https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/gfn-announcements/22/343462/cyberpunk-2077-coming-to-geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/gfn-announcement...
- chungus_khan 6y agoNot really so much on it as using it as a dumb video terminal then though.
- IronRanger 6y agoNo, but with the 15% commission tier for <$1m companies, you can expect an Indie renaissance.
- durovo 6y agoFor non-ios games, how does that commision matter?
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- amelius 6y agoIt's so sad that all technological innovation seems to be concentrated into the few products of a single company. Yes, we can have power-efficient phones and laptops, but what about other product categories? I think the market should be more modular so that any company can build cool stuff with top of the line CPUs, not just Apple. As a hacker, I think with Apple's dominance computing is becoming less interesting. It's like opening a LEGO box, and all pieces are already fused together.
- jamil7 6y agoIn some ways it's also a great time to be hacking on these kinds of projects. ARM chips are cheap and widely available to everyone as well as all kinds of other components. They maybe don't have the same kind of R&D behind them as Apple's but the building blocks are there.
- EricE 6y ago..."but the building blocks are there." And anyone can easily beat Amazon's pricing if they can just run a data center competently too - after all the building blocks are there. Seriously?
- jamil7 6y agoI feel this comment is in bad faith. I think you know what my actual point was but you’ve chosen to reply to a single line here.
- varispeed 6y agoI wonder how the extent of this problem could be attributed to patents that are awarded not on the basis of genuine invention but rather letting profit whoever filed their findings first.
- sxg 6y agoOn the other hand, without Apple pushing this innovation there was next to no chance we’d ever see anything like the M1 come from another company. Think of the standard laptop display from 10 years ago. They nearly all came with extremely low resolution screens until Apple expanded high res displays from the iPhone and iPad to its own laptops in 2012. Shortly after, all other brands followed suit. I anticipate competitors will do the same and roll out Arm-based laptops in the next few years.
- admiralspoo 6y agoApple wants to be the next SGI and from the M1 is it clear where they want to make profit -- memory and storage upgrades. I expect these monsters to have oodles of HBM, and the Mac Pro with a TB or more could approach house-levels of pricing, like SGI workstations of the past.
- simonh 6y agoThe seem to be aiming at keeping the base price stable, or in some cases at the low water mark for prices for recent models. The new Air starts a hair below $1k as before. After market RAM upgrades on Mac laptops haven't been possible for quite some time now, so I don't think a strategy to try and leverage more profit that way is a change. We'll have to see how they approach that for the higher end kit.
- addicted 6y agoThese chips mean Apple makes more money as well. Each chip now costs them pennies, as opposed to hundreds they were paying Intel and AMD. And their design costs are basically paid off by the iOS devices. Pretty much everything they were paying Intel and AMD (for graphics) is now profit in their pockets.
- ehejsbbejsk 6y agoLikely 40% cost savings at best.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoAll the Rnd Apple put into to make the new CPU's has to be amortised
- lizknope 6y agoExactly. A chip design team as large as Apple's costs hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries alone. Mask costs in 5nm are about $30 million. EDA physical design tools have list prices of over $1 million per license.
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- qz2 6y agoBloomberg are full of shit when it comes to tech news. I'm going to wait until products land before I evaluate. This last cycle I am impressed however.
- WoodenChair 6y ago> Bloomberg are full of shit when it comes to tech news. Actually this article is from Mark Gurman who has arguably the best track record of any journalist when getting the inside scoop on future Apple products. He has worked for Bloomberg for a couple years now.
- CyanBird 6y ago> who has arguably the best track record of any journalist If this is a supposed "good article" then I really don't want to see the bad ones... This piece is written for a complete tech illiterate audience, if anything it makes me want to get an apple machine less
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoThis is a leak article, not in depth tech article. Nobody can write a tech article till they get the numbers or get their hands on the product. Mark Gruman has reliable sources and can get the leak faster and more consistently true.
- jryle70 6y agoBloomberg was the first outlet that reported Apple's transition to ARM, even got the timeline right [0]. So I trust them when it comes to Apple's roadmap. Read Anandtech if you want tech details, but then it's only for tech already in the market. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-said-to-plan-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-...
- dannyw 6y agoObligatory disclaimer that Bloomberg ran an unproven and debunked chip story, and never retracted it.
- nojito 6y agoWhy would they redact something that was true?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragontamer 6y agoNow I don't trust China with regards to hardware manufacturing of computers. I'm sure they're trying to put backdoors into all sorts of equipment that is shipped to the USA. But Bloomberg NEVER explained how a hypothetical 0402 capacitor could contain a backdoor. They literally took a picture of the smallest chip on a motherboard and said "this could be a backdoor" in big-bold letters. Even from a paranoid anti-China perspective, that article was awful. "Chinese Backdoor in server equipment" wouldn't be surprising news to me (especially since important groups: military, telecommunications, etc. etc. use equipment like that). But when it comes to writing security-based articles, you need to be very specific about the nature of the threat. If you take the tiniest chip (a passive capacitor) and claim that there's a backdoor in it, you deserve to be laughed off.
- nojito 6y agoSo are you implying that senior execs at tech companies were lying? That’s a very serious allegation.
- dragontamer 6y agoOccam's Razor is that the authors of that story gave an interview with some security researchers talking about the potential security flaws of some motherboard (a BMC most likely). These researchers may have even talked about hardware backdoors in the abstract (a known potential problem, but whether or not it was actually happening... well... hard to tell from the article). They then went to a 2nd researcher to talk about "small chips", which is ambiguous. Some researcher was like... well... those 0402 ceramic capacitors are called "chips" (which they are: they're "ceramic chip capacitors"). The authors then got confused, and wrote about how 0402 capacitors were security flaws. Or something. I don't know, but that's how an article like that comes to be written in my head. And now that the authors of the article are talking about stupid chip capacitors that can apparently take over the computer, they're completely off track and there's no reason to read the article with any level of seriousness. ----------- > So are you implying that senior execs at tech companies were lying? All I mean to imply, is that its bloody obvious that an 0402 chip capacitor can't hack your computer. That Bloomberg's authors couldn't understand this fact before publishing greatly diminishes the reputation of the article in question. https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9VdsjZLS_Pk/v1/600x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9VdsjZLS_P... That's a 6-pin chip capacitor, is it not? Please, explain to me how a passive noise-dampening component can hack a computer.
- nly 6y agoI suspect PC's containing AMD, and maybe even Intel, chips will be crushing Apple in terms of performance a few years from now, even with the legacy that is the x86 ISA. Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part, it doesn't mean this advantage is inherent to ARM or sustainable once the tech cycle evens out. The bottleneck right now for essentially all chip performance in mobile devices is heat. If you bypass the power throttling and fan control on my 10th gen 6 core Dell XPS 9500 and let it slurp 80-90 watts (and it will), and sit at 100 degrees centigrade (and it will) it will handily beat an M1 multithreaded score in Cinebench.
- jsjohnst 6y ago> Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part Single core performance beats even Intel’s highest TDP processors, I’m pretty sure AMD’s too, in real world workloads. Yes, AMD and Intel still have an edge when you get above 8 cores, but that’s kinda to be expected, no?
- addicted 6y agoThe same advantage applies to Apple as well. In fact, the only difference between the different performances in the different devices Apple has added the M1 to is their cooling capabilities.
- spoopyskelly 6y agoImagine thinking your 90W boat anchor is a "mobile device".
- arh68 6y agoFWIW I largely agree with you. Zen is still competitive at ~7nm/12nm with separate corelets, so if they can match 5nm on a single chip, things will be back to normal. M1 has 16B transistors on 1 "chip", a 3950X has fewer than 10B across 3. What else would you expect, for now? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
- SigmundA 6y agoKeep wondering if Apple will do some kind of NUMA multi cpu setup for Mac Pros. Say four M1 like chips splitting CPU and GPU load each with their own on package memory.
- madeofpalk 6y agoIsnt that harder than just making one big chip?
- SigmundA 6y agoNot sure, was hoping to get some insight here. I know NUMA has many significant challenges but so does adding more cpu/gpu cores and on package memory to compete with current desktop/workstation levels on the ram and gpu sides. Just seems elegant to do 4 M1's and get 64gb total memory and 4x gpu/cpu and seems hard to scale up a single chip to match current multi chip / discrete gpu systems. Maybe even dimms for main memory and current on package memory acting just as a very large level of cache.
- chungus_khan 6y agoFour M1s in a NUMA configuration would get absolutely crushed in the high end market outside of niche uses because of the amount of interconnect bus stress. NUMA is most advantageous on server workloads that Apple doesn't target and for which Mac OS is poorly suited.
- faitswulff 6y agoWith all this talk of even more cores, how does binning work with SoCs? That is, CPU manufacturers can bin individual processors into different tiers depending on how they perform. What is binning like for SoCs, since they are more integrated? Do you bin the whole SoC?
- mortenjorck 6y agoAt least right now, Apple only bins the M1 on graphics cores (7 vs. 8). My guess is that those have the most complex lithography, so it would make sense that those would be the biggest yield variable. My guess is that any multivariate binning will be lowest-common denominator, e.g. an 8-performance core / 12-GPU core part with a single, second-tier bin of 6 performance cores and 10 GPU cores.
- 013a 6y agoThey're already binning the M1 between the two models of the Macbook Air; one has a 7 core GPU, the other has an 8 core. They haven't outright said this is due to binning, but it seems very likely. Will probably be similar for upper-end models, but more CPU variations as well. They're fabbing with TSMC, which has a really established history in high yields. Just think about the A13/A14 CPUs, which are probably the most voluminous single CPU models every fabricated by a company, yet have never been subject to binning to other lower or higher end models. As the chips get more complicated naturally there will be more fabrication issues, so I expect we'll see more binning, but it doesn't look like there's much cause for concern.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoYep, TSMC has an 87% yield[1] at their "5nm" tier - better than at their 7nm tier, in fact. [1]: 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...
- RotsiserMho 6y agoI wonder if they do bin them though, just not for iPhones or iPads. Perhaps today's A13/A14s that have small defects are tomorrow's Apple TV or HomePod CPUs.
- em500 6y agoThis is not a great article, if you've followed the news and around the M1 in the last few weeks. Sure, the Bloomberg audience are not computer geeks, but still. "If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public." It's not entirely obvious that "the latest machines running Intel chips" here probably refers only to the latest Macs running Intel chips. We already know that the M1/Firestorm beats Intel handily in single thread, so this just means they'll use enough cores to beat the 28 core Xeon-W in their current Mac Pro. This is of course completely uninteresting, since 1) they've long announced they'll be Intel-free by 2022 and 2) they're not going to release new Macs any slower than the current Intels. Going by Geekbench they need probably a 16 to 20 Firestorm CPU to beat the current Xeon W-3275M Mac Pro. A 32 Firestorm CPU would completely obliterate it. To make a statement, they'll probably do just that. The more interesting question to me is if they're going to go for the absolute performance crown, currently the AMD EPYC 7H12, a 64 core Zen2 CPU which benches around 60k in Geekbench5 (vs 19k for the 28-core Mac Pro). By mid-2021, that that will be probably a 64 core Zen3 EPYC at around 72k (+20% IPC vs Zen2). Apple can probably match that with a 48 Firestorm CPU. A 32 core CPU won't do it, even with a generous IPC increase next year.
- admiralspoo 6y agoApple will likely have HBM on the 32 core packages, which should provide a significant IPC uplift over the LPDDR4 used in the M1 Macs. I'm pretty certain a 32-core Apple Silicon machine will handily beat a 64 core Zen3, likely at half the power, especially since the AMD's chiplet designs runs into significant memory bandwidth and communication issues.
- dragontamer 6y ago> Apple will likely have HBM on the 32 core packages First of all, that's ludicrously expensive. You need an active interposer that's larger than the chip to do something like that. 4x HBM stacks means 4096 wires to run between your compute-device and the RAM, that's a lot of wires in a tiny area, and only possible with advanced packaging (expensive) methodologies. Second: HBM2 based designs have poor memory-capacity: 8GB per stack means 4x HBM2 caps out at 32GBs under most reasonable configurations. Going into 2021 with a ludicrously expensive 32GB machine seems a bit weak. I don't think anyone in the high-end market is targeting that level of memory capacity. Even if we're generous and HBM capacity doubles between now and then, I'm not sure if 64GBs is enough for workstation tasks. HBM works for supercomputers, because when 32GB isn't enough, you just buy another node. A64FX, the current CPU-based supercomputer that uses HBM, only has 32GB/node. Then Fugaku bought 150,000 nodes.
- dragontamer 6y agoIt is estimated that the M1 is 16-billion transistors on 5nm for a 4-big core + 4-little core + iGPU + neural engine SOC. The most comparable laptop processor is AMD Renoir: Zen2 8-core + iGPU for 10-billion transistors. As such, I'd expect a "hypothetical high end" 32-big core Mac to compete against a 64-big core EPYC in terms of #transistors. Would the high end market be interested in a lower core count computer but higher single-thread performance? I somehow doubt that. Server / workstation loads scale well to many cores: indeed, any computer that actually scales to 32-cores would probably also scale well to 64-cores (or SIMD-compute), and the M1 is only 128-bit wide SIMD. ------------ There's also the issue of the lack of hyperthreading: the Apple M1 does NOT implement SMT in any way what so ever. Those 32-cores would likely only support 32-threads, while the 64-core EPYC supports 128-threads. I dunno. "Just scaling up" the M1 doesn't seem like it'd be a winner in the high-end market to me. Maybe if the core gained a wider SIMD-width and SMT (2x threads/core), that'd help a lot.
- toast0 6y agoThere's value in having the same compute ability in fewer cores. Communication/synchronization overhead is usually growing faster than linear in the number of threads. SMT isn't an unalloyed good, it helps for many workloads and hurts for some. That said, the very wide cores in M1 are asking for SMT to increass utilization, I'd guess it'll happen eventually. OTOH, the weaker memory consistency rules on ARM seem to allow for a lot more out of order execution, which seems to keep things busy. I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high.
- dragontamer 6y ago> There's value in having the same compute ability in fewer cores. Communication/synchronization overhead is usually growing faster than linear in the number of threads. I agree for sure. But the tradeoffs are pretty steep. Scaling within a core is traditionally sqrt(size), while scaling number of cores on a problem is also sqrt(cores). Balancing between size-of-core vs number-of-cores is a big question. And that also depends very strongly on the task at hand. Web-servers scale better than sqrt(#cores), because each worker-thread is basically fully independent. > I don't think we'll see Intel and AMD increase the width of their cores so much; they need their cores to scale to 5Ghz (even if it takes 1KW of cooling) for marketting and competition reasons, and wider cores are harder to clock so high. I think there's a good argument that AMD / Intel can't scale their decoder much larger than 4-way / 6-way with uOp cache, due to the instruction set issue. But I've seen some interesting innovations: the most recent Intel Atoms have double-decoders (2+2 decoder) on SMT-based Atoms. Such a thing would make SMT more efficient without much increase to power. Its strange to see Apple take the single-thread performance crown. But... I don't think they've proven themselves in the high-end server / workstation market yet. Even if they do scale up, their decisions don't seem to be an obvious winner at the high end.
- crb002 6y agoHow many M1s can Apple fit in a rack? 256? IBM should ship a water cooled rack and hook them in the same toroidal topology as Blue Gene/L and figure out a real Borg like scheduler for them.
- ksec 6y agoThe most interesting piece of information to me is the suggestion of Apple still going with SoC route with its Mac Pro. i.e UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture ), GPU, NPU stay intact. You are basically getting a M1XX, where M1X is the 16 CPU Core variants. Consider the current M1, a 32 Core High Performance CPU Core and 128 GPU core would give you roughly 300W TDP Max, excluding all the memory controller and interconnect. A rough estimate is already at 500mm2+ Die Size, excluding NPU and all other bits and pieces, of course assuming the same processing node. The Old ( Or the recent ) Mac Pro has a Maxed out system of ~910W, that is 28 Core CPU + 2 x Radeon Vega II Duo ( That is 4 GPU ). We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again, except it would be even faster than the 2019 Cheese Grater Mac Pro. We would have reached the thermal ceiling again, unless Apple does Water Cooling and push that TDP allowance to 400W. Remember this M1XX is CPU + GPU TDP. For a PC system, or workstation power users are quite used to 300W CPU + 300W GPU. So I was sort of expecting Apple to be making CPU + GPU design, purely to create a monster as a successor to Cheese Grater Mac Pro. May be they have different Goal in mind, may be they think this is good enough for Mac Pro ( Which certainly is from many perspective ), and obviously iMac. Same Design, scaling across iPhone, iPad, MacBook, And Mac Pro. This brings me to the final point, we only have so much uArch improvement we could do, it is now all left to process node and heat dissipation of the system. We are in the era of TDP Computing.
- an_opabinia 6y agoWell, in terms of dollars per getting shit done, a GPU on ARM that only supports Metal 2 isn’t going to get any software for it in a really really long time, no matter how fast it is, perhaps so long that better conventional GPUs will come out by then. Who do you think writes all the code for this stuff? It’s guys in tracksuits in Visual Studio C++ on Windows. The top games for iOS are also either written by a few guys in Unity or by an absolutely huge team of people porting an existing, low graphics quality PC game.
- wmf 6y agoA lot of software will end up using OpenGL->Metal, Vulkan->Metal, or D3D->Metal translation layers but it won't matter if the GPU is fast enough.
- JoshTko 6y agoI think it's pretty interesting that only Intel is mentioned in the article. It could imply nothing, but it's odd that Intel is the benchmark since AMD has been the multi-thread king for a while. This could mean that Apple's multi-thread performance will be still below AMD.
- neogodless 6y agoI've wasted more life energy arguing on the internet than I care to admit to even myself, and so far, there does seem to be a common theme. Those that herald the M1 as unequivocally the next great thing are very, very rarely in the same (anecdotal) set of internet users that acknowledge that AMD exists, and makes CPUs. (Or it exists, but the M1 outperforms it in every metric!) I suspect that many Apple-focused journalists are similarly constrained by tunnel vision, limiting their view of the world as "things that Apple created in the past" and "things that Apple creates now." For the already Apple faithful, it's not a bad way to go. "Is this new Apple Silicon desktop going to outperform the only option I have now, an Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro?" So it's not too surprising that Intel is their benchmark, even if it ignores much higher performing alternatives available to those outside of Apple's walled garden.
- valuearb 6y agoApple has no incentive to build faster than ThreadRipper CPUs. That’s a tiny, tiny market. It’s more likely they offer TR like performance at much lower watts, temperature and cost, like they’ve done to AMDa best mobile CPUs.
- lostgame 6y agoI think this should be tagged with [rumour] or the like.
- dawnerd 6y agoOnce again an article calling m1 a low end device. If it’s so low end why is it doing so well?
- spacedcowboy 6y agoIt's the worst Mac CPU that Apple will ever make. That's why it's low-end. Whether it's doing well or not doesn't really factor into that. That's more a matter of market and availability.
- ElijahLynn 6y agoPaywall, can't access/read.
- deltron3030 6y agoHow likely is it that Nvidia will mimic the SoC approach and provide a similar unified architecture for PC vendors? Could this be the end for ATX components?
- wmf 6y agoNvidia has been making SoCs for years. Phone, tablet, and PC vendors don't want them.
- jmnicolas 6y agoIf they were selling an ITX motherboard with a Nvidia SOC soldered on it with M1 perfs I bet quite a few of us would buy it.
- ascagnel_ 6y agonVidia is in the process of acquiring ARM; I could see them marrying their GPU design skill with an ARM CPU to make a very compelling SoC.
- wmf 6y agoThey already did that.
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoAmazing how slow things are moving ... took 50 years for RISC to catch up to CISC, and no other more advanced architecture is on the horizon.
- saagarjha 6y agoPowerPC was a RISC…
- ur-whale 6y agohttps://archive.is/mLC0u https://archive.is/mLC0u
- ogre_codes 6y agoIt seems to me that Apple supporting discrete GPUs is inevitable. They likely want to continue supporting external GPUs for the MacBook Pro, once they do that, supporting internal GPUs is not a huge jump. My feeling is they will ship a blazing fast GPU on the base Mac Pro and offer optional discrete GPUs for people who want that functionality.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/mLC0u https://archive.is/mLC0u
- 4778468d 6y agoI care more about RAM than CPU.
- valuearb 6y agoThis news says you'll be able to have both.