3 ms·

Genuinely asking because I don't know. Is there anything that's better about ARM or is the Apple/TSMC being better than Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, et. al.?

• Cupprum 4y ago
  1 - The instruction set is more interesting because it is smaller. 2 - Arm also implements weak ordering which is type of memory model. It allows instructions to be separated into groups based on whether they affect other instructions. This allows these groups to skip some waiting lines. (Magic). X86 has strong ordering, which can make it slower in specific scenarios.
  • temac 4y ago
    3 - The instruction set is made of fixed length instructions TBH there are various mostly-Apple/TSMC-"exclusive" tricks too, for why their chips are better than the others: A - On Apple Silicon, pages are larger, but not too large B - there are various accelerators leveraged by libraries provided in the OS (or the provided toolchains, etc.) C - Apple got to use the best TSMC process years before the competition. D - TSMC is ahead (I'm curious of what Zen4 will give on laptop, btw) So it's mixed. The ARM ISA probably plays a small role in the perf of Apple Silicon vs. x86 chips, but is probably not the main cause of the perf gap.
• sethhochberg 4y ago
  Its less about the instruction set and more about the specific implementation choices and market they're competing in. Apple has been doing ARM SoC design for a long time and was an early 64-bit adopter, buys tons of bleeding-edge capacity from fabs, and is willing to design in more expensive features like tons of onboard cache that they can make up on margins in other ways because Apple sells complete devices, while Qualcomm etc are mostly in the business of selling chips. So while there are fundamental differences between x86 and ARM, the bigger differences are more "Apple vs other ARM SoC designers" than something fundamentally different about ARM that Apple takes advantage of.
• pornel 4y ago
  TSMC tech helps a lot, but is not exclusive to Apple. A relatively modern and sensible 64-bit ARM architecture helps too, but on top of that Apple seems to be really good at designing the chips. OTOH Qualcomm is constantly lagging behind Apple, promising that next year they will be almost as fast as a previous-gen Apple chip. The most generous explanation I've heard is that Qualcomm is specializing in quantity over quality, and focuses on making CPUs cheap, rather than fast.
  • yyyk 4y ago
    Actually, TSMC reserves the lowest node size to Apple (I don't recall for how long their deal will last). AMD's processors are about equivalent despite being on a larger node - so Apple actually didn't do a great job, but a lower node size is a lower node. That's good enough for users who (correctly) don't care about the why but just want to use their computer.
• GeekyBear 4y ago
  If the company is selling just the chip, it's in their best interests to hold the die size down as much as possible because doing so directly effects their profit margin. If the company is selling the whole device, including the chip, they can afford to throw more transistors and die area at performance with a much more minimal impact on their bottom line.