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as someone else said, apple is a node ahead of AMD this round. that won't necessarily continue; they don't own TSMC. I expect the gap will close somewhat if the
by leetcrew 5y ago
as someone else said, apple is a node ahead of AMD this round. that won't necessarily continue; they don't own TSMC. I expect the gap will close somewhat if they both launch their next gen parts on the same node.
> goals that aren’t aligned with low power usage in idle?
some of this too. intel and AMD architectures need to work for laptop, desktop, and server markets. that's a pretty wide optimization target.
on the other hand, apple's m1 targets ipads, laptops, and laptops in a desktop chassis. they have the opportunity to focus much more intensely on the low end of the perf/W curve.
- microtonal 5y agosome of this too. intel and AMD architectures need to work for laptop, desktop, and server markets. that's a pretty wide optimization target. And yet, my previous passively-cooled MacBook Air M1 was faster than a workstation-class Ryzen 3700X with a large active cooling block. And my MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro is somewhere between a 5850X and 5900X performance-wise. Both have 105W TDP and require again a large active cooling block, while the MacBook's fans barely spin up. Then, thanks to the AMX matrix multiplication unit, the M1 Pro has almost 2x sgemm throughput of a 5900X (2254 vs 1390 GFLOP/s). The M1 goes toe to toe with the 5900X (1217 GFLOP/s) while only using 7.5W. Sure, of the performance per watt can be explained by a better process node or focus on portable devices. However, the fact that M1/M1 Pro are as fast as high-end Ryzen workstation CPUs at a small fraction of the TDP, shows that Apple also put some of the finest engineering work in the M1.
- hajile 5y agoA13 is made on the same 7nm TSMC process as AMD is using and is still much more efficient. Node size isn't a very good argument at this point.
- acomjean 5y agoAccording to AMD you get >1.25 performance at 1/2 the power usage when chips go from 7nm to 5nm. So when x86 gets to 5nm the difference in performance might be fairly negligible. Its not everything but its certainly not nothing. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-unveils-zen-4-cpu-roadmap-96-core-5nm-genoa-128-core-begamo https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-unveils-zen-4-cpu-road...
- hajile 5y agoTSMC claims 15% higher clocks OR 20% lower power for the same architecture moving from N7 to N5. There's a HUGE asterisk sitting somewhere and I'm pretty sure I know where. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12727/tsmc-details-5-nm-process-tech-aggressive-scaling-but-thin-power-and-performance-gains https://www.anandtech.com/show/12727/tsmc-details-5-nm-proce... Chips with loads of cores like Milan (the one mentioned in that article) have very low clockspeeds to keep down the TDP. I'd guess that their 2.2-3GHz clocks are easily possible with high-density designs (high-density usually going hand-in-hand with lower clockspeeds), so performance won't suffer and might even improve due to shifting power savings into slightly higher clocks. That's the upside, but there is also a definite downside. Desktop chip clockspeeds will suffer. If they are made on these processes, they simply will not be able to achieve those high clocks (probably 3.5-4GHz at the absolute top end). That means that even if Zen 4 gets a 20% IPC increase, it just breaks even (or even regresses) with the 20-30% clockspeed decrease. TL;DR -- While server chips are pretty much all upside, desktop chips seem to break even or suffer performance regressions.