6 ms·

It's an interesting hypothesis, I'm not sure how true this is. The newer Ryzen 3 and upcoming Alder Lake products are between M1 and M1 Pro sized, and they all

It's an interesting hypothesis, I'm not sure how true this is. The newer Ryzen 3 and upcoming Alder Lake products are between M1 and M1 Pro sized, and they all have similar total amounts of cache. Arguably by using both a bit more area and a more advanced process Apple has a much higher transistor budget to work with, but throwing more transistors at the problem doesn't necessarily help power efficiency. The one area where they have a really decisive advantage is their ability to synchronize OS development with hardware roadmap, then force developers to play along (via app store rules).

GeekyBear 5y ago
>The newer Ryzen 3 and upcoming Alder Lake products are between M1 and M1 Pro sized, and they all have similar total amounts of cache. Increasing the cache sizes to be as large as Apple's phone SOC is an extremely recent decision on AMD and Intel's part, as noted at the M1 introduction. >Last year we had speculated that the A13 had 128KB L1 Instruction cache, Apple has confirmed that it’s actually a massive 192KB instruction cache. That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... > throwing more transistors at the problem doesn't necessarily help power efficiency Getting your performance from IPC improvements at a lower clock (at the cost of die space) instead of pushing the power envelope to hit ever increasing clock speeds seems to be paying off quite well.
- hedgehog 5y ago
  Ah true, in phone land the differences are extra stark. Given the lower margins and lack of service revenue on the Android side it's not clear if it's economically feasible for Qualcomm etc to match them. It's possible we'll see something similar happen on the Mac side where a something like a M1 Max iMac resets the bar for workstations. Then again maybe not, most laptops still have terrible screens despite Apple showing it's a solvable problem at least five years ago.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    With Phones, using a wide CPU design that runs at a lower clock has been Apple's strategy for quite some time. For instance, when power leakage became a huge issue at 20nm, Apple was less affected since they ran their clocks so much lower. >Apple is something of the exception here, with the 20nm A8 proving to be a solid SoC, thanks in part to their wide CPU design allowing them to achieve good performance without using high clockspeeds that would exacerbate the problem. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-...
sliken 5y ago
Cache, maybe. But the M1 is generally a more aggressive design. Can issue more instructions per cycle, more functional units, more aggressive GPU, larger reorder window, more extra accelerators (audio, video, machine learning, etc), in package ram, more memory channels (8 x 16 bit on the lowest end M1), etc. There's substantial advantages in memory bandwidth on the higher end M1s. M1 pro = as much bandwidth as a 8 channel AMD Epyc server chip. M1 max = as much bandwidth as a 16 channel AMD epyc dual socket. Some of the M1 products don't even have fans! I have a M1 mini that runs silent fast and makes my 1 year old MBP 16" Intel i9 look pretty terrible, even if I ignore the jet engine sounding fans that turn on when patching, video streaming, or doing nearly anything but idle. Keep in mind that most laptops have a 128 bit memory interface as do even high end desktops like i7/i9 and the ryzen 59XX. M1 max and pro are 256, and 512 bits and running at 4266 Mhz! Performance per core near the best Intel and AMD have to offer, but perf/watt is crazy better.
- olliej 5y ago
  I'm not super convinced by the GPUs to be honest. They seem to be good for integrated gpus, but are still blown away by discrete ones.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    A lot of the issues with the GPU come down to legacy software that isn't ARM native and/or doesn't support Apple's GPU/compute API, Metal. It's a similar situation to legacy x86 software that doesn't support AVX-512. It still runs, but could run faster if it supported the available hardware. For example, World of Warcraft is available in an ARM native version that supports Metal and can run at 120 FPS on the 16 inch MacBook M1 Max with the graphics settings cranked up to 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZV3bOpv2Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZV3bOpv2Rs x86 games on OpenGL don't run nearly as well, as expected.

GeekyBear 5y ago

>The newer Ryzen 3 and upcoming Alder Lake products are between M1 and M1 Pro sized, and they all have similar total amounts of cache. Increasing the cache sizes to be as large as Apple's phone SOC is an extremely recent decision on AMD and Intel's part, as noted at the M1 introduction. >Last year we had speculated that the A13 had 128KB L1 Instruction cache, Apple has confirmed that it’s actually a massive 192KB instruction cache. That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... > throwing more transistors at the problem doesn't necessarily help power efficiency Getting your performance from IPC improvements at a lower clock (at the cost of die space) instead of pushing the power envelope to hit ever increasing clock speeds seems to be paying off quite well.

hedgehog 5y ago
Ah true, in phone land the differences are extra stark. Given the lower margins and lack of service revenue on the Android side it's not clear if it's economically feasible for Qualcomm etc to match them. It's possible we'll see something similar happen on the Mac side where a something like a M1 Max iMac resets the bar for workstations. Then again maybe not, most laptops still have terrible screens despite Apple showing it's a solvable problem at least five years ago.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  With Phones, using a wide CPU design that runs at a lower clock has been Apple's strategy for quite some time. For instance, when power leakage became a huge issue at 20nm, Apple was less affected since they ran their clocks so much lower. >Apple is something of the exception here, with the 20nm A8 proving to be a solid SoC, thanks in part to their wide CPU design allowing them to achieve good performance without using high clockspeeds that would exacerbate the problem. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-...

sliken 5y ago

Cache, maybe. But the M1 is generally a more aggressive design. Can issue more instructions per cycle, more functional units, more aggressive GPU, larger reorder window, more extra accelerators (audio, video, machine learning, etc), in package ram, more memory channels (8 x 16 bit on the lowest end M1), etc. There's substantial advantages in memory bandwidth on the higher end M1s. M1 pro = as much bandwidth as a 8 channel AMD Epyc server chip. M1 max = as much bandwidth as a 16 channel AMD epyc dual socket. Some of the M1 products don't even have fans! I have a M1 mini that runs silent fast and makes my 1 year old MBP 16" Intel i9 look pretty terrible, even if I ignore the jet engine sounding fans that turn on when patching, video streaming, or doing nearly anything but idle. Keep in mind that most laptops have a 128 bit memory interface as do even high end desktops like i7/i9 and the ryzen 59XX. M1 max and pro are 256, and 512 bits and running at 4266 Mhz! Performance per core near the best Intel and AMD have to offer, but perf/watt is crazy better.

olliej 5y ago
I'm not super convinced by the GPUs to be honest. They seem to be good for integrated gpus, but are still blown away by discrete ones.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  A lot of the issues with the GPU come down to legacy software that isn't ARM native and/or doesn't support Apple's GPU/compute API, Metal. It's a similar situation to legacy x86 software that doesn't support AVX-512. It still runs, but could run faster if it supported the available hardware. For example, World of Warcraft is available in an ARM native version that supports Metal and can run at 120 FPS on the 16 inch MacBook M1 Max with the graphics settings cranked up to 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZV3bOpv2Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZV3bOpv2Rs x86 games on OpenGL don't run nearly as well, as expected.