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This seems to be a recurring theme with the M1, and one that, in a sense, actually baffles me even more than the alternative. There is no "magic" at play here,

by pdpi 6y ago

This seems to be a recurring theme with the M1, and one that, in a sense, actually baffles me even more than the alternative. There is no "magic" at play here, it's just lots and lots of raw muscle. They just seem to have a freakishly successful strategy for choosing what aspects of the processor to throw that muscle at. Why is that strategy simultaneously remarkably efficient and remarkably high-performance? What enabled/led them to make those choices where others haven't?

jeffbee 6y ago
I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly. The reason I think so is when I was at Google is was 7 years between when we told Intel what could be helpful, and when they shipped hardware with the feature. Also, when AMD first shipped the EPYC "Naples" it was crippled by some key uarch weaknesses that anyone could have pointed out if they had been able to simulate realistic large programs, instead of tiny and irrelevant SPEC benchmarks. If Apple is able to simulate or measure their own key workloads and get the improvements in silicon in a year or two they have a gigantic advantage over anyone else.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Interesting point. This would suggest pretty sizable synergies from the oft-rumored Microsoft acquisition of Intel.
  - f6v 6y ago
    > Microsoft acquisition of Intel Could that possibly be approved by governments?
    - gigatexal 6y ago
      Nope. Not a lawyer but I doubt it at all.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Microsoft doesn't need to acquire Intel, they need to do what Apple did and acquire a stellar ARM design house that will build a chip with x86 translation, tailored to accelerate the typical workloads on Windows machines and sell those chips to the likes of Dell and Lenovo and tell developers "ARM Windows is the future, x86 Windows will be sunset in 5 years and no longer supported by us, start porting your apps ASAP and in the mean time, try our X86 emulator on our ARM silicon, it works great." Microsoft proved with the XBOX and Surface series they can make good hardware if they want, now they need to move to chip design.
    - ralfd 6y ago
      Apple has at most 10% of the computer market and is just one player among many. I am skeptical Microsoft with their 90% dominance would or should be allowed this much power over the industry.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        The traditional personal computer market isn't nearly as important as it used to be. However you slice the pie, there's no way you can define the pieces to be 10% Apple and 90% Microsoft with a straight face.
      - mechEpleb 6y ago
        90% dominance of what is increasingly a small niche market. Apple controls a large fraction of the mobile device market, and everything else runs linux.
        icedchai 6y ago
        The fact is outside of the tech scene, most businesses and consumers runs Windows. To say this is a "small niche market" is laughable. Microsoft is everywhere.
        bradknowles 6y ago
        Compare how many millions of desktop PCs there are in the world, versus the billions of mobile devices.
- martamorena2 6y ago
  That's bizarre. As if CPU vendors were unable to run "realistic" workloads. If they truly aren't, that's because they are unwilling and then they are designing for failure and Apple can just eat their lunch.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    As a data scientist, I feel this. Intel and AMD don't own an OS or an app store, and you might be surprised how hard it is to get good data. Data is the new gold. If a company that can corner a piece of the market, they can collect data no one else can, and from that companies are often forced to partner or they can't properly provide services that will keep them competitive.
    - pabs3 6y ago
      Intel do own an OS, Clear Linux, but they probably lack profiles of typical usage of that OS, and probably there are not many users of it apart from Phoronix when they do benchmarking. https://clearlinux.org/ https://clearlinux.org/
    - epistasis 6y ago
      This makes me think that any sort of data advantage Apple may have has nothing to do with them owning an OS. Intel has a massive computer network, managed by their own IT team, just like any other large corporation. Intel could collect whatever performance data they want from actual users of actual programs just as easily as Apple could.
      - philistine 6y ago
        Apple is the only large company with a functional organization. Could that be it ? Coupled with their unparalleled ownership of a family of platforms (intel’s OS comparably is nonexistent).
        epistasis 6y ago
        I think you're probably right, but it's funny because I think Intel was well known for having really exceptional organizational function in the past. They used to be paranoid about everything!
- gumby 6y ago
  > I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly. Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads). By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.
- bradknowles 6y ago
  There’s another factor here, that I learned when I did a six month contract at Apple Retail Software Engineering. In short, Apple has a number of 10x engineers that they move around to whatever project needs the most help, whether that is hardware, or application software, or operating system software, or services infrastructure, or whatever. If some project starts getting enough negative “above the fold” coverage, then they will be temporarily gifted one or more of these special engineers. Do that enough times, and those 10x engineers will gain enough experience in enough different areas that they will be able to reason well about the other end of whatever pipeline they’re on, and will know other 10x engineers that they can work with on that other end of the pipeline, because they had previously worked with them on some other project in the past months or years. And those 10x engineers really will make a huge difference in what that project is capable of delivering. The key failure of this operating mode is that most of the 10x engineers never get enough time to transfer much knowledge or skills to the others on the temporary team they are currently working with, and so things will start slowly deteriorating when they are necessarily moved on to the next project. Rinse and repeat.
gameswithgo 6y ago
I see two main things behind it: 1. they are the only ones who have 5nm chips because they paid a lot to TSMC for that right 2. they gave up on expandable memory, which lets them solder it right next to the cpu, which likely makes it easier to ship with really high clocks. and/or they just spent the money it takes to get binned lpddr4 at that speed. So a good cpu design, just like AMD and Intel have, but one generation ahead on node size, and fast ram. Its not special low latency ram or anything, just clocked higher than maybe any other production machine, though enthusiasts sometimes clock theirs higher on desktops!
- mtgx 6y ago
  In other words: money. Throwing money at the (right) problems made them better than others. "But doesn't Intel have a lot of money, too?" Sure, but Intel has also been running around like a headless chicken this past decade (pretty much literally, since Otellini left) combined with them getting very complacent because they had "no real competition."
- epistasis 6y ago
  > So a good cpu design, just like AMD and Intel have The design seems to be very different, in that it's far far wider, and supposedly has a much better branch predictor. > fast ram Is that a property of the RAM clock, or a function of a better memory controller? The RAM certainly doesn't appear to have any better latency.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    Right, latency isn't (much) affected by a higher clock rate. Getting ram to run fast requires both good ram chips and good controller/motherboard. and yes, obviously apples bespoke ARM cpu is quite a bit different than Zen3 Ryzens x86 cpu, but I'm not sure it is net-better. When Zen4 hits at 5nm I expect it will perform on par or better than the M1, but we won't know till it happens!
acdha 6y ago
> What enabled/led them to make those choices where others haven't? Others have to some extent — AMD is certainly not out of the game — so I'd treat this more as the question of how they've been able to go more aggressively down that path. One of the really obvious answers is that they control the whole stack — not just the hardware and OS but also the compilers and high-level frameworks used in many demanding contexts. If you're Intel or Qualcomm, you have a wider range of things to support _and_ less revenue per device to support it, and you are likely to have to coordinate improvements with other companies who may have different priorities. Apple can profile things which their users do and direct attention to the right team. A company like Intel might profile something and see that they can make some changes to the CPU but the biggest gains would require work by a system vendor, a compiler improvement, Windows/Linux kernel change, etc. — they contribute a large amount of code to many open source projects but even that takes time to ship and be used.
- astrange 6y ago
  Intel does lots of contributions across the OS (Linux and glibc) to compilers including their own (gcc, icc, ispc, etc). Their problems aren't their ability, it's that Intel is poorly managed and internal groups are constantly fighting with each other. Also, compiler support for CPUs is very overrated. Heavy compiler investment was attempted with Itanium and debunked; giant OoO CPUs like Intel's or M1 barely care about code quality, and the compilers have very little tuning for individual models.
  - acdha 6y ago
    > Intel does lots of contributions across the OS (Linux and glibc) to compilers including their own (gcc, icc, ispc, etc). Their problems aren't their ability, it's that Intel is poorly managed and internal groups are constantly fighting with each other. I wasn't just talking about Intel but the concept of separate CPU and compiler vendors in general. Intel contributes a ton of open source but even if they were perfectly organized it takes time for everything to happen on different schedules before it's generally available: get patches into something like Linux or gcc, wait possibly years for Red Hat to ship a release using the new version, etc. Certain users — e.g. game or scientific developers — might jump on a new compiler or feature faster, of course, but that's far from a given and it means they're not going to get the across-the-board excellent scores that Apple is showing. > Also, compiler support for CPUs is very overrated. Heavy compiler investment was attempted with Itanium and debunked; giant OoO CPUs like Intel's or M1 barely care about code quality, and the compilers have very little tuning for individual models. This isn't entirely wrong but it's definitely not complete. Itanium failed because brilliant compilers didn't exist and it was barely faster even with hand-tuned code, especially when you adjusted for cost, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter at all. I've definitely seen significant improvements caused by CPU family-specific tuning and, more importantly, when new features are added (e.g. SIMD, dedicated crypto instructions, etc.) a compiler or library which knows how to use those can see huge improvements on specific benchmarks. That was more what I had in mind since those are a great example of where Apple's integration shines: when they have a task like “Make H.265 video cheap on a phone” or “Use ML to analyze a video stream” they can profile the whole stack, decide where it makes sense to add hardware acceleration, and then update their choice of the compiler toolchain and higher-level libraries (e.g. Accelerate.framework) and ship the entire thing at the time of their choosing whereas AMD/Intel/Qualcomm and maybe nVidia have to get Microsoft/Linux and maybe someone like Adobe on board to get the same thing done. That isn't a certain win — Apple can't work on everything at once and they certainly make mistakes — but it's hard to match unless they do screw up.
deleted 6y ago
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mhh__ 6y ago
I think it's worth saying that because AMD have only just really hit their stride, Intel were under almost zero pressure to improve which has really hurt them especially with the process. X86 is definitely a coefficient overhead, but if Intel put their designs on 5nm they'd look pretty good too - Jim Keller (when he was still there) hinted their offerings for a year or so in the future are significantly bigger to the point of him judging it to be worth mentioning so I wouldn't write them off.
- megap1x3ls 6y ago
  Do you know what 5nm is?
baybal2 6y ago
> There is no "magic" at play here, it's just lots and lots of raw muscle. They just seem to have a freakishly successful strategy for choosing what aspects of the processor to throw that muscle at. There is no freakishly successful strategy at play there as well. It's just all previous attempts at "fast ARM" chip were rather half hearted "add a pipeline step there, add extra register there, increase datapath width there," and not to squeeze it to the limit.
TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
Apple has been iterating on their proprietary mobile ARM-based processors since 2010, and has gotten really good at it. I would imagine that producing billions of consumer devices with these chips has helped give them a lot of experience in shortened time frame. I also wonder if having the hardware and software both worked on in-house is an advantage. I mean, if you're developing power management software for a mobile OS, and you're using a 3rd-party vendor, then you read the documentation, and work with the vendor if you have questions. If it's all internal, you call them, and could make suggestions on future processor design too based on OS usage statistics and metrics.
- simonh 6y ago
  In fact there is clear evidence of this with M1. It has optimised instructions to speed up retain/release of NSObject subclasses, which is a frequent operation on almost all Objective-C and Swift classes. They also designed the M1 to support a memory management profile used by x86 (and not ARM) to accelerate Rosetta translated binaries. I'm sure there are more.
gavin_gee 6y ago
didnt they also make some interesting hires a few years ago like Anand from Anandtech and some other silicon vets that likely helped them design the M1 approach?
barkingcat 6y ago
The answer is that they have raw hard numbers from the hundres of millions of iPads/iPhones sold each year, and can use the metrics from those devices to optimize the next generation of devices. These improvements didn't come from nowhere. It came from iterations of iOS hardware.
coldtea 6y ago
>Why is that strategy simultaneously remarkably efficient and remarkably high-performance? What enabled/led them to make those choices where others haven't? The things people give them complains about: (a) keeping a walled garden, (b) moving fast and taking the platform to new directions all at once (c) controlling the whole stack Which means they're not beholden to compatibility with third party frameworks and big players, or with their own past, and thus can rely on their APIs, third party devs etc, to cater to their changes to the architecture. And they're not chained to the whims of the CPU vendor (as the OS vendor) or the OS vendor (as the CPU vendor) either, as they serve the role of both. And of course they benchmarked and profiled the hell out of actual systems.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  They could still do all this shit without the walled garden. To me, it suggests they aren't willing to compete. They're anti-competitive.
  - marrvelous 6y ago
    With the walled garden, Apple can set enforceable timelines for the software ecosystem to adopt to architectural changes. Remember the transition to arm64? Apple forced everything on the App Store to ship universal binaries. Without the App Store walled garden, software isn’t required to keep up to date with architectural changes. Instead, keeping current is only a requirement to being featured on the App Store (which would just be a single way to install software, not the only method).
    - danaris 6y ago
      Well, and on the Mac, it's not the only method. The walled garden here has big open gates. That said, all software on the Mac, post-Catalina, has to be 64-bit, whether it's distributed through the Mac App Store or not, because the 32-bit system libraries are no longer included at all.
      - coldtea 6y ago
adam_arthur 6y ago
Certainly Apple's processors are far ahead, but they're a full process generation (5nm) ahead of their competitors. They paid their way to that exclusive right through TSMC. I'm sure they'll still come out ahead in benchmarks, but the numbers will be much closer once AMD moves to 5nm. You absolutely cannot fairly compare chips from different fab generations. I don't see many comments hammering this point home enough... it's not like the performance gap is through engineering efforts that are leagues ahead. Certainly some can be attributed to that, and Apple has the resources to poach any talent necessary.
- wmf 6y ago
  From a customer's perspective it's not my problem. Everyone had the opportunity to bid on that fab capacity and they decided not to.
  - adam_arthur 6y ago
    Yeah, totally agreed. But if you read these comments, they seem to be in total amazement about the performance gap and not acknowledging how much of an advantage being a fab generation ahead is. Customers don't care, but discussion of the merits of the chip should be more nuanced about this. It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon
    - tandr 6y ago
      > It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon ... yes, if there is any capacity left. Capacity for the new process is a limited resource after all.
    - jack_pp 6y ago
      People keep pointing this out but has Intel had such significant performance improvements since sandy bridge? With x86 it seems that lately you would be foolish to upgrade less than once every 3-4 years because the difference is just not that significant
jandrese 6y ago
It seems like Apple listened when people talked about how all modern processors bottleneck on memory access and decided to focus heavily on getting those numbers better. Of course this leads to the question that if everyone in the industry knew this was the issue why weren't Intel and AMD pushing harder on it? They already both moved the memory controller onboard so they had the opportunity to aggressively optimize it like Apple has done, but instead we have year after year where the memory lags behind the processor in speed improvements, to the point where it is ridiculous how many clock cycles a main memory access takes on a modern x86 chip.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  My guess is it had to do with limitations tied to the x86_64 instruction set. It doesn't matter how much modifications you do, if you don't start with a good foundation, you're going to be limited to that foundation.
  - nkurz 6y ago
    I think the current consensus among experts is that the instruction set is not the limiting factor. Modern x64 microprocessors have a separate front-end that handles instruction decoding. These instructions are decoded to internal proprietary "micro-ops". The internal buffers and actual execution units see only these µops. One can measure where the bottlenecks are, and it's rare to find that the front-end is the bottleneck. While it's arguably true that x64 is a poorly designed "foundation", it's unlikely to be causing any performance difference here.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      > One can measure where the bottlenecks are, and it's rare to find that the front-end is the bottleneck. Part of this is due to the fact that x86 processor designers won't include more execution units than they can feed from their instruction decoders. Apple's processors are much wider than x86 on both the decode and execution resources, and it's pretty clear that the M1 would not perform as well if its decoders were as narrow as current x86 cores.
SurfingInVR 6y ago
Something I've seen no one else mentioning: Apple's low-spec tier is $1000, not $70.
- square_usual 6y ago
  It's $699, for a complete device, not a part of one.
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    What's the screen resolution on that $699 "complete device"?
    - FreshFries 6y ago
      5120 by 2880
    - square_usual 6y ago
      Comparable to a $70 processor, at least.
dv_dt 6y ago
No fighting the sales department on where to put the market segmentation bottlenecks?
smoldesu 6y ago
The big "enabler" was their mass-purchase of 5nm lithography across the board. Even still though, 4ghz*8c isn't anything new, and isn't really that remarkable besides the low TDP (which is incidentally dwarfed by the display, which draws up to 5x more power than the CPU does). I think the big issue is that Apple has painted themselves into a corner here: ARM won't play nice with the larger CPUs they want to make, and the pressure for them to provide a competent graphics solution on custom silicon is mounting. They spent a lot of time this generation marketing their "energy efficiency" and battery life, but many consumers/professionals (myself included) don't really care about either of these things.
- krunkcoin 6y ago
  "the display, which draws up to 5x more power than the CPU does" - wat? Apple-supplied monitoring tools report that M1 under full load (all CPU and GPU cores) can draw over 30 watts. Laptop displays don't consume 150 watts. If anything, the displays in either of the M1 portables likely consume about 5 times less than 30W, even at full brightness. "ARM won't play nice with the larger CPUs they want to make" - wat? Apple holds an architectural license. This means they paid a lot upfront a long time ago and therefore have a more or less perpetual right to design their own Arm cores without input from Arm. "a competent graphics solution" - Also wat? M1 has an excellent GPU. It doesn't compete with discrete GPUs that use 300 watts, but that's fine: M1 is the chip for entry level Macs, designed for the smallest and lightest segments of their notebook line. And in that product segment, it has been every bit as much a revelation as the CPU. It's very fast, and uses little power given the performance. What exactly do you think is going to happen when they scale that basic GPU design up? Despite your dismissiveness, in modern silicon architecture energy efficiency is incredibly important: for any given power budget, the more efficient you are the more performance you can deliver. The performance Apple gets out of about 10W on M1 suggests they'll have few problems building a larger GPU to compete with Nvidia and AMD discrete GPUs.

by pdpi 6y ago

jeffbee 6y ago

I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly. The reason I think so is when I was at Google is was 7 years between when we told Intel what could be helpful, and when they shipped hardware with the feature. Also, when AMD first shipped the EPYC "Naples" it was crippled by some key uarch weaknesses that anyone could have pointed out if they had been able to simulate realistic large programs, instead of tiny and irrelevant SPEC benchmarks. If Apple is able to simulate or measure their own key workloads and get the improvements in silicon in a year or two they have a gigantic advantage over anyone else.

dcolkitt 6y ago
Interesting point. This would suggest pretty sizable synergies from the oft-rumored Microsoft acquisition of Intel.
- f6v 6y ago
  > Microsoft acquisition of Intel Could that possibly be approved by governments?
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    Nope. Not a lawyer but I doubt it at all.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Microsoft doesn't need to acquire Intel, they need to do what Apple did and acquire a stellar ARM design house that will build a chip with x86 translation, tailored to accelerate the typical workloads on Windows machines and sell those chips to the likes of Dell and Lenovo and tell developers "ARM Windows is the future, x86 Windows will be sunset in 5 years and no longer supported by us, start porting your apps ASAP and in the mean time, try our X86 emulator on our ARM silicon, it works great." Microsoft proved with the XBOX and Surface series they can make good hardware if they want, now they need to move to chip design.
  - ralfd 6y ago
    Apple has at most 10% of the computer market and is just one player among many. I am skeptical Microsoft with their 90% dominance would or should be allowed this much power over the industry.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      The traditional personal computer market isn't nearly as important as it used to be. However you slice the pie, there's no way you can define the pieces to be 10% Apple and 90% Microsoft with a straight face.
    - mechEpleb 6y ago
      90% dominance of what is increasingly a small niche market. Apple controls a large fraction of the mobile device market, and everything else runs linux.
      - icedchai 6y ago
        The fact is outside of the tech scene, most businesses and consumers runs Windows. To say this is a "small niche market" is laughable. Microsoft is everywhere.
        bradknowles 6y ago
        Compare how many millions of desktop PCs there are in the world, versus the billions of mobile devices.
martamorena2 6y ago
That's bizarre. As if CPU vendors were unable to run "realistic" workloads. If they truly aren't, that's because they are unwilling and then they are designing for failure and Apple can just eat their lunch.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  As a data scientist, I feel this. Intel and AMD don't own an OS or an app store, and you might be surprised how hard it is to get good data. Data is the new gold. If a company that can corner a piece of the market, they can collect data no one else can, and from that companies are often forced to partner or they can't properly provide services that will keep them competitive.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Intel do own an OS, Clear Linux, but they probably lack profiles of typical usage of that OS, and probably there are not many users of it apart from Phoronix when they do benchmarking. https://clearlinux.org/ https://clearlinux.org/
  - epistasis 6y ago
    This makes me think that any sort of data advantage Apple may have has nothing to do with them owning an OS. Intel has a massive computer network, managed by their own IT team, just like any other large corporation. Intel could collect whatever performance data they want from actual users of actual programs just as easily as Apple could.
    - philistine 6y ago
      Apple is the only large company with a functional organization. Could that be it ? Coupled with their unparalleled ownership of a family of platforms (intel’s OS comparably is nonexistent).
      - epistasis 6y ago
        I think you're probably right, but it's funny because I think Intel was well known for having really exceptional organizational function in the past. They used to be paranoid about everything!
gumby 6y ago
> I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly. Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads). By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.
bradknowles 6y ago
There’s another factor here, that I learned when I did a six month contract at Apple Retail Software Engineering. In short, Apple has a number of 10x engineers that they move around to whatever project needs the most help, whether that is hardware, or application software, or operating system software, or services infrastructure, or whatever. If some project starts getting enough negative “above the fold” coverage, then they will be temporarily gifted one or more of these special engineers. Do that enough times, and those 10x engineers will gain enough experience in enough different areas that they will be able to reason well about the other end of whatever pipeline they’re on, and will know other 10x engineers that they can work with on that other end of the pipeline, because they had previously worked with them on some other project in the past months or years. And those 10x engineers really will make a huge difference in what that project is capable of delivering. The key failure of this operating mode is that most of the 10x engineers never get enough time to transfer much knowledge or skills to the others on the temporary team they are currently working with, and so things will start slowly deteriorating when they are necessarily moved on to the next project. Rinse and repeat.

gameswithgo 6y ago

I see two main things behind it: 1. they are the only ones who have 5nm chips because they paid a lot to TSMC for that right 2. they gave up on expandable memory, which lets them solder it right next to the cpu, which likely makes it easier to ship with really high clocks. and/or they just spent the money it takes to get binned lpddr4 at that speed. So a good cpu design, just like AMD and Intel have, but one generation ahead on node size, and fast ram. Its not special low latency ram or anything, just clocked higher than maybe any other production machine, though enthusiasts sometimes clock theirs higher on desktops!

mtgx 6y ago
In other words: money. Throwing money at the (right) problems made them better than others. "But doesn't Intel have a lot of money, too?" Sure, but Intel has also been running around like a headless chicken this past decade (pretty much literally, since Otellini left) combined with them getting very complacent because they had "no real competition."
epistasis 6y ago
> So a good cpu design, just like AMD and Intel have The design seems to be very different, in that it's far far wider, and supposedly has a much better branch predictor. > fast ram Is that a property of the RAM clock, or a function of a better memory controller? The RAM certainly doesn't appear to have any better latency.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Right, latency isn't (much) affected by a higher clock rate. Getting ram to run fast requires both good ram chips and good controller/motherboard. and yes, obviously apples bespoke ARM cpu is quite a bit different than Zen3 Ryzens x86 cpu, but I'm not sure it is net-better. When Zen4 hits at 5nm I expect it will perform on par or better than the M1, but we won't know till it happens!

acdha 6y ago

> What enabled/led them to make those choices where others haven't? Others have to some extent — AMD is certainly not out of the game — so I'd treat this more as the question of how they've been able to go more aggressively down that path. One of the really obvious answers is that they control the whole stack — not just the hardware and OS but also the compilers and high-level frameworks used in many demanding contexts. If you're Intel or Qualcomm, you have a wider range of things to support _and_ less revenue per device to support it, and you are likely to have to coordinate improvements with other companies who may have different priorities. Apple can profile things which their users do and direct attention to the right team. A company like Intel might profile something and see that they can make some changes to the CPU but the biggest gains would require work by a system vendor, a compiler improvement, Windows/Linux kernel change, etc. — they contribute a large amount of code to many open source projects but even that takes time to ship and be used.

astrange 6y ago
Intel does lots of contributions across the OS (Linux and glibc) to compilers including their own (gcc, icc, ispc, etc). Their problems aren't their ability, it's that Intel is poorly managed and internal groups are constantly fighting with each other. Also, compiler support for CPUs is very overrated. Heavy compiler investment was attempted with Itanium and debunked; giant OoO CPUs like Intel's or M1 barely care about code quality, and the compilers have very little tuning for individual models.
- acdha 6y ago
  > Intel does lots of contributions across the OS (Linux and glibc) to compilers including their own (gcc, icc, ispc, etc). Their problems aren't their ability, it's that Intel is poorly managed and internal groups are constantly fighting with each other. I wasn't just talking about Intel but the concept of separate CPU and compiler vendors in general. Intel contributes a ton of open source but even if they were perfectly organized it takes time for everything to happen on different schedules before it's generally available: get patches into something like Linux or gcc, wait possibly years for Red Hat to ship a release using the new version, etc. Certain users — e.g. game or scientific developers — might jump on a new compiler or feature faster, of course, but that's far from a given and it means they're not going to get the across-the-board excellent scores that Apple is showing. > Also, compiler support for CPUs is very overrated. Heavy compiler investment was attempted with Itanium and debunked; giant OoO CPUs like Intel's or M1 barely care about code quality, and the compilers have very little tuning for individual models. This isn't entirely wrong but it's definitely not complete. Itanium failed because brilliant compilers didn't exist and it was barely faster even with hand-tuned code, especially when you adjusted for cost, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter at all. I've definitely seen significant improvements caused by CPU family-specific tuning and, more importantly, when new features are added (e.g. SIMD, dedicated crypto instructions, etc.) a compiler or library which knows how to use those can see huge improvements on specific benchmarks. That was more what I had in mind since those are a great example of where Apple's integration shines: when they have a task like “Make H.265 video cheap on a phone” or “Use ML to analyze a video stream” they can profile the whole stack, decide where it makes sense to add hardware acceleration, and then update their choice of the compiler toolchain and higher-level libraries (e.g. Accelerate.framework) and ship the entire thing at the time of their choosing whereas AMD/Intel/Qualcomm and maybe nVidia have to get Microsoft/Linux and maybe someone like Adobe on board to get the same thing done. That isn't a certain win — Apple can't work on everything at once and they certainly make mistakes — but it's hard to match unless they do screw up.

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mhh__ 6y ago

I think it's worth saying that because AMD have only just really hit their stride, Intel were under almost zero pressure to improve which has really hurt them especially with the process. X86 is definitely a coefficient overhead, but if Intel put their designs on 5nm they'd look pretty good too - Jim Keller (when he was still there) hinted their offerings for a year or so in the future are significantly bigger to the point of him judging it to be worth mentioning so I wouldn't write them off.

megap1x3ls 6y ago
Do you know what 5nm is?

baybal2 6y ago

> There is no "magic" at play here, it's just lots and lots of raw muscle. They just seem to have a freakishly successful strategy for choosing what aspects of the processor to throw that muscle at. There is no freakishly successful strategy at play there as well. It's just all previous attempts at "fast ARM" chip were rather half hearted "add a pipeline step there, add extra register there, increase datapath width there," and not to squeeze it to the limit.

TYPE_FASTER 6y ago

Apple has been iterating on their proprietary mobile ARM-based processors since 2010, and has gotten really good at it. I would imagine that producing billions of consumer devices with these chips has helped give them a lot of experience in shortened time frame. I also wonder if having the hardware and software both worked on in-house is an advantage. I mean, if you're developing power management software for a mobile OS, and you're using a 3rd-party vendor, then you read the documentation, and work with the vendor if you have questions. If it's all internal, you call them, and could make suggestions on future processor design too based on OS usage statistics and metrics.

simonh 6y ago
In fact there is clear evidence of this with M1. It has optimised instructions to speed up retain/release of NSObject subclasses, which is a frequent operation on almost all Objective-C and Swift classes. They also designed the M1 to support a memory management profile used by x86 (and not ARM) to accelerate Rosetta translated binaries. I'm sure there are more.

gavin_gee 6y ago

didnt they also make some interesting hires a few years ago like Anand from Anandtech and some other silicon vets that likely helped them design the M1 approach?

barkingcat 6y ago

The answer is that they have raw hard numbers from the hundres of millions of iPads/iPhones sold each year, and can use the metrics from those devices to optimize the next generation of devices. These improvements didn't come from nowhere. It came from iterations of iOS hardware.

coldtea 6y ago

>Why is that strategy simultaneously remarkably efficient and remarkably high-performance? What enabled/led them to make those choices where others haven't? The things people give them complains about: (a) keeping a walled garden, (b) moving fast and taking the platform to new directions all at once (c) controlling the whole stack Which means they're not beholden to compatibility with third party frameworks and big players, or with their own past, and thus can rely on their APIs, third party devs etc, to cater to their changes to the architecture. And they're not chained to the whims of the CPU vendor (as the OS vendor) or the OS vendor (as the CPU vendor) either, as they serve the role of both. And of course they benchmarked and profiled the hell out of actual systems.

fartcannon 6y ago
They could still do all this shit without the walled garden. To me, it suggests they aren't willing to compete. They're anti-competitive.
- marrvelous 6y ago
  With the walled garden, Apple can set enforceable timelines for the software ecosystem to adopt to architectural changes. Remember the transition to arm64? Apple forced everything on the App Store to ship universal binaries. Without the App Store walled garden, software isn’t required to keep up to date with architectural changes. Instead, keeping current is only a requirement to being featured on the App Store (which would just be a single way to install software, not the only method).
  - danaris 6y ago
    Well, and on the Mac, it's not the only method. The walled garden here has big open gates. That said, all software on the Mac, post-Catalina, has to be 64-bit, whether it's distributed through the Mac App Store or not, because the 32-bit system libraries are no longer included at all.
    - coldtea 6y ago

adam_arthur 6y ago

Certainly Apple's processors are far ahead, but they're a full process generation (5nm) ahead of their competitors. They paid their way to that exclusive right through TSMC. I'm sure they'll still come out ahead in benchmarks, but the numbers will be much closer once AMD moves to 5nm. You absolutely cannot fairly compare chips from different fab generations. I don't see many comments hammering this point home enough... it's not like the performance gap is through engineering efforts that are leagues ahead. Certainly some can be attributed to that, and Apple has the resources to poach any talent necessary.

wmf 6y ago
From a customer's perspective it's not my problem. Everyone had the opportunity to bid on that fab capacity and they decided not to.
- adam_arthur 6y ago
  Yeah, totally agreed. But if you read these comments, they seem to be in total amazement about the performance gap and not acknowledging how much of an advantage being a fab generation ahead is. Customers don't care, but discussion of the merits of the chip should be more nuanced about this. It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon
  - tandr 6y ago
    > It also implies that the gap won't exist for very long, as AMD will move onto 5nm soon ... yes, if there is any capacity left. Capacity for the new process is a limited resource after all.
  - jack_pp 6y ago
    People keep pointing this out but has Intel had such significant performance improvements since sandy bridge? With x86 it seems that lately you would be foolish to upgrade less than once every 3-4 years because the difference is just not that significant

jandrese 6y ago

It seems like Apple listened when people talked about how all modern processors bottleneck on memory access and decided to focus heavily on getting those numbers better. Of course this leads to the question that if everyone in the industry knew this was the issue why weren't Intel and AMD pushing harder on it? They already both moved the memory controller onboard so they had the opportunity to aggressively optimize it like Apple has done, but instead we have year after year where the memory lags behind the processor in speed improvements, to the point where it is ridiculous how many clock cycles a main memory access takes on a modern x86 chip.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
My guess is it had to do with limitations tied to the x86_64 instruction set. It doesn't matter how much modifications you do, if you don't start with a good foundation, you're going to be limited to that foundation.
- nkurz 6y ago
  I think the current consensus among experts is that the instruction set is not the limiting factor. Modern x64 microprocessors have a separate front-end that handles instruction decoding. These instructions are decoded to internal proprietary "micro-ops". The internal buffers and actual execution units see only these µops. One can measure where the bottlenecks are, and it's rare to find that the front-end is the bottleneck. While it's arguably true that x64 is a poorly designed "foundation", it's unlikely to be causing any performance difference here.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    > One can measure where the bottlenecks are, and it's rare to find that the front-end is the bottleneck. Part of this is due to the fact that x86 processor designers won't include more execution units than they can feed from their instruction decoders. Apple's processors are much wider than x86 on both the decode and execution resources, and it's pretty clear that the M1 would not perform as well if its decoders were as narrow as current x86 cores.

SurfingInVR 6y ago

Something I've seen no one else mentioning: Apple's low-spec tier is $1000, not $70.

square_usual 6y ago
It's $699, for a complete device, not a part of one.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  What's the screen resolution on that $699 "complete device"?
  - FreshFries 6y ago
    5120 by 2880
  - square_usual 6y ago
    Comparable to a $70 processor, at least.

dv_dt 6y ago

No fighting the sales department on where to put the market segmentation bottlenecks?

smoldesu 6y ago

The big "enabler" was their mass-purchase of 5nm lithography across the board. Even still though, 4ghz*8c isn't anything new, and isn't really that remarkable besides the low TDP (which is incidentally dwarfed by the display, which draws up to 5x more power than the CPU does). I think the big issue is that Apple has painted themselves into a corner here: ARM won't play nice with the larger CPUs they want to make, and the pressure for them to provide a competent graphics solution on custom silicon is mounting. They spent a lot of time this generation marketing their "energy efficiency" and battery life, but many consumers/professionals (myself included) don't really care about either of these things.

krunkcoin 6y ago
"the display, which draws up to 5x more power than the CPU does" - wat? Apple-supplied monitoring tools report that M1 under full load (all CPU and GPU cores) can draw over 30 watts. Laptop displays don't consume 150 watts. If anything, the displays in either of the M1 portables likely consume about 5 times less than 30W, even at full brightness. "ARM won't play nice with the larger CPUs they want to make" - wat? Apple holds an architectural license. This means they paid a lot upfront a long time ago and therefore have a more or less perpetual right to design their own Arm cores without input from Arm. "a competent graphics solution" - Also wat? M1 has an excellent GPU. It doesn't compete with discrete GPUs that use 300 watts, but that's fine: M1 is the chip for entry level Macs, designed for the smallest and lightest segments of their notebook line. And in that product segment, it has been every bit as much a revelation as the CPU. It's very fast, and uses little power given the performance. What exactly do you think is going to happen when they scale that basic GPU design up? Despite your dismissiveness, in modern silicon architecture energy efficiency is incredibly important: for any given power budget, the more efficient you are the more performance you can deliver. The performance Apple gets out of about 10W on M1 suggests they'll have few problems building a larger GPU to compete with Nvidia and AMD discrete GPUs.