4 ms·

I hope they make workstations. I want to see some competition for the eventual Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

dhruvdh 6y ago
They are licensing ARM cores; which as of now cannot compete with Apple silicon. While there are using some future ARM core, and I've read rumors that future designs might try to emulate what has made Apple cores successful; we cannot say whether Apple designs will stagnate or continue to improve at current rate. There is potential for competition from Qualcomm after their Nuvia acquisition though.
- adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
  It seems weird to me to say that arm cores can't compete with apple silicon given that apple doesn't own fabs. They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this).
  - seabrookmx 6y ago
    > They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this) No the Apple Silicon chips use the arm _instruction set_ but they do not use their core design. Apple designs their core in house, much like Qualcomm does with snapdragon. Both of these companies have an architectural license which allows them to do this.
    - tibbydudeza 6y ago
      Qualcomm no longer makes their own cores - they just use ARM reference IP designs since the Kryo. That will probably change with their Nuvia acquisition.
- devmor 6y ago
  What do you mean ARM cores can't compete with Apple silicon? "Apple silicon" are ARM cores.
  - dharmab 6y ago
    Apple Silicon is compatible with the ARM instruction set but they are not "just ARM cores" in their internal design.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    He means cores made by ARM, not cores implementing the ARM ISA. Currently, the cores designed by ARM cannot touch the Apple M1.
- ac29 6y ago
  Maybe not in single threaded performance, but Apple has no server grade parts. Ampere, for example, is shipping an 80 core ARM N1 processor that puts out some truely impressive multithreaded performance. An M1 Mac is an entirely different market - making a fast 4+4 core laptop processor doesn't neccesarily translate into making a fast 64+ core server processor.
  - martinald 6y ago
    To be honest it does though. You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server and even at full load you would be at 150W, which is about half of the high core count Xeons. Obviously not as simple as that, but the thermal fundamentals are right. The 40 core Xeon also costs around 10k. There's rumors that the new iMac will have a 20 core M1 (16+4). I imagine that will be faster than even the top line $10k Xeon. I have absolutely no doubt apple could put together a server based on the M1 which would wipe the floor with Intel if they wanted to. But I very much doubt they will since it is so far out of their core competencies these days. I have absolutely no doubt apple could produce a ridiculously good server CPU from the M1. I doubt they will actually do it though.
    - seniorivn 6y ago
      if they could easily do that(competitor for xeon) they would do it, it's a huge and very stable market, there is no reason to ignore it, if you have such a big advantage.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Other than the fact that Apple ignores markets all the time that it is just not interested in.
    - physicsguy 6y ago
      > You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server Not really, part of why the ARM chips are so good is that the memory bandwidth is so fast. With 40+40 cores you're going to have at least NUMA to contend with, which always hampers multithreaded performance.
deleted 6y ago
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titzer 6y ago
I think Apple did Arm an unbelievable favor by absolutely trouncing all CPU competitors with the M1. By being so fast, Apple's chip attracts many new languages and compiler backends to Arm that want a piece of that sweet performance pie. Which means that other vendors will want to have arm offerings, and not, e.g. RISCv5. I have no idea what Apple's plans for the M1 chip are, but if they had manufacturing capacity, they could put oodles of these chips into datacenters and workstations the world over and basically eat the x86 high-performance market. The fact that the chip uses so little power (15W) means they can absolutely cram them into servers where CPUs can easily consume 180W. That means 10x the number of chips for the same power, and not all concentrated in one spot. A lot of very interesting server designs are now possible.
- klelatti 6y ago
  It's hard to imagine that until a few months ago it was very difficult to get a decent Arm desktop / laptop. I imagine lots of developers working now to fix outstanding Arm bugs / issues.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    While I'm sure lots of projects have actual ARM-related bugs, there was a whole class of "we didn't expect this platform/arch combination" compilation bugs that have seen fixes lately. It's not that the code has bugs on ARM, a lot of OSS has been compiling on ARM for a decade (or more) thanks to Raspberry Pis, Chromebooks, and Android but built scripts didn't understand "darwin/arm64". Back in December installing stuff on an M1 Mac via Homebrew was a pain but it's gotten significantly easier over the past few months. But a million (est) new general purpose ARM computers hitting the population certainly affects the prioritizing of ARM issues in a bug tracker.
    - macintux 6y ago
      When Itanium was newborn, HP enlisted my employer, Progeny, to help port applications to ia64 Linux. Despite the fact that 64-bit Linux had been running successfully on DEC Alpha systems for years, we ran into no end of difficulty because pointers were truncated all over the place, which apparently hadn't mattered on Alpha systems. It seems like it must have been an Endian issue, but after 20 years my memories are basically toast. I just know nearly every bug we found was pointer truncation.
macksd 6y ago
You probably mean less powerful than this, but they do: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/solutions/workstation/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/solutions/work....
- modeless 6y ago
  Yes they make workstations, but they don't make ARM workstations. Yet. They already have ARM chips they could use for it, but they went with x86 instead despite the fact that they have to purchase the x86 chips from their direct competitor. Also, yes, less than $100k starting price would be nice.

They are licensing ARM cores; which as of now cannot compete with Apple silicon. While there are using some future ARM core, and I've read rumors that future designs might try to emulate what has made Apple cores successful; we cannot say whether Apple designs will stagnate or continue to improve at current rate. There is potential for competition from Qualcomm after their Nuvia acquisition though.

adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
It seems weird to me to say that arm cores can't compete with apple silicon given that apple doesn't own fabs. They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this).
- seabrookmx 6y ago
  > They are using arm cores on TSMC silicon (exactly the same as this) No the Apple Silicon chips use the arm _instruction set_ but they do not use their core design. Apple designs their core in house, much like Qualcomm does with snapdragon. Both of these companies have an architectural license which allows them to do this.
  - tibbydudeza 6y ago
    Qualcomm no longer makes their own cores - they just use ARM reference IP designs since the Kryo. That will probably change with their Nuvia acquisition.
devmor 6y ago
What do you mean ARM cores can't compete with Apple silicon? "Apple silicon" are ARM cores.
- dharmab 6y ago
  Apple Silicon is compatible with the ARM instruction set but they are not "just ARM cores" in their internal design.
- mlyle 6y ago
  He means cores made by ARM, not cores implementing the ARM ISA. Currently, the cores designed by ARM cannot touch the Apple M1.
ac29 6y ago
Maybe not in single threaded performance, but Apple has no server grade parts. Ampere, for example, is shipping an 80 core ARM N1 processor that puts out some truely impressive multithreaded performance. An M1 Mac is an entirely different market - making a fast 4+4 core laptop processor doesn't neccesarily translate into making a fast 64+ core server processor.
- martinald 6y ago
  To be honest it does though. You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server and even at full load you would be at 150W, which is about half of the high core count Xeons. Obviously not as simple as that, but the thermal fundamentals are right. The 40 core Xeon also costs around 10k. There's rumors that the new iMac will have a 20 core M1 (16+4). I imagine that will be faster than even the top line $10k Xeon. I have absolutely no doubt apple could put together a server based on the M1 which would wipe the floor with Intel if they wanted to. But I very much doubt they will since it is so far out of their core competencies these days. I have absolutely no doubt apple could produce a ridiculously good server CPU from the M1. I doubt they will actually do it though.
  - seniorivn 6y ago
    if they could easily do that(competitor for xeon) they would do it, it's a huge and very stable market, there is no reason to ignore it, if you have such a big advantage.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Other than the fact that Apple ignores markets all the time that it is just not interested in.
  - physicsguy 6y ago
    > You could take 10 M1 chips (40+40 cores, with around 30TFLOPS of GPU) put them into a server Not really, part of why the ARM chips are so good is that the memory bandwidth is so fast. With 40+40 cores you're going to have at least NUMA to contend with, which always hampers multithreaded performance.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

titzer 6y ago

I think Apple did Arm an unbelievable favor by absolutely trouncing all CPU competitors with the M1. By being so fast, Apple's chip attracts many new languages and compiler backends to Arm that want a piece of that sweet performance pie. Which means that other vendors will want to have arm offerings, and not, e.g. RISCv5. I have no idea what Apple's plans for the M1 chip are, but if they had manufacturing capacity, they could put oodles of these chips into datacenters and workstations the world over and basically eat the x86 high-performance market. The fact that the chip uses so little power (15W) means they can absolutely cram them into servers where CPUs can easily consume 180W. That means 10x the number of chips for the same power, and not all concentrated in one spot. A lot of very interesting server designs are now possible.

klelatti 6y ago
It's hard to imagine that until a few months ago it was very difficult to get a decent Arm desktop / laptop. I imagine lots of developers working now to fix outstanding Arm bugs / issues.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  While I'm sure lots of projects have actual ARM-related bugs, there was a whole class of "we didn't expect this platform/arch combination" compilation bugs that have seen fixes lately. It's not that the code has bugs on ARM, a lot of OSS has been compiling on ARM for a decade (or more) thanks to Raspberry Pis, Chromebooks, and Android but built scripts didn't understand "darwin/arm64". Back in December installing stuff on an M1 Mac via Homebrew was a pain but it's gotten significantly easier over the past few months. But a million (est) new general purpose ARM computers hitting the population certainly affects the prioritizing of ARM issues in a bug tracker.
  - macintux 6y ago
    When Itanium was newborn, HP enlisted my employer, Progeny, to help port applications to ia64 Linux. Despite the fact that 64-bit Linux had been running successfully on DEC Alpha systems for years, we ran into no end of difficulty because pointers were truncated all over the place, which apparently hadn't mattered on Alpha systems. It seems like it must have been an Endian issue, but after 20 years my memories are basically toast. I just know nearly every bug we found was pointer truncation.

macksd 6y ago

You probably mean less powerful than this, but they do: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/solutions/workstation/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/solutions/work....

modeless 6y ago
Yes they make workstations, but they don't make ARM workstations. Yet. They already have ARM chips they could use for it, but they went with x86 instead despite the fact that they have to purchase the x86 chips from their direct competitor. Also, yes, less than $100k starting price would be nice.