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I once compiled a list of architectures’ relative IPC on the SPECINT 2006 benchmark: Cortex-A73 (ARMv8-A) 64.4 Pentium M 69.0 Bulldozer (AMD FX) 76.2

I once compiled a list of architectures’ relative IPC on the SPECINT 2006 benchmark: Cortex-A73 (ARMv8-A) 64.4 Pentium M 69.0 Bulldozer (AMD FX) 76.2 K10 (Phenom II) 76.7 Goldmont Plus (Atom 2nd gen) 77.5 Core 80.0 Bobcat 81.3 Nehalem 90.0 Jaguar (PS4) 93.5 Sandy Bridge 100.0 Tremont (Atom 3rd gen) 100.7 Ivy Bridge 105.8 Cortex-A76 (ARMv8.2-A) 114.7 Zen 115.9 Haswell 117.6 Zen+ 119.3 Broadwell 121.5 Skylake 124.0 Zen 2 139.8 A10 (ARMv8.1-A) 139.8 Cortex-A77 (ARMv8.2-A) 141.0 Sunny Cove Ice Lake 146.3 Cypress Cove Rocket Lake 147.6 Zen 3 167.4 A11 (ARMv8.2-A) 186.0 A12 (ARMv8.3-A) 213.8 A13 (ARMv8.4-A) 235.0 A14/M1 (ARMv8.5-A) 236.7

kllrnohj 5y ago
Really highlights the absolutely massive gap between Apple Silicon and Cortex/the-rest-of-ARM. Although you'd really want to classify which Cortex SoCs you're using in that list, as implementers love to chop off the L2 & L3 caches to save die space. This is how we ended up with the bigger.big.little configurations - the "biggest" CPU is just the full CPU with all the caches it was supposed to have had.
exikyut 5y ago
Known-(very-)naive question: how and why is the M1 so far beyond both the-rest-of-ARM and both Intel (236.7-(Rocket Lake=147.6)=89.1) and AMD? ((236.7-(Zen 3=163.4)=73.3)? Of course the technically correct answer I'm not looking for is "because Apple optimized it better" :D, I'm looking more at the (obviously probably extrpolated/guessed) path they took to get there. For example perhaps the increased memory bandwidth contributed (ie $pc go brrrrt :P) but like... this is like the elephant in the room that Apple is basically The Best™ ARM shop in town right now, and I guess I'm trying to reason both about the engineering (how Apple got to where they are now) and the market reaction (how Apple and everyone else are going to go forward).
- hedgehog 5y ago
  That IPC figure is a bit misleading because different designs clock differently, for example the Apple designs likely have shorter pipelines which uses cycles and power more efficiently but won't support higher clock speeds. I doubt an M1 could hit 7.8GHz no matter how much cooling you gave it, but the Intel design will never be as energy efficient. Apple has different manufacturing constraints because vertical integration likely lets them spend more on the dies, they are using better fabs, etc. Meanwhile they prioritize having very few variants in a way Intel doesn't (or from another standpoint can't because they need more SKUs to sell). The engineers who do this stuff are living in 100-dimensional tradeoff land though, unlike what popular tech rants tend to imply there are no free lunches. At a higher level it is just hard to do designs at this complexity so the dominating factor is budget divided by how many different products the team needs to make. Intel is the outlier, they managed to sabotage their own dominant position, but across the rest of the CPU world this holds true.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  At very least Apple have the process budget and dollar budget to have really expensive DRAM, huge caches, and huge pipeline/big buffers (big ROB etc.)
- lynguist 5y ago
  It’s described in detail at Anandtech [1][2]. It has mostly to do with the fact that Apple’s chips are so much larger in every way measurable. There’s no magic, just raw performance from comparably massively over engineered designs. At the time of its release their reorder buffer had 630 entries vs Intel’s 352 and AMD’s 256. The floating point units inside the cores could handle quadruple of Intel’s throughput per clock. Etc. Etc. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... [2]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2
mhh__ 5y ago
Is this compiled from one source or (say) from individual anandtech bnenchmark results? I just say this to ask if there is repeated readings.
- lynguist 5y ago
  It’s compiled from Anandtech benchmarks and archived forum posts. Unfortunately I didn’t write down each source.
gautamcgoel 5y ago
Amazing how much better the M1 is relative to Intel's offerings. I notice that this list doesn't include Intel's latest core (Golden Cove). Do you have those benchmarks?
- lynguist 5y ago
  At the time I compiled it Golden Cove wasn’t out yet. Golden Cove has 19% higher IPC than Rocket Lake which would place it just above Zen 3 at a score of 175.6.

kllrnohj 5y ago

Really highlights the absolutely massive gap between Apple Silicon and Cortex/the-rest-of-ARM. Although you'd really want to classify which Cortex SoCs you're using in that list, as implementers love to chop off the L2 & L3 caches to save die space. This is how we ended up with the bigger.big.little configurations - the "biggest" CPU is just the full CPU with all the caches it was supposed to have had.

exikyut 5y ago

Known-(very-)naive question: how and why is the M1 so far beyond both the-rest-of-ARM and both Intel (236.7-(Rocket Lake=147.6)=89.1) and AMD? ((236.7-(Zen 3=163.4)=73.3)? Of course the technically correct answer I'm not looking for is "because Apple optimized it better" :D, I'm looking more at the (obviously probably extrpolated/guessed) path they took to get there. For example perhaps the increased memory bandwidth contributed (ie $pc go brrrrt :P) but like... this is like the elephant in the room that Apple is basically The Best™ ARM shop in town right now, and I guess I'm trying to reason both about the engineering (how Apple got to where they are now) and the market reaction (how Apple and everyone else are going to go forward).

hedgehog 5y ago
That IPC figure is a bit misleading because different designs clock differently, for example the Apple designs likely have shorter pipelines which uses cycles and power more efficiently but won't support higher clock speeds. I doubt an M1 could hit 7.8GHz no matter how much cooling you gave it, but the Intel design will never be as energy efficient. Apple has different manufacturing constraints because vertical integration likely lets them spend more on the dies, they are using better fabs, etc. Meanwhile they prioritize having very few variants in a way Intel doesn't (or from another standpoint can't because they need more SKUs to sell). The engineers who do this stuff are living in 100-dimensional tradeoff land though, unlike what popular tech rants tend to imply there are no free lunches. At a higher level it is just hard to do designs at this complexity so the dominating factor is budget divided by how many different products the team needs to make. Intel is the outlier, they managed to sabotage their own dominant position, but across the rest of the CPU world this holds true.
mhh__ 5y ago
At very least Apple have the process budget and dollar budget to have really expensive DRAM, huge caches, and huge pipeline/big buffers (big ROB etc.)
lynguist 5y ago
It’s described in detail at Anandtech [1][2]. It has mostly to do with the fact that Apple’s chips are so much larger in every way measurable. There’s no magic, just raw performance from comparably massively over engineered designs. At the time of its release their reorder buffer had 630 entries vs Intel’s 352 and AMD’s 256. The floating point units inside the cores could handle quadruple of Intel’s throughput per clock. Etc. Etc. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... [2]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2

mhh__ 5y ago

Is this compiled from one source or (say) from individual anandtech bnenchmark results? I just say this to ask if there is repeated readings.

lynguist 5y ago
It’s compiled from Anandtech benchmarks and archived forum posts. Unfortunately I didn’t write down each source.

gautamcgoel 5y ago

Amazing how much better the M1 is relative to Intel's offerings. I notice that this list doesn't include Intel's latest core (Golden Cove). Do you have those benchmarks?

lynguist 5y ago
At the time I compiled it Golden Cove wasn’t out yet. Golden Cove has 19% higher IPC than Rocket Lake which would place it just above Zen 3 at a score of 175.6.