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I’ve always wondered, how much of the M1 gains comes from ALL components (not just the CPU but more importantly also the GPU, controllers, etc) on its SoC being
by tiffanyh 5y ago
I’ve always wondered, how much of the M1 gains comes from ALL components (not just the CPU but more importantly also the GPU, controllers, etc) on its SoC being fab’ed on the smallest industry node size that competitors can’t use yet.
It’s not uncommon on x86 platforms for GPUs, memory controllers, etc to run on 1-2 generation old nodes while the CPU uses the latest tech.
- xyzzy21 5y agoThis is a key difference. The amount of power required to drive bond pad loads can be substantial and there's a major speed hit because you have to drive the larger capacitance of the load which only can be juiced with more power. Keeping it all on-chip is definitely a major factor because you have none of this sucking up power and speed (at the trade of power).
- Tagbert 5y agoSure, the fab size is part of the story, but we have also seen a general tendency for efficiency from Arm chips and the reason that they are used in mobile devices. Apple has also been willing to spend money on larger caches and wider buses in their SOCs to remove bottlenecks. Finally, Apple tunes the processor performance to optimize for processes that Mac OS uses a lot. That is possible because of their tight vertical integration and I have not seen on the more heterogenous Windows/Linux + Intel environment.