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Everytime CPU stuff is discussed it is quickly hijacked into praising Apple. Can we have a discussion about this CPU instead of talking about others? M1/M2 are

Everytime CPU stuff is discussed it is quickly hijacked into praising Apple. Can we have a discussion about this CPU instead of talking about others? M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs...

monocasa 4y ago
They're the top performing Arm CPUs.
- homerowilson 4y ago
  Maybe? There exist some extreme-performance ARM CPUs like A64FX from Fujitsu.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    They are the top performing ARM computers you can go to a store and buy. I'd love to have an HPE Ampere or a POWER tower under my desk, but it's not easy to get anything like those, and certainly not for a price competitive with generic x86.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Are we confusing things? They're both RISC, but P9/P10/etc is based on IBM's own Power microarchitecture (possibly open sourced / open standard), I wasn't aware it had anything to do with Arm? I could be hopelessly wrong... Or do you mean something different with "POWER"?
      - mhh__ 4y ago
        Owning an IBM Power system is a daydream of many nerds apparently. And power is open in that the ISA is open. Power10 is a bang up to date CPU so the internals are all closed.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        There are other interesting ISAs that are not arm64. Sadly, the only ones that still could be viable desktop (more like deskside) are either server-grade ARM or IBM's POWER (and none of them makes Mac Minis).
  - monocasa 4y ago
    I would be shocked if an A64FX core could go toe to toe with a Firestorm on general code. It just doesn't make sense for Fujitsu's use case to spend nearly as many gates on general improvements versus more vector ALUS.
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    The A64FX is a very specific microarchitecture that's aimed at big core counts rather than being a single threaded monster.
akmittal 4y ago
I feel Mobile CPUs are fast enough from last 5-6 years. Its the battery tech which is lagging. On Laptop/Server side Qualcomm need to catch up to AMD/Apple.
- usrn 4y ago
  After my experiences with Android I will never ever buy another device with a Qualcomm SoC again.
  - arifmeticus 4y ago
    Could you explain why?
  - akmittal 4y ago
    I had totally different experience, One i bought with Exynos was Battery hog, Mediatek ones generally have bad performance.
  - danielEM 4y ago
    I'm also curious what were your experiences with android that were affected by Qualcomm?
    - uni_rule 4y ago
      Maybe they had an 810 crap out on them
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    After my experiences with Android, it'll be really difficult to make me buy an Android phone. Compared to iOS, everything is slightly clunkier.
    - karamanolev 4y ago
      I'll take "slightly clunkier" before "extremely locked down and limited in unthinkable ways" any day, and not just for Android, but in general.
mhh__ 4y ago
Top performance CPUs in whose laptops? My alder lake is faster than an M1, my alder lake needs 4 fans
akmittal 4y ago
I hate Apple for lots of things. But they have done exceptional work with M1/M2. Imagine that power efficiency on servers. Saving so much energy.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Dropping the M2 into the same entry level Macbook Pro they sold last year gains you a couple of hours of battery life as well as a performance increase. https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-life-tested-this-is-the-longest-lasting-laptop-ever https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-l... That's pretty impressive for staying on the same process node.
  - akmittal 4y ago
    Truly amazing, most people (including me) thought after M1 perf gains will be marginal
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    That battery life test is understating the advantage Apple has over x86, probably because it's idling too much. The gap in a more CPU intensive web browsing test is more like 2x more than competing x86 ultralights [1]. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-Laptop-Review-Debut-for-the-new-Apple-M2.631003.0.html#toc-7 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-L...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- izzydata 4y ago
  But is Apple ever going to allow their CPUs to be used for anything other than their own products? If it isn't even an option then it is mostly irrelevant. I can't get a Windows laptop with an Apple M2 so it isn't worth checking how efficient of a CPU it is compared to Intel and AMD.
babypuncher 4y ago
Probably because the M1/M2 are kings of the roost as far as consumer hardware goes. No consumer ARM chip comes close, and Intel needs 3-4x more power draw just to match Apple on performance. The M1 is the stick by which all new ARM chips are going to be measured for a while.
- 6figurelenins 4y ago
  > Intel needs 3-4x more power draw just to match Apple on performance. The M1 Max is arguably price competitive with Intel 12900K, at half the performance and 1/6 wattage (at full load). The M1 Ultra is twice the price, closer in performance, for 1/3 wattage. https://youtu.be/LFQ3LkVF5sM?t=99 https://youtu.be/LFQ3LkVF5sM?t=99
tensor 4y ago
Discussing chip design in contrast to other chips is useful for discussion.
chasil 4y ago
"Perhaps more critically, the new core offers exclusive support for only AArch64 – dropping 32-bit support altogether." I don't understand why ARM wants to throw away AArch32/Thumb/Jazelle et al. This really shouldn't be in a phone - a lot of Android apps bundle 32-bit binaries for various purposes, and they won't run on this CPU. I can see why Fujitsu mandated AArch64, but my phone isn't going to be on the Top 500, and there were benefits to these old instruction sets.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  There are also benefits to cleaning up silicon. Eg: less transistors per core can mean more cores or less power or both.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chasil 4y ago
    If this were the case, then it would be better still to design a totally new instruction set. Why cling to any remnant?
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      AArch64 is, effectively, a totally new instruction set. It was designed to allow for fully regular decoding, unlike AArch32 & Thumb, which is a big part of why getting those off of the chip is a big win – it's not just the decoders you clean up, you can now make your pipeline and speculation deeper because you can peek N instructions into the future without having to decode the N-1 instructions in front of it first to figure out where the Nth instruction lies. That's part of why you see AArch64-only designs like this and the A12+ cores with much larger reorder buffers.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Binary compatibility is no longer a huge concern. By now only very old programs will require arm32 support and most current offers on any app store will have been recompiled for the latest and greatest (because software writers also want to look better on newer CPUs). Plus, if the new hardware is that much faster, you may not even need to pack native blobs.
undersuit 4y ago
When I first loaded this article your comment was on top and had no comments. It's still on top and the comments are talking about M1/M2. You applied the Streisand Effect to yourself.
iasay 4y ago
You’re right but they are the only ones shipping in something that isn’t a turd.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs... What are?

monocasa 4y ago

They're the top performing Arm CPUs.

homerowilson 4y ago
Maybe? There exist some extreme-performance ARM CPUs like A64FX from Fujitsu.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  They are the top performing ARM computers you can go to a store and buy. I'd love to have an HPE Ampere or a POWER tower under my desk, but it's not easy to get anything like those, and certainly not for a price competitive with generic x86.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Are we confusing things? They're both RISC, but P9/P10/etc is based on IBM's own Power microarchitecture (possibly open sourced / open standard), I wasn't aware it had anything to do with Arm? I could be hopelessly wrong... Or do you mean something different with "POWER"?
    - mhh__ 4y ago
      Owning an IBM Power system is a daydream of many nerds apparently. And power is open in that the ISA is open. Power10 is a bang up to date CPU so the internals are all closed.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      There are other interesting ISAs that are not arm64. Sadly, the only ones that still could be viable desktop (more like deskside) are either server-grade ARM or IBM's POWER (and none of them makes Mac Minis).
- monocasa 4y ago
  I would be shocked if an A64FX core could go toe to toe with a Firestorm on general code. It just doesn't make sense for Fujitsu's use case to spend nearly as many gates on general improvements versus more vector ALUS.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  The A64FX is a very specific microarchitecture that's aimed at big core counts rather than being a single threaded monster.

akmittal 4y ago

I feel Mobile CPUs are fast enough from last 5-6 years. Its the battery tech which is lagging. On Laptop/Server side Qualcomm need to catch up to AMD/Apple.

usrn 4y ago
After my experiences with Android I will never ever buy another device with a Qualcomm SoC again.
- arifmeticus 4y ago
  Could you explain why?
- akmittal 4y ago
  I had totally different experience, One i bought with Exynos was Battery hog, Mediatek ones generally have bad performance.
- danielEM 4y ago
  I'm also curious what were your experiences with android that were affected by Qualcomm?
  - uni_rule 4y ago
    Maybe they had an 810 crap out on them
- rbanffy 4y ago
  After my experiences with Android, it'll be really difficult to make me buy an Android phone. Compared to iOS, everything is slightly clunkier.
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    I'll take "slightly clunkier" before "extremely locked down and limited in unthinkable ways" any day, and not just for Android, but in general.

mhh__ 4y ago

Top performance CPUs in whose laptops? My alder lake is faster than an M1, my alder lake needs 4 fans

akmittal 4y ago

I hate Apple for lots of things. But they have done exceptional work with M1/M2. Imagine that power efficiency on servers. Saving so much energy.

GeekyBear 4y ago
Dropping the M2 into the same entry level Macbook Pro they sold last year gains you a couple of hours of battery life as well as a performance increase. https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-life-tested-this-is-the-longest-lasting-laptop-ever https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-l... That's pretty impressive for staying on the same process node.
- akmittal 4y ago
  Truly amazing, most people (including me) thought after M1 perf gains will be marginal
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  That battery life test is understating the advantage Apple has over x86, probably because it's idling too much. The gap in a more CPU intensive web browsing test is more like 2x more than competing x86 ultralights [1]. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-Laptop-Review-Debut-for-the-new-Apple-M2.631003.0.html#toc-7 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-L...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
izzydata 4y ago
But is Apple ever going to allow their CPUs to be used for anything other than their own products? If it isn't even an option then it is mostly irrelevant. I can't get a Windows laptop with an Apple M2 so it isn't worth checking how efficient of a CPU it is compared to Intel and AMD.

babypuncher 4y ago

Probably because the M1/M2 are kings of the roost as far as consumer hardware goes. No consumer ARM chip comes close, and Intel needs 3-4x more power draw just to match Apple on performance. The M1 is the stick by which all new ARM chips are going to be measured for a while.

6figurelenins 4y ago
> Intel needs 3-4x more power draw just to match Apple on performance. The M1 Max is arguably price competitive with Intel 12900K, at half the performance and 1/6 wattage (at full load). The M1 Ultra is twice the price, closer in performance, for 1/3 wattage. https://youtu.be/LFQ3LkVF5sM?t=99 https://youtu.be/LFQ3LkVF5sM?t=99

tensor 4y ago

Discussing chip design in contrast to other chips is useful for discussion.

chasil 4y ago

"Perhaps more critically, the new core offers exclusive support for only AArch64 – dropping 32-bit support altogether." I don't understand why ARM wants to throw away AArch32/Thumb/Jazelle et al. This really shouldn't be in a phone - a lot of Android apps bundle 32-bit binaries for various purposes, and they won't run on this CPU. I can see why Fujitsu mandated AArch64, but my phone isn't going to be on the Top 500, and there were benefits to these old instruction sets.

imoverclocked 4y ago
There are also benefits to cleaning up silicon. Eg: less transistors per core can mean more cores or less power or both.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chasil 4y ago
  If this were the case, then it would be better still to design a totally new instruction set. Why cling to any remnant?
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    AArch64 is, effectively, a totally new instruction set. It was designed to allow for fully regular decoding, unlike AArch32 & Thumb, which is a big part of why getting those off of the chip is a big win – it's not just the decoders you clean up, you can now make your pipeline and speculation deeper because you can peek N instructions into the future without having to decode the N-1 instructions in front of it first to figure out where the Nth instruction lies. That's part of why you see AArch64-only designs like this and the A12+ cores with much larger reorder buffers.
rbanffy 4y ago
Binary compatibility is no longer a huge concern. By now only very old programs will require arm32 support and most current offers on any app store will have been recompiled for the latest and greatest (because software writers also want to look better on newer CPUs). Plus, if the new hardware is that much faster, you may not even need to pack native blobs.

undersuit 4y ago

When I first loaded this article your comment was on top and had no comments. It's still on top and the comments are talking about M1/M2. You applied the Streisand Effect to yourself.

iasay 4y ago

You’re right but they are the only ones shipping in something that isn’t a turd.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs... What are?