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This article does not appear to do what the title claims. It mostly rounds up news from other sources. Has anyone done the actual analysis of what the dedicate

This article does not appear to do what the title claims. It mostly rounds up news from other sources. Has anyone done the actual analysis of what the dedicated logic cores on the M1 are? I'm always curious what kinds of work Apple dedicates hardware to.

olliej 6y ago
I agree, the article contains nothing new, most regurgitates or links to other articles. Despite the large chip image at the head of the article there is no discussion or description of the silicon.
comboy 6y ago
Is it really possible to get such analysis if you're not a macos developer? From a layman point of view, I would take a list of instructions executed during common case OS usage and then extract the most common patterns (basically compression) and put them into silicon. These wouldn't be easy to understand if you don't know exactly what the OS is doing and how. I mean of course you need some cleanup and well thought-out design for future software development, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, to get the full experience of a new OS you will also need to update the hardware.
- shard 6y ago
  Looking at the die shot, the CPU, GPU, and NPU jumps out, if you've seen a bunch of other die shots before, and combine that with the core counts that Apple announced. For less obvious blocks, engineers with the right specialties might be able to make a guess. Otherwise thermal imaging would allow some guesses when running targeted algorithms.
  - olliej 6y ago
    The die shot image comes from the eetimes page they link to.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  "There are no secrets in silicon" A determined enough team of people with sulfuric acid and electron microscopes could work out exactly what is going on inside the chip. (not that anyone would actually do this - maybe Intel? But at least in principle, the information is accessible to non-Apple folks)
  - dismalpedigree 6y ago
    We do. This is what we have publicly disclosed about our findings thus far. https://www.techinsights.com/blog/two-new-apple-socs-two-market-events-apple-a14-and-m1 https://www.techinsights.com/blog/two-new-apple-socs-two-mar...
    - comboy 6y ago
      Is it common to put fake features in silicon to make reverse engineering harder?
      - dismalpedigree 6y ago
        Not really (that i have seen). I am not an analyst though, so not a guarantee. Die real estate is extremely expensive. Plus it wouldn’t really throw us off the scent due to the techniques we employ.
- simonh 6y ago
  They actually did this in the M1 for retain/release for Objective-C and Swift objects. It's an extremely common operation on the platform and is 4x faster on M1 natively, and still 2x faster than native Intel under Rosetta.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  This is effectively what happens anyway because the CPU manufacturers beat each other over the head with various benchmarks, but it's worth saying that very little area of a modern CPU is actually taken up by functional units like adders

olliej 6y ago

I agree, the article contains nothing new, most regurgitates or links to other articles. Despite the large chip image at the head of the article there is no discussion or description of the silicon.

comboy 6y ago

Is it really possible to get such analysis if you're not a macos developer? From a layman point of view, I would take a list of instructions executed during common case OS usage and then extract the most common patterns (basically compression) and put them into silicon. These wouldn't be easy to understand if you don't know exactly what the OS is doing and how. I mean of course you need some cleanup and well thought-out design for future software development, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, to get the full experience of a new OS you will also need to update the hardware.

shard 6y ago
Looking at the die shot, the CPU, GPU, and NPU jumps out, if you've seen a bunch of other die shots before, and combine that with the core counts that Apple announced. For less obvious blocks, engineers with the right specialties might be able to make a guess. Otherwise thermal imaging would allow some guesses when running targeted algorithms.
- olliej 6y ago
  The die shot image comes from the eetimes page they link to.
ForHackernews 6y ago
"There are no secrets in silicon" A determined enough team of people with sulfuric acid and electron microscopes could work out exactly what is going on inside the chip. (not that anyone would actually do this - maybe Intel? But at least in principle, the information is accessible to non-Apple folks)
- dismalpedigree 6y ago
  We do. This is what we have publicly disclosed about our findings thus far. https://www.techinsights.com/blog/two-new-apple-socs-two-market-events-apple-a14-and-m1 https://www.techinsights.com/blog/two-new-apple-socs-two-mar...
  - comboy 6y ago
    Is it common to put fake features in silicon to make reverse engineering harder?
    - dismalpedigree 6y ago
      Not really (that i have seen). I am not an analyst though, so not a guarantee. Die real estate is extremely expensive. Plus it wouldn’t really throw us off the scent due to the techniques we employ.
simonh 6y ago
They actually did this in the M1 for retain/release for Objective-C and Swift objects. It's an extremely common operation on the platform and is 4x faster on M1 natively, and still 2x faster than native Intel under Rosetta.
mhh__ 6y ago
This is effectively what happens anyway because the CPU manufacturers beat each other over the head with various benchmarks, but it's worth saying that very little area of a modern CPU is actually taken up by functional units like adders