4 ms·

It will come down entirely to who can sustain a good CPU core. Currently Apple is the only company making performance-competitive ARM cores that can make a rea

It will come down entirely to who can sustain a good CPU core. Currently Apple is the only company making performance-competitive ARM cores that can make a reasonable justification for an architecture switch. Otherwise AMD's CPUs are still ahead of everyone else, including all other ARM CPU cores not made by Apple. And even Intel is still faster in places where performance matters more than power efficiency (eg, desktop & PC gaming)

floatboth 6y ago
Arm's Neoverse cores are doing pretty well in the datacenter space — on AWS, the Graviton2 instances are currently the best ones for lots of use cases. It's clear that core designs by Arm are really good. The problem currently is the lag between the design being done and various vendors' chips incorporating it. upd: oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now
- rubatuga 6y ago
  Fujitsu flying under the radar while having the fastest cpu ever made haha
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Graviton2 is competitive sometimes with Epyc, but also falls far behind in some tests (eg, Java performance is a bloodbath). Overall across majority tests, Neoverse consistently comes up short of Milan even when Neoverse is given a core-count advantage. And critically the per-core performance of Graviton2 / Neoverse is worse, and per-core performance is what matters to consumer space. But it can't just be competitive it needs to be significantly better in order for the consumer space to care. Nobody is going to run Windows on ARM just to get equivalent performance to Windows on X86, especially not when that means most apps will be worse. That's what's really impressive about the M1, and so far is very unique to Apple's ARM cpus. > oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now A64FX doesn't appear to be a particularly good CPU core, rather it's a SIMD powerhouse. It's the AVX-512 problem - when you can use it, it can be great. But you mostly can't, so it's mostly dead weight. Obviously in HPC space this is different scenario entirely, but that's not going to translate to consumer space at all (and it's not an ARM advantage, either - 512bit SIMD hit consumer space via x86 first with Intel's Rocket Lake).
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Not sure why you're placing so much weight on Epyc outperforming Graviton but discounting designs / use cases where Arm is clearly now better. Plus it's clear that we are just at the beginning of a period where some firms with very deep pockets are starting to invest seriously in Arm on the server and the desktop. If x64 ISA had major advantages over Arm then that would be significant, but I've not heard anyone make that case: instead it's a debate about how big the Arm advantage is. Can x64 remain competitive in some segments: probably and inertia will work in its favour. I do think it's inevitable that we will see a major shift to Arm though.
aeyes 6y ago
Amazons ARM chips are performance competitive as well, for many workloads you can expect at least similar performance per core at the same clock speed.
huac 6y ago
so then we think about what makes Apple's M1 so good. one hard-to-replicate factor is that they designed their hardware and software together, the ops which MacOS uses often are heavily optimized on chip. but one factor that you can replicate is colocating memory, CPU, and GPU, the system-on-chip architecture. that's what Nvidia looks to be going after with Grace, and I'm sure they've learned lessons from their integrated designs e.g. Jetson. very excited to see how this plays out!
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > one hard-to-replicate factor is that they designed their hardware and software together, the ops which MacOS uses often are heavily optimized on chip. Not really, they are still just using the same ARM ISA as everyone else. The only hardware/software integration magic of the M1 so far seems to be the x86 memory model emulation mode, which others could definitely replicate. > but one factor that you can replicate is colocating memory, CPU, and GPU, the system-on-chip architecture. AMD introduced that in the x86 world back in 2013 with their Kavari APU ( https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-closer-look-at-amds-heterogeneous-computing/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-closer-look-at-amds-heteroge... ), and it's been fairly typical since then for on-die integrated GPUs on all ISAs.

floatboth 6y ago

Arm's Neoverse cores are doing pretty well in the datacenter space — on AWS, the Graviton2 instances are currently the best ones for lots of use cases. It's clear that core designs by Arm are really good. The problem currently is the lag between the design being done and various vendors' chips incorporating it. upd: oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now

rubatuga 6y ago
Fujitsu flying under the radar while having the fastest cpu ever made haha
kllrnohj 6y ago
Graviton2 is competitive sometimes with Epyc, but also falls far behind in some tests (eg, Java performance is a bloodbath). Overall across majority tests, Neoverse consistently comes up short of Milan even when Neoverse is given a core-count advantage. And critically the per-core performance of Graviton2 / Neoverse is worse, and per-core performance is what matters to consumer space. But it can't just be competitive it needs to be significantly better in order for the consumer space to care. Nobody is going to run Windows on ARM just to get equivalent performance to Windows on X86, especially not when that means most apps will be worse. That's what's really impressive about the M1, and so far is very unique to Apple's ARM cpus. > oh also in the HPC world, Fujitsu with the A64FX seems to be like the best thing ever now A64FX doesn't appear to be a particularly good CPU core, rather it's a SIMD powerhouse. It's the AVX-512 problem - when you can use it, it can be great. But you mostly can't, so it's mostly dead weight. Obviously in HPC space this is different scenario entirely, but that's not going to translate to consumer space at all (and it's not an ARM advantage, either - 512bit SIMD hit consumer space via x86 first with Intel's Rocket Lake).
- klelatti 6y ago
  Not sure why you're placing so much weight on Epyc outperforming Graviton but discounting designs / use cases where Arm is clearly now better. Plus it's clear that we are just at the beginning of a period where some firms with very deep pockets are starting to invest seriously in Arm on the server and the desktop. If x64 ISA had major advantages over Arm then that would be significant, but I've not heard anyone make that case: instead it's a debate about how big the Arm advantage is. Can x64 remain competitive in some segments: probably and inertia will work in its favour. I do think it's inevitable that we will see a major shift to Arm though.

aeyes 6y ago

Amazons ARM chips are performance competitive as well, for many workloads you can expect at least similar performance per core at the same clock speed.

huac 6y ago

so then we think about what makes Apple's M1 so good. one hard-to-replicate factor is that they designed their hardware and software together, the ops which MacOS uses often are heavily optimized on chip. but one factor that you can replicate is colocating memory, CPU, and GPU, the system-on-chip architecture. that's what Nvidia looks to be going after with Grace, and I'm sure they've learned lessons from their integrated designs e.g. Jetson. very excited to see how this plays out!

kllrnohj 6y ago
> one hard-to-replicate factor is that they designed their hardware and software together, the ops which MacOS uses often are heavily optimized on chip. Not really, they are still just using the same ARM ISA as everyone else. The only hardware/software integration magic of the M1 so far seems to be the x86 memory model emulation mode, which others could definitely replicate. > but one factor that you can replicate is colocating memory, CPU, and GPU, the system-on-chip architecture. AMD introduced that in the x86 world back in 2013 with their Kavari APU ( https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-closer-look-at-amds-heterogeneous-computing/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-closer-look-at-amds-heteroge... ), and it's been fairly typical since then for on-die integrated GPUs on all ISAs.