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AMD beats them because they are a process node ahead. Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or eff
by adam_arthur 4y ago
AMD beats them because they are a process node ahead. Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient.
It's 90% the process node. There is no magic design sauce that makes those chips better.
The big/little design change did seem to improve performance quite a bit for Intel, even using the same manufacturing node as before
- bayindirh 4y agoI don’t completely agree. A MacBook Air M1 is 25% faster than a 10th generation Intel 10700K, running the same code full of floating point instructions and matrices. It’s not a simple matter of process node. The same MacBook Air can do hour long Skype video calls with ~9% charge consumption, with no discernible heat difference on the body too. M1 is a different beast.
- gpderetta 4y agoIsn't M1 two process nodes ahead of the 10700K?
- bayindirh 4y agoI'm not telling that process difference isn't the part of the picture, but the process difference is at most half of the story. Working on HPC field and with generations and generations of Intel hardware, I can tell you that two node difference (alone) never gives you 25% real world performance in the realm of Intel, let alone theoretical.
- tootyskooty 4y agoEven a single node difference can easily come close to a 25% increase in performance: "N5 technology provides about 20% faster speed than N7 technology or about 40% power reduction." [1] Real world performance pretty much always lines up with these estimates. It's the main reason why we have exponential growth in computing power in the first place. It would be a more fair comparison to compare the M1 to AMD's ZEN 4, which should be coming out next quarter. [1] https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_5nm https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
- mhh__ 4y agoThis isn't a normal die shrink though. This is jumping from Intel's heroically old 14nm+++++++++++++++ to a brand spanking new TSMC process. It might be on the order of 4 to 6 times denser.
- bayindirh 4y agoI'm all for competition to be honest. While Intel is the least favorite CPU maker of mine (due to their unethical moves in the past), I'd love to see fierce competition rather than a single dominant power. We've seen how the latter went until AMD came back to the game.
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- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> I don’t completely agree. A MacBook Air M1 is 25% faster than a 10th generation Intel 10700K Why is everyone insistent on comparing Apple’s latest CPUs to Intel’s parts from multiple generations back? Intel is on 12xxx series now. AMD also has new generation laptop CPUs that perform very well. Let’s compare to those. The M1 is power efficient but much of that is due to the TSMC process they used. I really don’t understand this desire to make arbitrary comparisons to old Intel CPUs.
- bayindirh 4y agoBecause that’s what I had access when I did the tests. I’ll do a series of tests on our cluster and post these. Will these be meaningful for you? The thing is, M1 on air is a relatively low clock speed CPU with passive cooling. 10200K is actively cooled, unlimited beast of its generation. The libraries I use are X86 optimized. Yet the code I’ve written is 25% faster on ARM. This is significant.
- formerly_proven 4y agoI'm not saying it isn't, but the "low clock speed" part is often brought up in a discussion like this, implying that Apple could make a M1KFS running at much higher clocks.
- mhh__ 4y agoX86 optimized doesn't actually mean that much on a lot of workloads because the memory hierarchy completely dominates performance. Apple knew this so the M1 has an extremely fast memory system.
- bayindirh 4y agoIt’s a scientific code which manipulates a lot of relatively big matrices, which saturates the FPUs pretty well (I made the analysis back then). Intel’s memory architecture can keep up with the load until I utilize all cores. When I start to use HT cores, neither cache, nor memory can keep up. I do the both tests (Intel and Apple) both with physical core counts to keep it fair. So it’s not some run of the mill code.
- formerly_proven 4y ago> The same MacBook Air can do hour long Skype video calls with ~9% charge consumption, with no discernible heat difference on the body too. > M1 is a different beast. The M1 has other advantages which are decidedly not rooted in the hardware: software. Apple seems to do profoundly better than Windows and Linux at applications actually using hardware accelerators. This makes a gigantic difference in performance and power efficiency. On a Windows or Linux system it is not at all a given that even very easily hardware-accelerated tasks, like video decoding, actually use the hardware that's there.
- murderfs 4y agoThey're not actually a process node ahead. Intel 10nm has slightly better density than TSMC 7nm.
- adam_arthur 4y agoM1 is on 5nm
- torginus 4y agoThey are not. If you check out Wikipedia, Intel 7 (or for that matter Intel 10nm) is very comparable to TSMC 7nm in parameters (transistor density etc.). TSMC 5nm is better, but AMD is not there yet.
- lynguist 4y agoThere is a massive design gap between all Apple designed chips and non Apple designed chips. Apple’s chips are ridiculously humongous. They’re built for extremely wide, high performance applications for the past 10 years. A single A14 core can do 64 32-bit floating point operations in a single clock cycle. AMD/Intel were long at 16 operations and only the latest Intel went up to 32 operations.
- adam_arthur 4y agoWell, Intel's latest chip has better performance than M1 despite being two process nodes behind. So not sure what you're going on about
- msbarnett 4y ago1 process node behind. Intel 10nm has similar or better transistor density as TSMC 7nm.
- adam_arthur 4y agoYou're right. But even being one behind, it outperforms M1, with lower efficiency. Thus reasonable to speculate that a process node advancement would at least put Intel's chip on par with M1 on both perf and efficiency
- msbarnett 4y ago> Thus reasonable to speculate that a process node advancement would at least put Intel's chip on par with M1 on both perf and efficiency We'll see, but I highly doubt that Intel-at-equivalent-of-TSMC-5nm will be performance/watt competitive with the M1. Apple gets that power efficiency via an extremely wide-and-deep design that intentionally trades off a surprisingly low max clock ceiling (3.2GHz) for power efficiency while maintaining an absurdly high IPC (something like 75% higher than Intel's IPC at only one process node smaller) that makes it much more competitive on performance than conventional industry wisdom ever expected (there is and has been for years a strong belief that a design as wide as Apple's would be grossly inefficient because you could not possibly extract enough instruction level parallelism to keep so many decoders/execution units saturated -- hence we've spent over a decade with 4-5 wide frontends being the "practical maximum" that allows them to still target ~5GHz turbo speeds, which was believed to be basically the best/only path to high performance within what was believed to be the limit of "achievable" IPC. The M1 blows these fundamental assumptions out of the water). So Intel makes conventional design decisions that make up the performance of their lower clock-for-clock IPC by turboing well north of 5GHz, at the cost of consuming something like 7x the max power of the M1. A single node shrink isn't going to buy them a 75% increase in IPC (their last 4 or 5 node shrinks combined haven't bought them that much IPC increase), so Intel@equivalent-of-TSMC-5nm still going to have to burn power like crazy to stay competitive on performance, and that's going to cost them efficiency that the node shrink just can't paper over. It will lead in absolute perf, but its not going to be nearly as efficient.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoAMD does not beat Intel [1] unless we limit the CPUs to the same wattage (see efficiency benchmarks below). [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/ryzen-7-5800x3d-vs-core-i7-12700k-and-core-i9-12900k-face-off-the-rise-of-3d-v-cache https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/ryzen-7-5800x3d-vs-core...
- rbanffy 4y agoIf that’s the game we want to play, there’s always POWER to show what you can pull off with an unlimited power (no pun intended) budget.
- innocenat 4y agoSome people care about performance per dollar, and Intel can compete with AMD on that front with Alder Lake.
- leetcrew 4y agonot really. for whatever reason, ryzen cpus have very little headroom for overclocking. no matter how much you increase the voltage, you're not gonna get much more performance. intel has increasingly pushed the limits of their designs over the last few generations, but you can usually get more performance with aggressive voltage settings and beefy cooling.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoRyzen CPUs are limited when it comes to overclocking due to the infinity fabric as that needs to be stable and in sync with RAM.
- n7pdx 4y ago"Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient." That is because there is a huge design gap. Intel architecture and design teams have always assumed on the inevitability of their own manufacturing superiority and process advantage and thus never had to really consider where to place transistors for the most benefit, or think really hard on better ways to improve single-thread performance instead of just turning a knob that was invented two decades ago. In any case, your statement is just plain wrong. Dennard scaling has been dead for a decade now. Planar area decreases with new processes come with increased power density, i.e. new process nodes reduce die sizes but the transistor performance does not improve the way they used to. source: worked at Intel for CPU design for a decade, then worked on the same things elsewhere using TSMC process
- adam_arthur 4y agoIntel's chip is more powerful than M1 on an older process node. So where is the design gap?
- n7pdx 4y agoLOL yeah. More powerful, i.e. it consumes more power. Fun fact: the M1 big core caps itself around the same wattage where most Intel SKU consider the core to be below stock wattage. As in, in order to achieve your “more powerful” claim, it takes Intel cores 2-7x the watts, depending on the workload, to eek out a marginal performance uplift… or sometimes just to match the M1. Nobody in CPU design cares about unconstrained power performance. Even at Intel, they never use the PL2 power level as the design landing zone. All modeling is done at much lower power target, even below PL1. That is to say: unconstrained power performance is not an engineering effort, it is a marketing and SKU differentiation effort. Your “more powerful” statement is a matter of how much power Intel/Apple/AMD/whoever is willing to shove into their piece of silicon, which in turn dictates the form factors and customers they can try to satisfy. Apple only needs a few watts per big core and still get the peak perf it needs, and put that chip in all the form factors it sells. Obviously if M1 sucked down the kind of power as any Intel chip, it cannot go into an iPad, or a fanless macbook air, without totally compromising performance. Intel on the other hand needs grossly more watts to hit that same performance, and therefore is losing badly on form factors that care about power: laptops and servers. Some form factors/customers just don’t care, which is why Intel cooks up marketing targeting the gamer market, or the 8-pound laptop market. That’s all fine, just don’t pretend Intel is not getting absolutely hammered on the CPU technical specs for the money-making markets that matter. BTW, the DIY gamer CPU market does not matter. The 8-pound laptop market does not matter.