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> are supposed to go after Apple in this area, Talent can be poached [1] and Technology can be acquired [2] [1] "Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect W

by pella 4y ago

> are supposed to go after Apple in this area, Talent can be poached [1] and Technology can be acquired [2] [1] "Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips" https://hothardware.com/news/intel-poaches-head-apple-silicon-architect-who-led-transition-to-arm-and-m1-chips https://hothardware.com/news/intel-poaches-head-apple-silico... [2] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-completes-acquisition-nuvia https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-comp... ------ The real problem - Apple is slowing down [3][4] [3] "Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In" https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and-the-future-looks-dim-as-the-cpu-engineer-exodus-to-nuvia-and-rivos-impact-starts-to-bleed-in/ https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and... [4] "Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase And A15 Based IP" https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and-the-future-looks-dim-as-the-cpu-engineer-exodus-to-nuvia-and-rivos-impact-starts-to-bleed-in/ https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and... details from [3] "It appears Apple has not changed the CPU much this generation. SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now. We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing. Instead of a new CPU core, they are using a modified version of last year’s core. One of these modifications is related to the CPU core’s MMU. This work was being done for the upcoming colloquially named “M1X” generation of Mac chips. Part of the reason for this change is related to larger memory sizes and virtualization features/support. In addition, there may be other small changes as well, but we need hardware in the hand to analyze that. We also aren’t sure if Avalanche and Blizzard are the next generation cores or the current modified Firestorm and Icestorm cores. Regardless of the paltry CPU gains and potential core architecture delays, Apple is still the leader in performance per watt. With Intel design teams starting to get back on track, AMD executing almost flawlessly, and Qualcomm coming in soon like a hammer with Nuvia cores, we aren’t sure if this lead will be sustained. The A11 to A12 generation was seen as Apple starting to asymptote out on gains with only a 15% gain, and the A13 to A14 looked even more weak with 8.3% gains, but now with no CPU gains, let’s cross our fingers and hope the A16 brings a large architectural change." source: [3]

matwood 4y ago
Doom and gloom for Apple is a common way to get clicks. The M2 in many workloads looks like ~20% increase which is certainly not a slowdown for YoY performance. Additionally, everyone is alway 2 years out from beating what Apple is selling today, ignoring where Apple will be in 2 years. With that said, of course competitors can catch up with what Apple is doing. Doing things you link to is how, and it's exactly how competition works. We'll have to wait and see what AMD and Qualcom end up actually releasing.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  How could we define a slowdown or speedup in YoY performance improvements, for the M2? It is the first successor.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Despite the M1 moniker, Apple has been doing in-house silicon for about 7 generations now - they started with A7 iirc, and M1 is part of the A14 generation, and M2 is part of the A15 generation. M1 is what would have traditionally been called an "A14X", meaning wider GPU than the phone-sized SOC. So there are basically 8 generations of YoY comparisons to make. M2 is not a particularly large jump as these generations go, but it's on the same node and it's actually decent in that context.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Sure, but since they've moved into an entirely different class of device, I don't think the A<n> series establishes a very useful baseline. I mean, scaling the phone/tablet type chip up to laptop/desktop class must have made them bump into some bottlenecks that previously looked infinitely wide. Depending on how difficult those bottlenecks are to clear, we could see some years with quick progress, some years with not so much.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. I thought that’s how it works in Silicon Valley these days, people leave the company to create a startup with the intent to be acquired once they make enough progress. If apple were planning a risc-v future then this seems like much ado about nothing. If not they have plenty of cash to throw at the problem when it becomes a real issue. I wouldn’t bet against them since they take secrecy very seriously and everyone is predicting doom and gloom without any idea what they’re doing behind the curtains.

by pella 4y ago

matwood 4y ago

Doom and gloom for Apple is a common way to get clicks. The M2 in many workloads looks like ~20% increase which is certainly not a slowdown for YoY performance. Additionally, everyone is alway 2 years out from beating what Apple is selling today, ignoring where Apple will be in 2 years. With that said, of course competitors can catch up with what Apple is doing. Doing things you link to is how, and it's exactly how competition works. We'll have to wait and see what AMD and Qualcom end up actually releasing.

bee_rider 4y ago
How could we define a slowdown or speedup in YoY performance improvements, for the M2? It is the first successor.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Despite the M1 moniker, Apple has been doing in-house silicon for about 7 generations now - they started with A7 iirc, and M1 is part of the A14 generation, and M2 is part of the A15 generation. M1 is what would have traditionally been called an "A14X", meaning wider GPU than the phone-sized SOC. So there are basically 8 generations of YoY comparisons to make. M2 is not a particularly large jump as these generations go, but it's on the same node and it's actually decent in that context.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Sure, but since they've moved into an entirely different class of device, I don't think the A<n> series establishes a very useful baseline. I mean, scaling the phone/tablet type chip up to laptop/desktop class must have made them bump into some bottlenecks that previously looked infinitely wide. Depending on how difficult those bottlenecks are to clear, we could see some years with quick progress, some years with not so much.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. I thought that’s how it works in Silicon Valley these days, people leave the company to create a startup with the intent to be acquired once they make enough progress. If apple were planning a risc-v future then this seems like much ado about nothing. If not they have plenty of cash to throw at the problem when it becomes a real issue. I wouldn’t bet against them since they take secrecy very seriously and everyone is predicting doom and gloom without any idea what they’re doing behind the curtains.