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And all Apple haters are like: "Apple is just a design and marketing company!" Yes, exactly. They design chips and market them. They do both things like no oth
by baxtr 5y ago
And all Apple haters are like: "Apple is just a design and marketing company!"
Yes, exactly. They design chips and market them. They do both things like no other company on this planet.
- leetcrew 5y agoin the consumer space, sure. but they are hardly the only company making impressive in-house archetectures for their products. aws graviton is just one example off the top of my head: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
- opencl 5y agoThe graviton chips are not an in house architecture, the cores are designed by and licenced from ARM.
- sandGorgon 5y agoApple also licenses it from the same party - it holds an "Architecture License" from ARM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190521
- marcan_42 5y agoThat's a license for the use of the instruction set, not the design. The design is completely in-house.
- masklinn 5y agoThe point of an architecture license is that you license the ISA itself but can design your own chip from the transistor up :) There's like 15 holders of ARM architecture license. As long as Apple properly implements the ISA and passes validation, they can literally do whatever they want to the core itself (not just the SoC around it). Most ARM users have much more limited licenses, and can only buy and fab IP blocks designed by someone else (usually ARM). That is the case of Amazon, the Graviton used A72 cores, and the Graviton II uses Neoverse N1, which are derived from the A76 with more focus on server workloads. Both are designed by and licensed from ARM.
- watersb 5y agoI see this come up often, and it reminds me to go check the details (which I haven't done, as I write this, per Internet tradition)... Apple was one of the original founders of the business entity that licenses the ARM architecture these days. Apple sold the share of that business that they directly controlled. But the overall result is that specific terms of Apple's license to ARM intellectual property have never been disclosed, and are thought to be quite broad, a license at least on par with architecture and foundry-level licenses. Not sinister, just an exceptional relationship between Apple and ARM, historically.
- olliej 5y agoYou misunderstand. An ARM architecture license is not a licensed to use an ARM designed core. It is a license to implement the ARM instruction set on your own non-ARM design. "Architecture" in this case comes from ISA: Instruction Set Architecture. :D So, Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung (and Nvidia?) have ARM architecture licenses, and they then go and design their own implementations, from scratch (I don't know if the license lets them use ARM designed bits, you'd have to ask them :D ). Most companies simply license an ARM designed core and blat that into their SoC - I assume it's cheaper but I don't know if that means the license is cheaper, or the total cost (e.g. including actually designing a cpu) is cheaper.
- thabersack 5y agoI am not a fan of OSX, but I have been consistently impressed with Apples hardware. (pretending the touchbar didn't exist)
- wing-_-nuts 5y agoThe 'keys as a touch bar' is one of the happiest things they've abandoned for me. Imagine having to restart your computer to get an escape key! Grr.
- jerrysievert 5y agoI have to give them one kudo for getting me to map capslock, which I never used, to escape. if only that had been their ingenious plan.
- olliej 5y agoWait, you don't want your escape key to panic? :D They fixed it in later Touch Bars by adding back a physical escape key next to the Touch Bar. That at least makes it slightly easier to arrange the Touch Bar to not trigger random behaviour :D (apparently I float my little finger above the top left of the keyboard)
- menaerus 5y ago> They design chips and market them. They do both things like no other company on this planet. Latter for sure, former not so much. Apple is not designing its own CPUs (but ARM does) nor they are physically manufacturing or improving the silicon process (but TSMC does), they build SoCs like many other companies out there. This means that they can't make an advantage over the competitors by: 1. Making the silicon process more advanced 2. Improving CPU microarchitecture 3. Improving CPU instruction pipeline 4. Improving CPU branch prediction or OOO execution 5. Making the TLB page-walker algorithms more efficient 6. Making better cache-coherency protocols 7. Implementing their own bus interconnect which is faster than others 8. Designing better RAM modules 9. Etc. etc. (I could go on and on but I guess the point is visible) What Apple can do to make a difference is that they can fine tune the SoC microarchitectural details but hardly anything else. By looking at the specs of M1's, the biggest outliers with respect to other chips of the same or similar class currently existing on the market are: 1. RAM and CPUs are physically co-located on the same die 2. RAM is advanced to (LP)DDR5 3. CPU caches are massive (L1, L2 and TLB) 4. There's a separate cluster of CPUs for low-power mode execution First three things from the list is what is making M1's so fast, and especially the third point. Enlarging CPU caches has been done by the server CPUs like forever and which is the reason why quite old (2014) 2x Xeon system can eat AMD Ryzen 9 5950X for breakfast in some of the multicore workloads I ran (and I mean substantially). Last thing from the list above is what is making this chip more power efficient and this technique is as old as the moment when big.LITTLE was introduced in 2011. In nowadays ARM chips it is known as DynamIQ but the concept is the same: conserving energy by running less power hungry CPUs when workload does not require the full power (which in average user is most of the time).
- acdha 5y ago> Apple is not designing its own CPUs (but ARM does) Do you have any evidence supporting this? If you were right, it would seem odd that Apple has consistently delivered significantly better performance, often by multiple product generations, than other ARM licensees since the launch of the A8 in 2014 if ARM was doing all of the real work. Similarly, it seems like they could have saved a ton of money not hiring chip architects if they didn't have anything for them to work on.
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- gime_tree_fiddy 5y agoI think it is their software philosophy that I find objectionable, mainly in iOS and OSX. But their design and hardware is great enough to for someone like me to own a MB Pro, and iPad Pro.
- smoldesu 5y agoLet's set the stage here though; the most powerful, affluent company in the world made a new chip on silicon that could not be fabricated or bought by any other manufacturers in the world. This new CPU runs a foreign architecture, refuses to run x86 code unless recompiled into "native" instructions. Their decades-old chip manufacturing team manages to make a CPU that's just barely competitive with the rest of the market and... has slightly better battery life? Is it uncouth to say that I was expecting a little more here from the biggest company in the world? I don't hate Apple because they're a "design and marketing" company; those just happen to be what they're best at. I hate them because they're lazy, they waste money and spend every drop of goodwill they ascertain on locking in consumers, reducing the choice they have inside their ecosystem and raising the wall around their garden. Apple is a company driven by the same ethos that ruined Microsoft 10 years ago, and their reckoning is fast-approaching. The M1 still can't run a ton of software. It is the compatibility underdog, and the x86 developers of the world (at least speaking anecdotally here) simply don't care. Apple is still not the best chip designer (Nvidia and even AMD nowadays have them beat there), and their marketing is only powerful because they can say whatever they want and people will buy it anyways. You're right on one account though; nobody else markets like they do.
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- microtonal 5y agoAMD nowadays have them beat there I am not sure what world you live in? Their entry-level chip (the M1) beats workstation-class AMD CPUs like the Ryzen 3700X in most benchmarks, while being passively cooled and using 15W for the whole SOC, while the 3700X uses at least 65W for the CPU alone and requires a large cooling block. All while being passively cooled. In matrix multiplication workloads, that same entry-level CPU is roughly as fast as a 12 core Ryzen 5900X, while using only 7.5W (the 5900X pretty much goes up to 105W for the same workload). And all that while delivering stellar battery life. You can hate Apple for their politics, walled-garden approach, etc. But your comment completely mischaracterizes the engineering feat of M1 CPUs. They have gone from having no presence on laptops/desktops to setting the gold standard for performance per watt.
- fguerraz 5y agoApple hater here: I just don't like their software, ecosystem and negative influence on democracy. Their hardware is the best, I will admit.