3 ms·

It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung haven't been able to compete with TS

by guelo 5y ago

It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung haven't been able to compete with TSMC.

paulmd 5y ago
AMD will be on TSMC N5P next year, which will give them node parity with Apple (who will be releasing A15 on N5P this year), and actually a small node lead over the current N5-based A14 products. So we will get to test the "it's all just node lead guys, nothing wrong with x86!!!" theory. Don't worry though there will still be room to move the goalposts with "uhhh, but, Apple is designing for high IPC and low clocks, it's totally different and x86 could do it if they wanted to but, uhhh, they don't!". (I'm personally of the somewhat-controversial opinion that x86 can't really be scaled in the same super-wide-core/super-deep-reorder-buffer fashion that ARM opens up and the IPC gap will persist as a result. The gap is very wide, higher than 3x in floating-point benchmarks, it isn't something that's going to be easy to close.)
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  There is a third variable: Apple is putting ram much closer to the CPU than AMD. This has the advantage that you get lower latency (and slightly higher bandwidth), but the downside that you're currently limited to 128gb of ram, compared to 2tb for threadripper (4tb for epic). Amd's 3d cache that they're launching in a few months will be interesting since it lets the L3 go up a ton.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Latency to RAM is not any better. Bandwidth is extremely much better but not for this reason.
- Macha 5y ago
  We've already seen x86 draw even with Intel 12th gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM
  - paulmd 5y ago
    So in that one, you've got a 20-thread Intel part (6+8C/20T) at probably 3.5 GHz going against a 10-thread Apple part (8+2C/10T), at probably 3 GHz, and the Apple part still comes out on top by ~5% in Cinebench R23 MT. And that's with Intel having 50% more high-performance threads available. Work out the IPC there - the Intel has a 2x thread count advantage, a 17% clock advantage, and Apple comes out 5% ahead. So the IPC gap there is about 2.46x. It's not a perfect comparison of course, since we're mixing SMT and big/little cores, but in basically every area Intel should (on paper) have more resources available and Apple is coming out on top anyway by sheer IPC. That's what I'm saying - you can't really do that approach with x86. It's not power-advantageous or transistor-advantageous to go super wide on the decode or reorder buffer like that on x86. And regardless of the tricks x86 uses to mitigate it, you've still got a 2.5x IPC gap at the end of the day. A 2.5x IPC gap will not be closed up by just a single node shrink. And that's looking at MT, where your task scales perfectly. See where I'm going with this? Intel is using 2x the number of threads, and 3x the number of efficiency cores to get there. Apple can deliver that punch across a much lower number of threads - meaning ST-bottlenecked tasks will scale much much better on Apple. With a single-threaded test, the M1 is pulling 7W vs 33W for the Alder Lake intel. Obviously that tells us nothing about efficiency, since we'd need to know the scores, but that's the downside, is for normal, poorly-threaded tasks, like surfing the web or editing code, the 12900HK is going to be boosting high to reach the same performance levels the M1 does at 3 GHz. And that's exactly what you see in the power figures there. In short: you will likely see x86 able to keep up in one metric or another. You can win on performance if you just go nuclear on power. You can match on power on perfectly-threadable tasks that allow the x86 to deploy twice the threads (sharing instruction cache/etc). You can match on single-threaded battery life if you accept lesser performance. But the overall performance of the M1 derives from the massive IPC it generates, and that's something that x86 can't match nearly as easily. Going ham on a single metric just to claim victory isn't nearly the same thing as the level of all-round performance and efficiency that Apple has achieved there. (see also, putting a 128-thread Threadripper 3990WX workstation up against a 10-thread M1 Max laptop just to win at rendering... and people here thought that disproved that Apple was great hardware lol)
    - 5y ago
- jcranberry 5y ago
  why so smug? who cares whichever company makes a better processor?

by guelo 5y ago

It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung haven't been able to compete with TSMC.

paulmd 5y ago

AMD will be on TSMC N5P next year, which will give them node parity with Apple (who will be releasing A15 on N5P this year), and actually a small node lead over the current N5-based A14 products. So we will get to test the "it's all just node lead guys, nothing wrong with x86!!!" theory. Don't worry though there will still be room to move the goalposts with "uhhh, but, Apple is designing for high IPC and low clocks, it's totally different and x86 could do it if they wanted to but, uhhh, they don't!". (I'm personally of the somewhat-controversial opinion that x86 can't really be scaled in the same super-wide-core/super-deep-reorder-buffer fashion that ARM opens up and the IPC gap will persist as a result. The gap is very wide, higher than 3x in floating-point benchmarks, it isn't something that's going to be easy to close.)

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
There is a third variable: Apple is putting ram much closer to the CPU than AMD. This has the advantage that you get lower latency (and slightly higher bandwidth), but the downside that you're currently limited to 128gb of ram, compared to 2tb for threadripper (4tb for epic). Amd's 3d cache that they're launching in a few months will be interesting since it lets the L3 go up a ton.
- astrange 5y ago
  Latency to RAM is not any better. Bandwidth is extremely much better but not for this reason.
Macha 5y ago
We've already seen x86 draw even with Intel 12th gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM
- paulmd 5y ago
  So in that one, you've got a 20-thread Intel part (6+8C/20T) at probably 3.5 GHz going against a 10-thread Apple part (8+2C/10T), at probably 3 GHz, and the Apple part still comes out on top by ~5% in Cinebench R23 MT. And that's with Intel having 50% more high-performance threads available. Work out the IPC there - the Intel has a 2x thread count advantage, a 17% clock advantage, and Apple comes out 5% ahead. So the IPC gap there is about 2.46x. It's not a perfect comparison of course, since we're mixing SMT and big/little cores, but in basically every area Intel should (on paper) have more resources available and Apple is coming out on top anyway by sheer IPC. That's what I'm saying - you can't really do that approach with x86. It's not power-advantageous or transistor-advantageous to go super wide on the decode or reorder buffer like that on x86. And regardless of the tricks x86 uses to mitigate it, you've still got a 2.5x IPC gap at the end of the day. A 2.5x IPC gap will not be closed up by just a single node shrink. And that's looking at MT, where your task scales perfectly. See where I'm going with this? Intel is using 2x the number of threads, and 3x the number of efficiency cores to get there. Apple can deliver that punch across a much lower number of threads - meaning ST-bottlenecked tasks will scale much much better on Apple. With a single-threaded test, the M1 is pulling 7W vs 33W for the Alder Lake intel. Obviously that tells us nothing about efficiency, since we'd need to know the scores, but that's the downside, is for normal, poorly-threaded tasks, like surfing the web or editing code, the 12900HK is going to be boosting high to reach the same performance levels the M1 does at 3 GHz. And that's exactly what you see in the power figures there. In short: you will likely see x86 able to keep up in one metric or another. You can win on performance if you just go nuclear on power. You can match on power on perfectly-threadable tasks that allow the x86 to deploy twice the threads (sharing instruction cache/etc). You can match on single-threaded battery life if you accept lesser performance. But the overall performance of the M1 derives from the massive IPC it generates, and that's something that x86 can't match nearly as easily. Going ham on a single metric just to claim victory isn't nearly the same thing as the level of all-round performance and efficiency that Apple has achieved there. (see also, putting a 128-thread Threadripper 3990WX workstation up against a 10-thread M1 Max laptop just to win at rendering... and people here thought that disproved that Apple was great hardware lol)
  - 5y ago
jcranberry 5y ago
why so smug? who cares whichever company makes a better processor?