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Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% imp

Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.

stocknoob 6y ago
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png
bamurphymac1 6y ago
Apple tends to hold back performance on first gen products and then boost them dramatically in the next iteration.
ogre_codes 6y ago
You can look at Apple's mobile CPU performance gains over the past 10 years for an idea of what the current trajectory is. There is likely to be a couple more big performance jumps similar to this when Apple releases versions of this with more cores.
kllrnohj 6y ago
The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a necessarily "safe" bet. There's nothing obviously on the table for a big uptick in IPC. Apples got a great trajectory and great engineers, of course, but there's nothing here where you can point to an existing thing and be like "now as soon as they add that, too, wow!" It's "only" running at a peak of around 3.2ghz, though, so there's a lot of clear theoretical headroom on that front. But whether or not things like their cache or other subsystems can handle higher frequencies is unknown. But clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo would be a potentially large gain - at the cost of also a huge uptick in power consumption, though, so Apple may just decline to go that route entirely, at least on their mobile CPUs.
- floatboth 6y ago
  > clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo How high they can go really depends on the process. TSMC 7FF silicon didn't go that high early on, max clocks really were improving as the process matured. This was very noticeable with AMD Zen 2, early dies topped out at ~4.2 (for all cores on the die), later ones often easily take ~4.4.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    How high it goes also depends on the CPU design. We know TSMC's 7NM can make CPUs that hit 4.5ghz, the Ryzen 5000 does this. It's also quite likely that TSMC's 5nm can still hit the 4ghz+ range in a CPU application. What we don't know is if the M1 can actually run at those frequencies, too, or if there's other bottlenecks that prevent the M1 from clocking higher than it does.
rsynnott 6y ago
Seems reasonable to expect that the version for 16" MBP/high-end 13"/iMac will be more or less the same thing but with more cores.

Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.

stocknoob 6y ago

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/perf-trajectory.png

bamurphymac1 6y ago

Apple tends to hold back performance on first gen products and then boost them dramatically in the next iteration.

ogre_codes 6y ago

You can look at Apple's mobile CPU performance gains over the past 10 years for an idea of what the current trajectory is. There is likely to be a couple more big performance jumps similar to this when Apple releases versions of this with more cores.

kllrnohj 6y ago

The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a necessarily "safe" bet. There's nothing obviously on the table for a big uptick in IPC. Apples got a great trajectory and great engineers, of course, but there's nothing here where you can point to an existing thing and be like "now as soon as they add that, too, wow!" It's "only" running at a peak of around 3.2ghz, though, so there's a lot of clear theoretical headroom on that front. But whether or not things like their cache or other subsystems can handle higher frequencies is unknown. But clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo would be a potentially large gain - at the cost of also a huge uptick in power consumption, though, so Apple may just decline to go that route entirely, at least on their mobile CPUs.

floatboth 6y ago
> clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo How high they can go really depends on the process. TSMC 7FF silicon didn't go that high early on, max clocks really were improving as the process matured. This was very noticeable with AMD Zen 2, early dies topped out at ~4.2 (for all cores on the die), later ones often easily take ~4.4.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  How high it goes also depends on the CPU design. We know TSMC's 7NM can make CPUs that hit 4.5ghz, the Ryzen 5000 does this. It's also quite likely that TSMC's 5nm can still hit the 4ghz+ range in a CPU application. What we don't know is if the M1 can actually run at those frequencies, too, or if there's other bottlenecks that prevent the M1 from clocking higher than it does.

rsynnott 6y ago

Seems reasonable to expect that the version for 16" MBP/high-end 13"/iMac will be more or less the same thing but with more cores.