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I do think we have to temper the level of surprise somewhat. The key thing in consumer silicon chip design is always individual core design (or designs, there'
by urthor 5y ago
I do think we have to temper the level of surprise somewhat.
The key thing in consumer silicon chip design is always individual core design (or designs, there's Firestorm and Icestorm in big little). That's what matters for single threaded workloads.
Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare. Plus it's exceedingly pointless to do lengthy multi-threaded development on a laptop, it's going to overheat and under-clock. SSH into a cloud instance and develop in an identical environment to where you deploy.
Apple vastly exceeded expectations by making enormous silicon dice, and tying in vastly more GPU, bandwidth, and parallelism than expected. To the joy of video editors everywhere (which cannot be done over ssh).
But for people who watch closely, the M1 Max delivered exactly what was expected, plus a gargantuan GPU and memory bandwidth.
The M1 Max is still ultimately the A14's Firestorm/Icestorm cores, in a MBP form factor, delivering amazing idle and low power consumption performance, and single threaded that matches Intel/AMD's desktop chips, at a far lower PPW because of the node shrink.
Given that the A15 still features the Firestorm/Icestorm core design, it's almost guaranteed that we'll have to wait till 2023 to see a more than marginal uplift in single threaded workloads and low power performance.
- simonh 5y ago>Given that the A15 still features the Firestorm/Icestorm core design... The A15 uses Avalanche performance cores and Blizzard efficiency cores. I'm not sure how different they are, except that Blizzard in particular is a lot faster that Icestorm.
- urthor 5y agoAh that makes sense. The high performance cores are very similar iirc, accounting for binning and density. But if Apple has upgraded just the efficiency cores this time around that makes sense.
- vardump 5y ago"Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare." Really? I've observed these kind of consumer workloads getting more and more common in recent years. In any case I wouldn't call them exceedingly rare.
- Koiwai 5y ago"getting more and more common" and "exceedingly rare" does NOT actually contradict each other.
- rjknight 5y agoIf they're exceedingly rare now, despite having become more and more common, what were they before? Super-exceedingly rare?
- ggm 5y agoffmpeg to reduce/transcode off air digital TV would be my expected regular use case. If this design can do this faster I and a lot of other people will be delighted.
- iso1210 5y agoThat's a massively niche use case, and I say that as someone sat in a TV OB truck editing an ffmpeg video filter at this exact moment.
- ggm 5y agoIf you use plex, you transcode all the time. If your smart TV doesn't grok your native encoding, plex will do this in flow. Or for handholds. I don't think plex is alone in doing this. Maybe I misunderstand how many people do streaming TV with downconvert. But that said, very chuffed OB does ffmpeg. You rock!
- urthor 5y agoI want to emphasize the fully part of fully parallelized with this. It's very common to multi-thread something across three threads for example. But something that is perfectly parallelized across all your threads, or at least 8 or more, that's actually something I almost never see in end user devices. And yeah, ultimately having 4 "big" cores that are as fast as possible matters for those use cases that are threaded across a limited number of cores.
- nicoburns 5y ago> Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare. Eh? Probably THE most common workload for a laptop (opening a webpage) is multi-threaded. And even consumers multi-task. As soon as you have multiple processes, you can use multiple cores even without multi-threading support. > Plus it's exceedingly pointless to do lengthy multi-threaded development on a laptop, it's going to overheat and under-clock. The promise of these laptops is that they won't. As you say, their power consumption is a lot lower than competing chips, and it's that power that produces the heat.
- elzbardico 5y ago> SUSTAINED, LONG RUNNING HEAVY Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are NOT THAT COMMON, YET. Most of time, those workloads come in bursts. There, I fixed it for you.