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there is no firm evidence that apples chips are better because of isa, they perform about like a ryzen would at 5nm
by gameswithgo 5y ago
there is no firm evidence that apples chips are better because of isa, they perform about like a ryzen would at 5nm
- jtc331 5y agoI think there is evidence—the number of execution decoders can be much higher than x86 because fixed width instructions make that less speculative. That improves out of order and speculative execution prospects.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoThis. ARM instructions are much more regular and easier to decode (meaning a smaller decoder) than x86 instructions, allowing for more instruction decoders in the M1.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoA few hundred thousand extra transistors aren't a big deal on a 20 billion transistor chip.
- djbusby 5y agoDoes this mean the chip is more "secure" like against those attack vectors (Sepcetre?) that affect some x86?
- mrDmrTmrJ 5y agoNo. As long as you're preforming speculative execution Spectre vulnerabilities will persist. (Meltdown was different and solved.) The good news is Spectre style vulnerabilities are extremely hard to use and indeed have never been observed in the wild. Also, good security practices (only run trusted code on your own dedicated machine) provide full protection against theoretical Spectre attacks.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoDecoders are less than 1% of the chip, that's not a substantive difference. Both Intel and Arm decode their instructions into micro ops, so there is no difference to out of order and speculative execution prospects because of the instruction code. The only substantive difference is that Intel provides a stronger memory ordering guarantee. This is theoretically an advantage for Arm, but there are disadvantages too, so I'd call that a wash.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whynotminot 5y agoCan people please stop inventing the performance of a chip that doesn’t yet exist.
- trynumber9 5y agoYou can look up SPECint2017 for AMD and Apple chips. Sure, AMD has to clock higher to do it but the end result is they are still ahead with their year old 7nm chips in both 1T and MT.
- mlindner 5y agoPlease mention a low power chip that AMD makes that's competitive with an apple chip at similar power levels. Apple hasn't released it's high power chips yet at 5nm. They've only released chips in the very low power laptop range (honestly lower than most any laptop uses today) and the power laptop range (not even high power laptop range). Comparisons will be interesting once we see the Mac Pro heat range M* chip.
- trynumber9 5y agoThat wasn't the point as I read it. They were talking about performance. Zen 3 is a small, simple design compared to the braniac Fire Storm. There is little savings from ARM, Apple is simply using far more transistors to build a massive core.
- whynotminot 5y ago> Please mention a low power chip that AMD makes that's competitive with an apple chip at similar power levels. It doesn't exist. That's why people keep inventing hypothetical AMD 5nm parts to compete with the M1 as if it somehow scores points for AMD to win with an imaginary chip against a real one. The irony of this is that the same AMD fanboys were (legitimately) dismissive of similar arguments from Intel fanboys for years prior to this. "If Intel was on 7nm Zen wouldn't be able to compete!" Maybe, but it isn't, and the only reasonable comparisons are with silicon that actually exists.
- fortran77 5y agoI just bought a brand-new laptop with an "1th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11370H @ 3.30GHz" and I'm 100% happy with it.