9 ms·

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent

by elteto 6y ago

AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. I think that would be very exciting because they have the engineering expertise and talent necessary to compete against Apple's M1. I don't know of any other company that can do that (besides Intel, but you know...). Additionally, there is a huge hole open right now for ARM on everything else that is not an Apple product. Apple normalized ARM on consumer's desktops/laptops: they brought down the "subjective" barrier against ARM, which is much harder to break sometimes than the technological one. But ARM CPUs for everything else that is not an Apple product is up for grabs. The M1 is extremely competitive but it will never leave Apple's realm (unless Apple wants to start competing on the CPU business, but I see that going very strongly against Apple's consumer focus). It is incredible, looking at it in retrospective, but Apple opened up (or normalized, if you will) a whole new market for ARM products.

ipodopt 6y ago
The RISC-V ISA would be the better bet. a. They start investing now and they can have some leverage in the spec. b. The spec is minimal and open to expansion that it sets itself up for more domain specific processors. Which we will be seeing alot more of thanks to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth. c. There is a pretty big theme of moving toward more open and democratized standards in tech. d. They would be the big dogs in RISC-V where as ARM already has big players. e. In both ARM and RISC-V they would be saving the need for extra transistors. My understanding is that there are extra transistors that basically translate x86 machine code to some internal RISC ISA for performance reasons on x86 processors. Due to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth and the maturation of external Fabs Intel and AMD will no longer be able to 'hide' this deficit. f. No royalties
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Not sure if it's still the case but RISC-V was beating ARM in code size as well
  - ipodopt 6y ago
    I find that a bit surprising since my understanding is RISC-V is more minimal (has fewer higher level instructions) (ATM, that will change with extensions) then ARM. This paper refutes your point and is inline with my understanding: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perotti.pdf https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perot... One counter point is the simpler the ISA the more work the compiler needs to do. So x86 is may be easier to write an optimize compiler for given it does some of the work for you (despite the bloat). I wonder how much benchmarks on the current ARM and RISK-V chips will change over time due to compiler improvements. ARM probably already has alot of investment in some workloads... EDIT: This presentation show code size comparisons with a RISC-V extension that adds multiply/divide and it get really close to ARM: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co...
    - _chris_ 6y ago
      The paper you linked to is about embedded controller micro-benchmarks being worse by 5-10%; RISC-V's compressed ISA made some tough decisions to improve density on general-purpose code, not just micro-focused on MCUs. On something larger like SPEC, RISC-V is denser than ARM and x86.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      My understanding was that RV was less dense than the ARM-M Thumb variants, but more dense than AArch64 like these servers would be.
      - ipodopt 6y ago
        Yes, you are correct. Thanks for pointing that out to me. With compression and the multiply/divide extensions very similar to the ARM-M Thumb variants in code density. https://riscv.org/announcements/2016/04/risc-v-offers-simple-modular-isa/ https://riscv.org/announcements/2016/04/risc-v-offers-simple... https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co... Really fun time to be working on this part of the stack.
- loudmax 6y ago
  I'd love to see RISC-V or another open source ISA become the dominant design. But I'm not sure RISC-V is there yet. Companies have been pouring resources into optimizing ARM CPUs for years now, and they're now starting to get to the point where their performance competitive with x86. RISC-V is just getting started. I don't know if there's a RISC-V CPU that's comes anywhere close to the raw performance of higher end ARM CPUs, nevermind x86. Having said that, I hope AMD doesn't decide not to develop a RISC-V CPU. I'd expect them to have the resources to start working on ARM now, while planning for RISC-V further out.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    > Companies have been pouring resources into optimizing ARM CPUs for years now Yes, companies (Apple especially, but also Samsung and Qualcom) have been making optimized ARM CPUs, but those designs remain within those companies. Very similar optimizations could be made on a RISC-V implementation and AMD has proven that they have the ability to make design optimizations.
  - josephg 6y ago
    > I'd expect them to have the resources to start working on ARM now, while planning for RISC-V further out. I doubt that strategy would work. The problem in the PC space is that there's no Apple-like leader who can boldy drive a change in CPU architecture. Whoever is first out of the gate bears all the risk of the change not catching on. If you lose the bet, you've wasted massive R&D spend to make a lemon. Take a look at the reviews of Microsoft's ARM surface laptops to see what I mean here. I think there's an opportunity over the next 5 years or so for PC makers to ride the M1's coattails and shift from x86 to ARM. Especially given intel's failure to move off 14nm. But I doubt lightning will strike twice. If windows moves to ARM now, we'll be stuck there for at least another few decades. And the technical argument for RISC-V will be much weaker if ARM rules the roost. Weirdly the strongest counterargument I can think of is due to electron. Chrome will maintain first class support for any and every popular CPU architecture. So the more that desktop software is written on the web and in electron apps, the easier any architecture transition will be down the road. That and the server space. Linux already supports RISC-V extremely well given how few linux-capable RV chips there are in the wild.
sitkack 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series
nine_k 6y ago
I hope somebody will come up with a standard and open way to boot an ARM board and to enumerate devices on it, much like BIOS does for x86 boards. Possibly the makers of Pine64 and Raspberry Pi could cooperate and offer something in this area, because they collectively control most of the market of hobby / general-purpose ARM system boards. If they set a common standard (or even two standards), other producers in this space would have an incentive to follow. This will simplify OS porting efforts enormously.
- wmf 6y ago
  The standard is called SBSA aka ServerReady.
- monocasa 6y ago
  The BIOS doesn't really let you enumerate devices on x86. That mainly happens through PCI config space.
  - toast0 6y ago
    The "IBM PC architecture" tells you where to find the PCI config space (either the well known i/o address 0x0CF8 and friends, or memory mapped address found in ACPI tables) BIOS provided tables allow you to enumerate devices that aren't on the PCI bus, and BIOS provides methods to interact with storage devices. UEFI does all the same things, but differently. A lot of ARM64 boards intended towards general purpose use include UEFI these days.
- cesarb 6y ago
  It already exists, it's called Server Base System Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...). AFAIK, this Ampere Altra follows that standard, which is how unmodified Linux distributions can run on it (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-altra-q80&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a... tested both CentOS and Ubuntu).
axaxs 6y ago
I think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Yes but they were terrible. Just being ARM isn't some kind of magic dust. It has to actually be fast.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    How are Exynos chromebooks terrible?
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      They're slow. The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser. The browser performance of e.g. the Samsung Chromebook 2 was less than half that of its contemporary competitors, and a modern Chromebook with an Intel Core CPU is 5-10x faster. Exynos didn't even manage to be the fastest ARM CPU in a Chromebook. The Tegra K1 was a bit quicker.
      - sangnoir 6y ago
        > The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser My (Celeron) Chromebook 2 supported a whole Linux VM (via Crostini) and using Vim for python and Go development on it was noticeably slower than any contemporary laptop - I can't imagine the Exynos version was far off on perf (since it was only a diff SKU). I would not call it "terrible".
        jeffbee 6y ago
        The Celeron Chromebooks 2 were only slightly faster, maybe 15%. That's why I specifically called out the Intel Core CPU, not the Celeron. The Celeron N2840 is a "Bay Trail" Atom core, which nobody would willingly purchase. The state of the art CPU from that generation of Chromebooks was the 4th gen Core i3, a "Haswell" part that was more than twice as quick as that Celeron.
wmf 6y ago
Note that Nuvia is working on that "hole" with some very Apple-like claims.
Rapzid 6y ago
Maybe, but that's a Zen 2 proc being used and isn't far off in single core perf or really multi-core perf on a lot of tests(with worse single-core perf and fewer cores). It's the latest ARM tech against Zen 3 EPYC releasing Q1 is likely to be a different story.
random5634 6y ago
AMD is doing fine. "The writing on the wall". Zen3 is going to very competitive, their interconnect on chip is great. Sure, add a line for ARM. What's interesting to me, I feel like a lot of this started when intel wouldn't do the chip for the iphone. All of a sudden you had this leading edge mfg pushing arm hard which drove volumes through the roof, and all the copycats (android etc) copied the chip selection, screen style etc as well. I wonder how different the path might have been if intel had come up with something for apple.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Indeed, the writing on the wall is that AMD is eating Intel's lunch is and positioned to dominate the server x86 market.
- klelatti 6y ago
  I don't think that Intel producing the iPhone chip was ever likely to happen - sure Jobs had to ask Intel as a courtesy for a partner but it was never realistic. - Arm has dominated low power / mobile segment from well before the iPhone due to its superior power consumption; - The non Arm IP (eg Imagination GPU) was also important and it was unlikely that Intel would have been integrated that on their SoCs. I had an Atom tablet from the time when Intel supposedly had competitive mobile SoCs and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life.
  - buran77 6y ago
    > I had an Atom tablet [...] and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life. In all honesty the implementation and OS also matter. Most Atom tablets weren't particularly great (or even good) devices overall. And running Windows on a contemporary ARM SoC wouldn't have resulted in a better experience.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      It was Android and much, much worse than contemporary Arm tablets.
Alupis 6y ago
AMD might already be working on an ARM design[1]. [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-based-apple-m1-rival.html#:~:text=AMD%20has%20explored%20the%20possibility,but%20the%20SoC%20was%20shelved https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-....
- kinghajj 6y ago
  From what I recall, the K12 core was essentially the same micro-architecture as Zen, but with ARM instruction decoders. There were some vague statements that the ISA allowed some optimizations compared to the x86 version, but we never got to see what that really means, since the K12 project was shelved to focus on x86. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has been sitting on K12 and keeping it just updated enough so that they could revive it whenever the market becomes more interested in ARM servers.
  - justincormack 6y ago
    Would be fun if you could switch instruction decoders...
pkulak 6y ago
It's not totally clear to me if the M1 gains are from the 5nm process, which even AMD hasn't transitioned too yet while still smoking everything Intel on 7nm, from ARM itself, or from some mix of both. Of course, it's probably a mix, but I don't know if ARM alone has much in that mix. It does seem to me that, even if ARM held no performance benefit over x86, Apple would still decide to use it based on their use of it in their hugely successful mobile products.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  This article might help the picture come into focus a little better: https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2 https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...
- amelius 6y ago
  I think M1's gains are mainly from the specific configuration they chose to build the ARMs in (after doing the necessary quantitative analyses), not from actual development of CPU tech.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  When the first chips using Apple's Firestorm cores were announced on 5nm, the theory was that Apple had used the node shrink to decrease power usage, not increase performance. >The one explanation and theory I have is that Apple might have finally pulled back on their excessive peak power draw at the maximum performance states of the CPUs and GPUs, and thus peak performance wouldn’t have seen such a large jump this generation, but favour more sustainable thermal figures. Apple’s A12 and A13 chips were large performance upgrades both on the side of the CPU and GPU, however one criticism I had made of the company’s designs is that they both increased the power draw beyond what was usually sustainable in a mobile thermal envelope. This meant that while the designs had amazing peak performance figures, the chips were unable to sustain them for prolonged periods beyond 2-3 minutes. Keeping that in mind, the devices throttled to performance levels that were still ahead of the competition, leaving Apple in a leadership position in terms of efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14-soc-meagre-upgrades-or-less-power-hungry https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...
adrianmonk 6y ago
> AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. This is a really tough strategy decision. Focus all energy on delivering a knock-out blow to Intel (in x86/64) or try to do other stuff too? For the next several years at least, there is still a whole lot of money to be made selling x86/64 chips. (I don't know if Microsoft has plans to move mainstream Windows users off x86/64, but even if they do, it won't happen quickly.) Right now, AMD has an opportunity to take x86/64 away from Intel. Probably the best opportunity in decades. There's something to be said for focusing all resources on delivering a knock-out blow right now, before the opportunity is gone. On the other hand, ARM might have a better future over the long term. And it isn't necessarily true that AMD would be spreading itself too thin by trying to do both.
- foobarian 6y ago
  I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. They are already using TSMC so they are not held back by density.
  - avianlyric 6y ago
    > I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. Yeah ARM isn’t x86. Apple made big gains by leveraging the difference in instruction length and complexity between x86 and ARM. Something AMD can’t do, and they’ve said as much.
    - foobarian 6y ago
      I still don't have a clear understanding. Apple also made big gains by integrating performance sensitive stuff on the package. AMD could do the same. I wonder if they are constrained by some hardware-level interoperability requirements across the motherboard, like with chipsets or DMA controllers or whatnot made by different companies. Apple clearly has a nice advantage here.
      - 6y ago
ATsch 6y ago
I recall AMD mentioning that their Zen architecture is pretty generic and that it would not be hard to make it execute ARM instructions instead. AMD has worked on this before, although the project was canned, but there's been some rumors recently of it having been resurrected.
kllrnohj 6y ago
> AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. ARM's brand new 80-core system struggles to match AMD's year old 64-core system, while also being entirely unable to run some of the workloads either at all or in the 2S configuration. And with mostly comparable power draw and a much worse turbo story that ARM is trying to pretend is somehow a good thing. Competition is great, but it's a bit premature to claim "the writing is on the wall" is it not? AMD has historically made ARM CPUs in the past, they're not rigidly stuck to x86 like Intel is, but it's also not like x86 is in immediate danger, either.
- klelatti 6y ago
  It's not Arm's system it's Ampere's. Arm is claiming nothing about this cpu.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    This system uses ARM's Neoverse-N1 CPU cores. Ampere put it in a socket, but it's still "ARM's" CPU core. This isn't a custom design like Apple's CPUs. And per the article it sounds like it's ARM's fault this can't exceed 3.3 ghz. That seems to be a Neoverse-N1 limitation: "Fundamentally, the Altra’s handling of frequency and power in such a manner is simply a by-product of the Neoverse-N1 cores not being able to clock in higher than 3.3GHz"
    - klelatti 6y ago
      System != Core for a whole range of reasons as you know - not least price. I actually think that Ampere should get the credit for producing a system this competitive (even with an off the shelf core).

by elteto 6y ago

ipodopt 6y ago

The RISC-V ISA would be the better bet. a. They start investing now and they can have some leverage in the spec. b. The spec is minimal and open to expansion that it sets itself up for more domain specific processors. Which we will be seeing alot more of thanks to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth. c. There is a pretty big theme of moving toward more open and democratized standards in tech. d. They would be the big dogs in RISC-V where as ARM already has big players. e. In both ARM and RISC-V they would be saving the need for extra transistors. My understanding is that there are extra transistors that basically translate x86 machine code to some internal RISC ISA for performance reasons on x86 processors. Due to the slowing of transistors per dollar growth and the maturation of external Fabs Intel and AMD will no longer be able to 'hide' this deficit. f. No royalties

spamizbad 6y ago
Not sure if it's still the case but RISC-V was beating ARM in code size as well
- ipodopt 6y ago
  I find that a bit surprising since my understanding is RISC-V is more minimal (has fewer higher level instructions) (ATM, that will change with extensions) then ARM. This paper refutes your point and is inline with my understanding: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perotti.pdf https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_12_Perot... One counter point is the simpler the ISA the more work the compiler needs to do. So x86 is may be easier to write an optimize compiler for given it does some of the work for you (despite the bloat). I wonder how much benchmarks on the current ARM and RISK-V chips will change over time due to compiler improvements. ARM probably already has alot of investment in some workloads... EDIT: This presentation show code size comparisons with a RISC-V extension that adds multiply/divide and it get really close to ARM: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co...
  - _chris_ 6y ago
    The paper you linked to is about embedded controller micro-benchmarks being worse by 5-10%; RISC-V's compressed ISA made some tough decisions to improve density on general-purpose code, not just micro-focused on MCUs. On something larger like SPEC, RISC-V is denser than ARM and x86.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    My understanding was that RV was less dense than the ARM-M Thumb variants, but more dense than AArch64 like these servers would be.
    - ipodopt 6y ago
      Yes, you are correct. Thanks for pointing that out to me. With compression and the multiply/divide extensions very similar to the ARM-M Thumb variants in code density. https://riscv.org/announcements/2016/04/risc-v-offers-simple-modular-isa/ https://riscv.org/announcements/2016/04/risc-v-offers-simple... https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Code-Size-of-RISC-V-versus-ARM-using-the-Embench%E2%84%A2-0.5-Benchmark-Suite-What-is-the-Cost-of-ISA-Simplicity.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.10-12.50a-Co... Really fun time to be working on this part of the stack.
loudmax 6y ago
I'd love to see RISC-V or another open source ISA become the dominant design. But I'm not sure RISC-V is there yet. Companies have been pouring resources into optimizing ARM CPUs for years now, and they're now starting to get to the point where their performance competitive with x86. RISC-V is just getting started. I don't know if there's a RISC-V CPU that's comes anywhere close to the raw performance of higher end ARM CPUs, nevermind x86. Having said that, I hope AMD doesn't decide not to develop a RISC-V CPU. I'd expect them to have the resources to start working on ARM now, while planning for RISC-V further out.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  > Companies have been pouring resources into optimizing ARM CPUs for years now Yes, companies (Apple especially, but also Samsung and Qualcom) have been making optimized ARM CPUs, but those designs remain within those companies. Very similar optimizations could be made on a RISC-V implementation and AMD has proven that they have the ability to make design optimizations.
- josephg 6y ago
  > I'd expect them to have the resources to start working on ARM now, while planning for RISC-V further out. I doubt that strategy would work. The problem in the PC space is that there's no Apple-like leader who can boldy drive a change in CPU architecture. Whoever is first out of the gate bears all the risk of the change not catching on. If you lose the bet, you've wasted massive R&D spend to make a lemon. Take a look at the reviews of Microsoft's ARM surface laptops to see what I mean here. I think there's an opportunity over the next 5 years or so for PC makers to ride the M1's coattails and shift from x86 to ARM. Especially given intel's failure to move off 14nm. But I doubt lightning will strike twice. If windows moves to ARM now, we'll be stuck there for at least another few decades. And the technical argument for RISC-V will be much weaker if ARM rules the roost. Weirdly the strongest counterargument I can think of is due to electron. Chrome will maintain first class support for any and every popular CPU architecture. So the more that desktop software is written on the web and in electron apps, the easier any architecture transition will be down the road. That and the server space. Linux already supports RISC-V extremely well given how few linux-capable RV chips there are in the wild.

sitkack 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series

nine_k 6y ago

I hope somebody will come up with a standard and open way to boot an ARM board and to enumerate devices on it, much like BIOS does for x86 boards. Possibly the makers of Pine64 and Raspberry Pi could cooperate and offer something in this area, because they collectively control most of the market of hobby / general-purpose ARM system boards. If they set a common standard (or even two standards), other producers in this space would have an incentive to follow. This will simplify OS porting efforts enormously.

wmf 6y ago
The standard is called SBSA aka ServerReady.
monocasa 6y ago
The BIOS doesn't really let you enumerate devices on x86. That mainly happens through PCI config space.
- toast0 6y ago
  The "IBM PC architecture" tells you where to find the PCI config space (either the well known i/o address 0x0CF8 and friends, or memory mapped address found in ACPI tables) BIOS provided tables allow you to enumerate devices that aren't on the PCI bus, and BIOS provides methods to interact with storage devices. UEFI does all the same things, but differently. A lot of ARM64 boards intended towards general purpose use include UEFI these days.
cesarb 6y ago
It already exists, it's called Server Base System Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...). AFAIK, this Ampere Altra follows that standard, which is how unmodified Linux distributions can run on it (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-altra-q80&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ampere-a... tested both CentOS and Ubuntu).

axaxs 6y ago

I think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?

jeffbee 6y ago
Yes but they were terrible. Just being ARM isn't some kind of magic dust. It has to actually be fast.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  How are Exynos chromebooks terrible?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    They're slow. The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser. The browser performance of e.g. the Samsung Chromebook 2 was less than half that of its contemporary competitors, and a modern Chromebook with an Intel Core CPU is 5-10x faster. Exynos didn't even manage to be the fastest ARM CPU in a Chromebook. The Tegra K1 was a bit quicker.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      > The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser My (Celeron) Chromebook 2 supported a whole Linux VM (via Crostini) and using Vim for python and Go development on it was noticeably slower than any contemporary laptop - I can't imagine the Exynos version was far off on perf (since it was only a diff SKU). I would not call it "terrible".
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        The Celeron Chromebooks 2 were only slightly faster, maybe 15%. That's why I specifically called out the Intel Core CPU, not the Celeron. The Celeron N2840 is a "Bay Trail" Atom core, which nobody would willingly purchase. The state of the art CPU from that generation of Chromebooks was the 4th gen Core i3, a "Haswell" part that was more than twice as quick as that Celeron.

wmf 6y ago

Note that Nuvia is working on that "hole" with some very Apple-like claims.

Rapzid 6y ago

Maybe, but that's a Zen 2 proc being used and isn't far off in single core perf or really multi-core perf on a lot of tests(with worse single-core perf and fewer cores). It's the latest ARM tech against Zen 3 EPYC releasing Q1 is likely to be a different story.

random5634 6y ago

AMD is doing fine. "The writing on the wall". Zen3 is going to very competitive, their interconnect on chip is great. Sure, add a line for ARM. What's interesting to me, I feel like a lot of this started when intel wouldn't do the chip for the iphone. All of a sudden you had this leading edge mfg pushing arm hard which drove volumes through the roof, and all the copycats (android etc) copied the chip selection, screen style etc as well. I wonder how different the path might have been if intel had come up with something for apple.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Indeed, the writing on the wall is that AMD is eating Intel's lunch is and positioned to dominate the server x86 market.
klelatti 6y ago
I don't think that Intel producing the iPhone chip was ever likely to happen - sure Jobs had to ask Intel as a courtesy for a partner but it was never realistic. - Arm has dominated low power / mobile segment from well before the iPhone due to its superior power consumption; - The non Arm IP (eg Imagination GPU) was also important and it was unlikely that Intel would have been integrated that on their SoCs. I had an Atom tablet from the time when Intel supposedly had competitive mobile SoCs and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life.
- buran77 6y ago
  > I had an Atom tablet [...] and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life. In all honesty the implementation and OS also matter. Most Atom tablets weren't particularly great (or even good) devices overall. And running Windows on a contemporary ARM SoC wouldn't have resulted in a better experience.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    It was Android and much, much worse than contemporary Arm tablets.

Alupis 6y ago

AMD might already be working on an ARM design[1]. [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-based-apple-m1-rival.html#:~:text=AMD%20has%20explored%20the%20possibility,but%20the%20SoC%20was%20shelved https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-....

kinghajj 6y ago
From what I recall, the K12 core was essentially the same micro-architecture as Zen, but with ARM instruction decoders. There were some vague statements that the ISA allowed some optimizations compared to the x86 version, but we never got to see what that really means, since the K12 project was shelved to focus on x86. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has been sitting on K12 and keeping it just updated enough so that they could revive it whenever the market becomes more interested in ARM servers.
- justincormack 6y ago
  Would be fun if you could switch instruction decoders...

pkulak 6y ago

It's not totally clear to me if the M1 gains are from the 5nm process, which even AMD hasn't transitioned too yet while still smoking everything Intel on 7nm, from ARM itself, or from some mix of both. Of course, it's probably a mix, but I don't know if ARM alone has much in that mix. It does seem to me that, even if ARM held no performance benefit over x86, Apple would still decide to use it based on their use of it in their hugely successful mobile products.

cbozeman 6y ago
This article might help the picture come into focus a little better: https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2 https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...
amelius 6y ago
I think M1's gains are mainly from the specific configuration they chose to build the ARMs in (after doing the necessary quantitative analyses), not from actual development of CPU tech.
GeekyBear 6y ago
When the first chips using Apple's Firestorm cores were announced on 5nm, the theory was that Apple had used the node shrink to decrease power usage, not increase performance. >The one explanation and theory I have is that Apple might have finally pulled back on their excessive peak power draw at the maximum performance states of the CPUs and GPUs, and thus peak performance wouldn’t have seen such a large jump this generation, but favour more sustainable thermal figures. Apple’s A12 and A13 chips were large performance upgrades both on the side of the CPU and GPU, however one criticism I had made of the company’s designs is that they both increased the power draw beyond what was usually sustainable in a mobile thermal envelope. This meant that while the designs had amazing peak performance figures, the chips were unable to sustain them for prolonged periods beyond 2-3 minutes. Keeping that in mind, the devices throttled to performance levels that were still ahead of the competition, leaving Apple in a leadership position in terms of efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14-soc-meagre-upgrades-or-less-power-hungry https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...

adrianmonk 6y ago

> AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. This is a really tough strategy decision. Focus all energy on delivering a knock-out blow to Intel (in x86/64) or try to do other stuff too? For the next several years at least, there is still a whole lot of money to be made selling x86/64 chips. (I don't know if Microsoft has plans to move mainstream Windows users off x86/64, but even if they do, it won't happen quickly.) Right now, AMD has an opportunity to take x86/64 away from Intel. Probably the best opportunity in decades. There's something to be said for focusing all resources on delivering a knock-out blow right now, before the opportunity is gone. On the other hand, ARM might have a better future over the long term. And it isn't necessarily true that AMD would be spreading itself too thin by trying to do both.

foobarian 6y ago
I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. They are already using TSMC so they are not held back by density.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  > I'm also curious if there is something inherent to ARM that would stop them from making similar optimizations to the AMD chips. Yeah ARM isn’t x86. Apple made big gains by leveraging the difference in instruction length and complexity between x86 and ARM. Something AMD can’t do, and they’ve said as much.
  - foobarian 6y ago
    I still don't have a clear understanding. Apple also made big gains by integrating performance sensitive stuff on the package. AMD could do the same. I wonder if they are constrained by some hardware-level interoperability requirements across the motherboard, like with chipsets or DMA controllers or whatnot made by different companies. Apple clearly has a nice advantage here.
    - 6y ago

ATsch 6y ago

I recall AMD mentioning that their Zen architecture is pretty generic and that it would not be hard to make it execute ARM instructions instead. AMD has worked on this before, although the project was canned, but there's been some rumors recently of it having been resurrected.

kllrnohj 6y ago

> AMD should see the writing on the wall and start designing ARM CPUs. ARM's brand new 80-core system struggles to match AMD's year old 64-core system, while also being entirely unable to run some of the workloads either at all or in the 2S configuration. And with mostly comparable power draw and a much worse turbo story that ARM is trying to pretend is somehow a good thing. Competition is great, but it's a bit premature to claim "the writing is on the wall" is it not? AMD has historically made ARM CPUs in the past, they're not rigidly stuck to x86 like Intel is, but it's also not like x86 is in immediate danger, either.

klelatti 6y ago
It's not Arm's system it's Ampere's. Arm is claiming nothing about this cpu.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  This system uses ARM's Neoverse-N1 CPU cores. Ampere put it in a socket, but it's still "ARM's" CPU core. This isn't a custom design like Apple's CPUs. And per the article it sounds like it's ARM's fault this can't exceed 3.3 ghz. That seems to be a Neoverse-N1 limitation: "Fundamentally, the Altra’s handling of frequency and power in such a manner is simply a by-product of the Neoverse-N1 cores not being able to clock in higher than 3.3GHz"
  - klelatti 6y ago
    System != Core for a whole range of reasons as you know - not least price. I actually think that Ampere should get the credit for producing a system this competitive (even with an off the shelf core).