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It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will

It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series). It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD we should probably expect the same slower more gradual improvements from Apple that we see from the other companies.

sod 4y ago
Yes, the year over year improvements were 90% just the tsmc node changes. But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Those efficiency cores are unmatched, paired with the right scheduling from the OS. The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was. But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed. Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Not disputing this, but even Asahi Linux without GPU acceleration has pretty much whole-day battery life on an M1 Air. I'm not sure how well their kernel manages scheduling on the different cores but I suspect the vast majority of the perf/Watt is on the actual hardware.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  It's worth noting that TSMC is looking to exploit Apple's demand for the hottest silicon. The latest reports suggest that they'll cut the prices to lure in others, so Apple will be forced to ante-up or stay on an old process: https://www.techspot.com/news/97269-tsmc-may-cut-3nm-wafer-prices-entice-amd.html https://www.techspot.com/news/97269-tsmc-may-cut-3nm-wafer-p... It's fascinating to think about. If the Mac is currently a low-margin product, Apple might be forced to stay on one node until the better silicon becomes cheap enough to use in production. If Apple doesn't play their cards right, TSMC could shanghai Apple in the exact same way Intel got stranded in the sea of process enhancement.
  - scoopertrooper 4y ago
    The M1 Pro is thought to cost $96. I highly doubt the MacBook Pro will ever approach being a low margin product, even if TSMC triple their prices. https://medium.com/macoclock/is-apple-fleecing-you-a682c851a48e https://medium.com/macoclock/is-apple-fleecing-you-a682c851a...
- Uehreka 4y ago
  In the beginning I thought the “performance per watt” thing was just folks who want Apple to be better clinging to a stat that made it look like that was the case. But in late 2021 I was long overdue for an upgrade, so I got an M1 Max MacBook Pro and holy hell, now I get it. The battery lasts stupid long. Like, the fact that I can bring this thing on a plane or train without worrying if they’ll have working electric sockets is huge. The fact I can stash this thing under a desk with no power available and have it run graphics-intensive projections for a 3-hour theatre show is huge. The fact that I can achieve all that with zero throttling (I turned on High Energy use and never turned it off) is huge. The fact that I can achieve all of that with basically no fan noise is nonsensical. Like, compared to the 2020 Razer Blade (RTX 2070 Max-Q) I use for work, it’s like a completely different class of device. My Razer Blade spins up like a jet engine under load, requires a cable if I’m going to do anything intense for an hour, underclocks from ~4.4GHz to ~1.5-2.5GHz when on battery (seemingly no way to disable this), and really only beats my MacBook for tasks that specifically require an Nvidia GPU.
  - mdasen 4y ago
    Yea, I upgraded to an M1 Pro and it's truly amazing. I used to always look at benchmarks and always want to upgrade to the newest thing that was coming out. Now I have a laptop that feels like it just works. It doesn't get hot, I've never heard the fan, and just so many of the typical worries/concerns just aren't there for me anymore. Yesterday, there was an article about Intel showing off a "35 watt" chip that was benchmarking better than last year's 125 watt chip. Except, you go into the comments and people note that it'll draw 107 watts for short periods of time - probably just long enough to get good benchmark scores. The magic of the M-series processors is that they have really great sustainable performance and without needing to draw power and create heat like Intel's. The Razor Blade machines are amazing in how they deal with the amount of heat generated with their liquid cooling and everything (it's quite a design), but as you note it's still a jet-engine sounding machine that requires being tethered to power. One of the big things that Apple showed off when introducing the M1 Pro/Max was the idea that you could be a creator doing your job and no longer feel like you were tied to a power outlet. Photoshop from a park or edit video wherever you are: you really don't need more power than you'll always have with you. As I said, I bought the M1 Pro and specifically upgraded to the 8 performance core version of it. I'd always bought the high-watt Intel processors for my MacBook, not the paltry 15W Intel parts. I had a 2020 MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 (28W, 10nm) and I'd regularly have it get really hot, the fan often wasn't too loud but it was always a constant drone, and things felt slow. My next machine is going to be a MacBook Air. I feel like I'm using nothing on this machine. I have 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, but it just feels like there's no point to having that much CPU. It's a really crazy feeling for me. Yes, more performance will be useful for some people, especially people who do video editing, graphics, etc. But damn does all my work never even come close to stressing this thing - something I'd regularly have a problem with on Intel's greatest drawing a lot more power and making a lot more heat just a year before. Intel has made some strides since then and I'm happy that their newer processors are doing well, but for the first time in my life it just feels like I don't care. I might grab a 3nm laptop from Apple when those come out, but I'm not anxiously awaiting them. I might just wait for whatever comes after TSMC's 3nm process. I am kinda excited that I can go to a MacBook Air.
- johncalvinyoung 4y ago
  According to Apple's press release^1, at least the M2 Pro is fabbed on a 'second generation 5nm' process. Since the power/cores/performance claims seem to be sub-linear going to the M2 Max, I'd expect it continues to share the same node. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-and-m2-max-next-generation-chips-for-next-level-workflows/#:~:text=next-,M2%20Pro%3A%20Next%2DGeneration%20Performance%20for%20Pro%20Workflows,-Built%20using%20a https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-...
- rowanG077 4y ago
  I'm not so sure that's true. Linux seems to handle these SoCs fine as well. The secret sauce in that regard seem much more in the very large amount of co-processors rather then the OS itself.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
Apple’s M1 chips already offered improvements compared to their previous generation Intel chips, and Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years. By all accounts, they have been ahead of Intel, at the very least. I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain? The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they were slightly ahead.
  - objclxt 4y ago
    > They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4 ...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      They weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.
      - cma 4y ago
        A chips had more relaxed memory ordering that couldn't work well for emulating x64. M chips can toggle the memory ordering guarantees.
        4y ago
s3p 4y ago
Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone else since. They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.
- Tepix 4y ago
  You seem to have a short memory. In the beginning, the Apple I had a 6502. The Macintosh ran on a Motorola 68000. Power Macintoshes used PowerPC chips. Then came Intel Macs, they started with 32bit CPUs, then 64bit Intel chips. And finally, we got ARM Macs from Apple.
klelatti 4y ago
You’re right in that TSMC / Samsung were for many years behind the state of the art, and by extension so was the technology that Apple was using. Apple’s CPUs defined the state of the art for mobile though. And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.
guax 4y ago
20% improvement is substantial even if not worth an upgrade. Add the same for next iteration and it the gap gets sizeable and harder to resist. I'm actually reliefer i can keep my less than a month old 16 inch since it was 700 euro cheaper than a new M2 pro and not worth returning for 20% improvement
gumby 4y ago
> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD... I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions. The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched. However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep. I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines. If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
- hajile 4y ago
  Apple's CPUs do very well in sustained performance. They fit 8 high-performance CPUs and 2 efficiency cores into a 40w peak power envelope while hitting peak clockspeeds (that 40w includes all the IO, mostly idling GPU, idling NPU, SSD controller, etc). Based on M2, their new chip should be 3.4-3.5GHz with 4 efficiency cores that get 30-40% better IPC all within that same power envelope. AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w TDP (not counting spikes that go higher than that) at 3.6GHz. Apple could most likely fit 72 high-performance cores and 36 more efficiency cores into that same 360w TDP. Given that AMD's chips require much higher clockspeeds to hit the same total performance (nearly 5GHz for Zen 3 to match a 3.2GHz M1), the final product from AMD would likely be quite a bit slower overall. I believe the real reason for the Mac Pro not hitting the market is their insistence on unified memory. At that size, unified memory and controlling latencies explodes in complexity. Even worse, the Mac Studio already appeals to most of the higher-end market meaning this $20-50k system probably doesn't have very many buyers either. They could sell such a product in the server market, but they left that market years ago and the reinvestment costs would be massive and very high-risk.
r00fus 4y ago
> It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel? Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.

sod 4y ago

Yes, the year over year improvements were 90% just the tsmc node changes. But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Those efficiency cores are unmatched, paired with the right scheduling from the OS. The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was. But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed. Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cassianoleal 4y ago
> But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Not disputing this, but even Asahi Linux without GPU acceleration has pretty much whole-day battery life on an M1 Air. I'm not sure how well their kernel manages scheduling on the different cores but I suspect the vast majority of the perf/Watt is on the actual hardware.
smoldesu 4y ago
It's worth noting that TSMC is looking to exploit Apple's demand for the hottest silicon. The latest reports suggest that they'll cut the prices to lure in others, so Apple will be forced to ante-up or stay on an old process: https://www.techspot.com/news/97269-tsmc-may-cut-3nm-wafer-prices-entice-amd.html https://www.techspot.com/news/97269-tsmc-may-cut-3nm-wafer-p... It's fascinating to think about. If the Mac is currently a low-margin product, Apple might be forced to stay on one node until the better silicon becomes cheap enough to use in production. If Apple doesn't play their cards right, TSMC could shanghai Apple in the exact same way Intel got stranded in the sea of process enhancement.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  The M1 Pro is thought to cost $96. I highly doubt the MacBook Pro will ever approach being a low margin product, even if TSMC triple their prices. https://medium.com/macoclock/is-apple-fleecing-you-a682c851a48e https://medium.com/macoclock/is-apple-fleecing-you-a682c851a...
Uehreka 4y ago
In the beginning I thought the “performance per watt” thing was just folks who want Apple to be better clinging to a stat that made it look like that was the case. But in late 2021 I was long overdue for an upgrade, so I got an M1 Max MacBook Pro and holy hell, now I get it. The battery lasts stupid long. Like, the fact that I can bring this thing on a plane or train without worrying if they’ll have working electric sockets is huge. The fact I can stash this thing under a desk with no power available and have it run graphics-intensive projections for a 3-hour theatre show is huge. The fact that I can achieve all that with zero throttling (I turned on High Energy use and never turned it off) is huge. The fact that I can achieve all of that with basically no fan noise is nonsensical. Like, compared to the 2020 Razer Blade (RTX 2070 Max-Q) I use for work, it’s like a completely different class of device. My Razer Blade spins up like a jet engine under load, requires a cable if I’m going to do anything intense for an hour, underclocks from ~4.4GHz to ~1.5-2.5GHz when on battery (seemingly no way to disable this), and really only beats my MacBook for tasks that specifically require an Nvidia GPU.
- mdasen 4y ago
  Yea, I upgraded to an M1 Pro and it's truly amazing. I used to always look at benchmarks and always want to upgrade to the newest thing that was coming out. Now I have a laptop that feels like it just works. It doesn't get hot, I've never heard the fan, and just so many of the typical worries/concerns just aren't there for me anymore. Yesterday, there was an article about Intel showing off a "35 watt" chip that was benchmarking better than last year's 125 watt chip. Except, you go into the comments and people note that it'll draw 107 watts for short periods of time - probably just long enough to get good benchmark scores. The magic of the M-series processors is that they have really great sustainable performance and without needing to draw power and create heat like Intel's. The Razor Blade machines are amazing in how they deal with the amount of heat generated with their liquid cooling and everything (it's quite a design), but as you note it's still a jet-engine sounding machine that requires being tethered to power. One of the big things that Apple showed off when introducing the M1 Pro/Max was the idea that you could be a creator doing your job and no longer feel like you were tied to a power outlet. Photoshop from a park or edit video wherever you are: you really don't need more power than you'll always have with you. As I said, I bought the M1 Pro and specifically upgraded to the 8 performance core version of it. I'd always bought the high-watt Intel processors for my MacBook, not the paltry 15W Intel parts. I had a 2020 MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 (28W, 10nm) and I'd regularly have it get really hot, the fan often wasn't too loud but it was always a constant drone, and things felt slow. My next machine is going to be a MacBook Air. I feel like I'm using nothing on this machine. I have 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, but it just feels like there's no point to having that much CPU. It's a really crazy feeling for me. Yes, more performance will be useful for some people, especially people who do video editing, graphics, etc. But damn does all my work never even come close to stressing this thing - something I'd regularly have a problem with on Intel's greatest drawing a lot more power and making a lot more heat just a year before. Intel has made some strides since then and I'm happy that their newer processors are doing well, but for the first time in my life it just feels like I don't care. I might grab a 3nm laptop from Apple when those come out, but I'm not anxiously awaiting them. I might just wait for whatever comes after TSMC's 3nm process. I am kinda excited that I can go to a MacBook Air.
johncalvinyoung 4y ago
According to Apple's press release^1, at least the M2 Pro is fabbed on a 'second generation 5nm' process. Since the power/cores/performance claims seem to be sub-linear going to the M2 Max, I'd expect it continues to share the same node. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-and-m2-max-next-generation-chips-for-next-level-workflows/#:~:text=next-,M2%20Pro%3A%20Next%2DGeneration%20Performance%20for%20Pro%20Workflows,-Built%20using%20a https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-...
rowanG077 4y ago
I'm not so sure that's true. Linux seems to handle these SoCs fine as well. The secret sauce in that regard seem much more in the very large amount of co-processors rather then the OS itself.

mynameisvlad 4y ago

Apple’s M1 chips already offered improvements compared to their previous generation Intel chips, and Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years. By all accounts, they have been ahead of Intel, at the very least. I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?

nicoburns 4y ago
> I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain? The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they were slightly ahead.
- objclxt 4y ago
  > They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4 ...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    They weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.
    - cma 4y ago
      A chips had more relaxed memory ordering that couldn't work well for emulating x64. M chips can toggle the memory ordering guarantees.
      - 4y ago

s3p 4y ago

Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone else since. They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.

Tepix 4y ago
You seem to have a short memory. In the beginning, the Apple I had a 6502. The Macintosh ran on a Motorola 68000. Power Macintoshes used PowerPC chips. Then came Intel Macs, they started with 32bit CPUs, then 64bit Intel chips. And finally, we got ARM Macs from Apple.

klelatti 4y ago

You’re right in that TSMC / Samsung were for many years behind the state of the art, and by extension so was the technology that Apple was using. Apple’s CPUs defined the state of the art for mobile though. And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.

guax 4y ago

20% improvement is substantial even if not worth an upgrade. Add the same for next iteration and it the gap gets sizeable and harder to resist. I'm actually reliefer i can keep my less than a month old 16 inch since it was 700 euro cheaper than a new M2 pro and not worth returning for 20% improvement

gumby 4y ago

> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD... I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions. The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched. However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep. I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines. If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).

hajile 4y ago
Apple's CPUs do very well in sustained performance. They fit 8 high-performance CPUs and 2 efficiency cores into a 40w peak power envelope while hitting peak clockspeeds (that 40w includes all the IO, mostly idling GPU, idling NPU, SSD controller, etc). Based on M2, their new chip should be 3.4-3.5GHz with 4 efficiency cores that get 30-40% better IPC all within that same power envelope. AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w TDP (not counting spikes that go higher than that) at 3.6GHz. Apple could most likely fit 72 high-performance cores and 36 more efficiency cores into that same 360w TDP. Given that AMD's chips require much higher clockspeeds to hit the same total performance (nearly 5GHz for Zen 3 to match a 3.2GHz M1), the final product from AMD would likely be quite a bit slower overall. I believe the real reason for the Mac Pro not hitting the market is their insistence on unified memory. At that size, unified memory and controlling latencies explodes in complexity. Even worse, the Mac Studio already appeals to most of the higher-end market meaning this $20-50k system probably doesn't have very many buyers either. They could sell such a product in the server market, but they left that market years ago and the reinvestment costs would be massive and very high-risk.

r00fus 4y ago

> It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel? Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.