13 ms·

> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compar

by deanc 4y ago

> Compared to 5nm process, the first-generation 3nm process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23% and reduce area by 16% compared to 5nm, while the second-generation 3nm process is to reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35%. What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures seem outstanding and generationally impactful if true.

nsteel 4y ago
> reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35% To be clear, you don't get all three. Also, are these Apple's numbers? They are better than what TSMC say (1st gen) 3nm silicon provides: > N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_3nm https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
- jb1991 4y ago
  I’m curious why not? Apple Silicon so far has improved performance, and reduced power consumption. Does that mean that it’s a larger chip than the others that came before it?
  - maven29 4y ago
    They got there by skimping on IO
    - manmal 4y ago
      Please elaborate. IO is really not an issue in the M* machines I‘ve used - on the contrary.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        none of the M1 laptops let you use multiple external monitors and all of the M1 products have much lower limits on storage than PCs.
        dev_tty01 4y ago
        Not true. Depending upon the processor choice, M1, M1 pro, or M1 max, you get 1, 2, or 4 external monitors. Up to 64 GB ram. Do you really need more than 64 GB? The number of users who actually need more are a very small part of the market.
        jb1991 4y ago
        And the M1 Ultra even offers up to 128 GB RAM -- and that is also unified with GPU RAM.
        ihateolives 4y ago
        The price of RAM is absolutely bonkers though. If i ever need more than 16GB of RAM and more than 512GB of storage, I'll strongly consider moving back to Thinkpads or something.
  - amoss 4y ago
    There is a trade-off between the three kinds of improvements. It is possible to pick some points (for example) that give a less than maximum power reduction as well as a less than maximum speed improvment. I think the comparison would be the Apple Silicon that they released is larger than a (hypothetical) alternative that only improved performance but kept the other two constant.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Maybe X*Y*Z=K but K increases over time. Ten years ago, we couldn't do what we can do now.
- warrenm 4y ago
  "Speed" != "Performance" '70% logic density gain' sounds like 'reduce area by 35%' to me The only one that might not line up is 'reduce power consumption by up to 50%' vs 'up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology' ...but you have to know what's being compared before deciding the numbers do (or don't) make sense
  - SuchAnonMuchWow 4y ago
    About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic: Typically, sram (cache memories for example) doesn't scale as much as core logic, and interconnect (connections between the cores, DDR, etc...) almost don't scale at all. This is highly dependent on the design of the SoC, but the core logic is rarely the largest of the three, so you will not see a 35% reduction of the total area of the chip: only of the areas the most densely packed with logic. What you could have for example is a 35% more powerful neural network accelerator in the same area as the previous generation. But you will not have 35% bigger cache.
    - nsteel 4y ago
      Have you seen the 3nm SRAM scaling? It's really depressing. It won't bother CPUs too much but other devices are going to struggle to scale.
      - hajile 4y ago
        N3 scaling? There's literally zero scaling. N3 is a stop-gap as TSMC is behind on their N2 GAA process. It's not so different from Intel's 14nm++++++ where it was dramatically better than before, but still not enough.
    - warrenm 4y ago
      > About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic No, but improving density still makes it smaller (for an otherwise-"identical" offering) :)
  - ARandomerDude 4y ago
- turnsout 4y ago
  > Also are these Apple's numbers? Hope it's obvious, but no, they are not Apple's numbers—this is a rumor about unreleased products.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    Bizarrely it seems the parent plucked those numbers from a Samsung 3mn press release! That's why they don't make sense in the context of TSMC 3nm. I've never had a presentation from Samsung, I guess they need to say something special.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  >To be clear, you don't get all three. Actually you do. The branding is called FinFlex, but the upshot is that you can use different FETs for different parts of a circuit. So some critical timing bottleneck blocks could be built with performance optimized FETs and other blocks can optimize for low power. The numbers from TSMC for N3E are +18% speed improvement at same power, -34% power reduction at same speed, and 1.7x density improvement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap >Also, are these Apple's numbers? Ha ha. That's funny. Does Apple ever release any numbers prerelease?
thefounder 4y ago
Perhaps more fanless macs. That would be great and make a difference in the user exeprience. Re iphone: I only use mail, safari and chat apps so I doubt I can see any difference.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > I only use mail, safari and chat apps so I doubt I can see any difference. You probably also take photos, where Apple automatically applies some Machine Learning tricks. And wherever Machine Learning is used, more can be used. One day they could put an entire ChatGPT on the iPhone.
  - thefounder 4y ago
    >> One day they could put an entire ChatGPT on the iPhone. That sounds great except I never use siri...(in car commands being the exception).
CoolGuySteve 4y ago
History suggests we will see obnoxious hacker news comments about how the M-series processors are some unrivaled alien technology that will be forever unbeaten when it comes to performance followed by AMD releasing a low wattage CPU with better multicore performance about 8 months later (or whenever they get fab capacity anyways).
- personjerry 4y ago
  What AMD-powered computer is more energy efficient than a M1 for example?
  - zekica 4y ago
    Apple M1 Pro vs AMD 5800u - 2 months apart (October vs December 2021). 5nm vs 7nm TSMC. They have comparable performance (60-120% in multi core depending on the task, 90-110% in single core) and the same power draw.
    - Cupprum 4y ago
      Where did you get those numbers? According to [1] its not even the same ballpark. To me it seems that even normal m1 is a bit better [2]. [1] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ryzen-7-5800u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ry... [2] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-7-5800u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  What I really want is for them to release a lineup like Aerith - the super efficient Steam Deck SoC for the general market so we get more fun forms of computers
- hbn 4y ago
  The first M1 devices released in November 2020. Where is AMD's competitive chip that came out July 2021?
cubefox 4y ago
This comparison is somewhat disingenuous. Why would they compare 3nm to 5mm, when the current TSMC process is 4nm, not 5nm? We don't know how (un)impressive the improvements of the 3nm process are, when we don't know how much of the difference between 5nm and 3nm merely comes from the difference between between 5nm and 4nm.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  From what I have read, 4nm is not really a significant process change and is really just a variant of 5nm. There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result. 3nm really is different.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    "There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result." I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.
    - lcvw 4y ago
      Those numbers are just for marketing. There is no feature on the chip that is actually 5 nm, 4 nm, or whatever.
      - cubefox 4y ago
        That's highly irrelevant for my point, which would still stand if the process generations were named differently.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
      The chip industry articles I have seen say that 4nm is not mean fully smaller than 5nm and really can be just considered a version of 5nm. I don’t have the background to give you more than that but the message has been consistent across multiple tech writers. You can see it in the smaller performance gains of 4nm A16 chips vs 4nm A15 chips from Apple.
nindalf 4y ago
This is power consumption of (some of) the chips alone. That's pretty good, but the power consumption of the screen, cell radio, bluetooth, accelerometer, microphone, GPS - all of these add up to more than the power consumption by the chip. And not all of them, especially not the screen is going to be affected by TSMC's process change. Obviously there's many caveats here based on how each person uses their device. But the broad takeaway is - a 45% reduction in power consumption by Apple's chips doesn't result in a corresponding increase in battery life. We'll only know when the final product is shipped.
- SpacePortKnight 4y ago
  Do you have a link which shows the power consumption of all the components you mentioned? I've seen this comment over and over again, everytime an increase in processor efficiency is talked about and yet those gains usually do result in a very noticiable improvement on battery life.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    No, it will have a massive impact on battery life. I only meant to say, a 50% decrease in consumption by CPU doesn't translate to doubling the battery life. All those other things matter too, so maybe it translates to 20-30% more. That's still massive!
ytch 4y ago
I've heard that (I'm not experts on this, so correct me if i am wrong) making SRAM is huge different than making processing units (ALU, FPU or others). But CPU needs both SRAM and processing units. Marking always show best case only, therefore the final product won't as good as the marketing numbers.
brailsafe 4y ago
It'll help make the lightest and smallest devices even more capable than any other competing laptop. After using my work issued 16" M2 Pro, my 2019 intel mbp is crawlin slow, particularly with Docker. Build times can always be faster, battery life always better, cooling efficiency better. The real life luxury of just being able to toss a 14" macbook pro that weighs almost nothing into your bag and have a savage development machine with up to 96gb of ram, no fan noise and minimal heat, great battery life, is very valuable. I've started noticing all the processes that really bog my intel mac down. Indexing, running out of ram, builds, etc.. I was pretty pessimistic about macs for a while, but it feels right now like when they started putting retina displays in them. My previous mac couldn't even smoothly play a 1080p YouTube video very well.
- Loveaway 4y ago
  Similar for me, caved in and bought a M2. It's great and all, gotta say though, not entirely happy with how unbearable the 2019 intel mbp has become. Yeah, it struggles with YouTube videos and fans are spinning in vacuum cleaner mode. But it didn't in 2019. I feel OS and software updates ruined it. Not what I expect after only about 3 years of use. (obviously it wasn't cheap either) Oh well, still gave Apple my money, just hope it's a special situation with the chipset transition and not the regular lifespan from now on.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    What browser are you running? My 2017 Mac runs 4k YouTube videos without a glitch in Safari.
    - coldcode 4y ago
      I prefer to use Brave to watch Youtube; it skips most of the ads automatically.
    - brailsafe 4y ago
      I should have articulated that differently. What I meant to say was that the mac I had prior to my first Retina MBP (2013) couldn't run 1080p YT videos well. That model was a 2009 13", if memory serves. So I was just comparing the two transitional periods, whereby my Intel mac feels almost as limited as that 2009 machine did.
meindnoch 4y ago
For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1
  - meindnoch 4y ago
    >no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      Doing development work on a 10 year old ThinkPad dramatically changed how I think about performance in my software. With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things
    - totetsu 4y ago
      I want my ps2 keyboard port back
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        USB doesn't have to be this slow. Some slowness is required, but not this much. (And USB3 doesn't have to be slower than PS2.) What we get is a result of nobody on the entire stack giving a shit. It's not a technological limitation.
      - 4y ago

by deanc 4y ago

nsteel 4y ago

> reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30% and reduce area by 35% To be clear, you don't get all three. Also, are these Apple's numbers? They are better than what TSMC say (1st gen) 3nm silicon provides: > N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_3nm https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...

jb1991 4y ago
I’m curious why not? Apple Silicon so far has improved performance, and reduced power consumption. Does that mean that it’s a larger chip than the others that came before it?
- maven29 4y ago
  They got there by skimping on IO
  - manmal 4y ago
    Please elaborate. IO is really not an issue in the M* machines I‘ve used - on the contrary.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      none of the M1 laptops let you use multiple external monitors and all of the M1 products have much lower limits on storage than PCs.
      - dev_tty01 4y ago
        Not true. Depending upon the processor choice, M1, M1 pro, or M1 max, you get 1, 2, or 4 external monitors. Up to 64 GB ram. Do you really need more than 64 GB? The number of users who actually need more are a very small part of the market.
        jb1991 4y ago
        And the M1 Ultra even offers up to 128 GB RAM -- and that is also unified with GPU RAM.
        ihateolives 4y ago
        The price of RAM is absolutely bonkers though. If i ever need more than 16GB of RAM and more than 512GB of storage, I'll strongly consider moving back to Thinkpads or something.
- amoss 4y ago
  There is a trade-off between the three kinds of improvements. It is possible to pick some points (for example) that give a less than maximum power reduction as well as a less than maximum speed improvment. I think the comparison would be the Apple Silicon that they released is larger than a (hypothetical) alternative that only improved performance but kept the other two constant.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Maybe X*Y*Z=K but K increases over time. Ten years ago, we couldn't do what we can do now.
warrenm 4y ago
"Speed" != "Performance" '70% logic density gain' sounds like 'reduce area by 35%' to me The only one that might not line up is 'reduce power consumption by up to 50%' vs 'up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology' ...but you have to know what's being compared before deciding the numbers do (or don't) make sense
- SuchAnonMuchWow 4y ago
  About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic: Typically, sram (cache memories for example) doesn't scale as much as core logic, and interconnect (connections between the cores, DDR, etc...) almost don't scale at all. This is highly dependent on the design of the SoC, but the core logic is rarely the largest of the three, so you will not see a 35% reduction of the total area of the chip: only of the areas the most densely packed with logic. What you could have for example is a 35% more powerful neural network accelerator in the same area as the previous generation. But you will not have 35% bigger cache.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    Have you seen the 3nm SRAM scaling? It's really depressing. It won't bother CPUs too much but other devices are going to struggle to scale.
    - hajile 4y ago
      N3 scaling? There's literally zero scaling. N3 is a stop-gap as TSMC is behind on their N2 GAA process. It's not so different from Intel's 14nm++++++ where it was dramatically better than before, but still not enough.
  - warrenm 4y ago
    > About the area, keep in mind that not every part of a chip is composed of dense logic No, but improving density still makes it smaller (for an otherwise-"identical" offering) :)
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
turnsout 4y ago
> Also are these Apple's numbers? Hope it's obvious, but no, they are not Apple's numbers—this is a rumor about unreleased products.
- nsteel 4y ago
  Bizarrely it seems the parent plucked those numbers from a Samsung 3mn press release! That's why they don't make sense in the context of TSMC 3nm. I've never had a presentation from Samsung, I guess they need to say something special.
dev_tty01 4y ago
>To be clear, you don't get all three. Actually you do. The branding is called FinFlex, but the upshot is that you can use different FETs for different parts of a circuit. So some critical timing bottleneck blocks could be built with performance optimized FETs and other blocks can optimize for low power. The numbers from TSMC for N3E are +18% speed improvement at same power, -34% power reduction at same speed, and 1.7x density improvement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap >Also, are these Apple's numbers? Ha ha. That's funny. Does Apple ever release any numbers prerelease?

thefounder 4y ago

Perhaps more fanless macs. That would be great and make a difference in the user exeprience. Re iphone: I only use mail, safari and chat apps so I doubt I can see any difference.

credit_guy 4y ago
> I only use mail, safari and chat apps so I doubt I can see any difference. You probably also take photos, where Apple automatically applies some Machine Learning tricks. And wherever Machine Learning is used, more can be used. One day they could put an entire ChatGPT on the iPhone.
- thefounder 4y ago
  >> One day they could put an entire ChatGPT on the iPhone. That sounds great except I never use siri...(in car commands being the exception).

CoolGuySteve 4y ago

History suggests we will see obnoxious hacker news comments about how the M-series processors are some unrivaled alien technology that will be forever unbeaten when it comes to performance followed by AMD releasing a low wattage CPU with better multicore performance about 8 months later (or whenever they get fab capacity anyways).

personjerry 4y ago
What AMD-powered computer is more energy efficient than a M1 for example?
- zekica 4y ago
  Apple M1 Pro vs AMD 5800u - 2 months apart (October vs December 2021). 5nm vs 7nm TSMC. They have comparable performance (60-120% in multi core depending on the task, 90-110% in single core) and the same power draw.
  - Cupprum 4y ago
    Where did you get those numbers? According to [1] its not even the same ballpark. To me it seems that even normal m1 is a bit better [2]. [1] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ryzen-7-5800u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ry... [2] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-7-5800u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
coffeebeqn 4y ago
What I really want is for them to release a lineup like Aerith - the super efficient Steam Deck SoC for the general market so we get more fun forms of computers
hbn 4y ago
The first M1 devices released in November 2020. Where is AMD's competitive chip that came out July 2021?

cubefox 4y ago

This comparison is somewhat disingenuous. Why would they compare 3nm to 5mm, when the current TSMC process is 4nm, not 5nm? We don't know how (un)impressive the improvements of the 3nm process are, when we don't know how much of the difference between 5nm and 3nm merely comes from the difference between between 5nm and 4nm.

Tagbert 4y ago
From what I have read, 4nm is not really a significant process change and is really just a variant of 5nm. There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result. 3nm really is different.
- cubefox 4y ago
  "There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result." I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.
  - lcvw 4y ago
    Those numbers are just for marketing. There is no feature on the chip that is actually 5 nm, 4 nm, or whatever.
    - cubefox 4y ago
      That's highly irrelevant for my point, which would still stand if the process generations were named differently.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    The chip industry articles I have seen say that 4nm is not mean fully smaller than 5nm and really can be just considered a version of 5nm. I don’t have the background to give you more than that but the message has been consistent across multiple tech writers. You can see it in the smaller performance gains of 4nm A16 chips vs 4nm A15 chips from Apple.

nindalf 4y ago

This is power consumption of (some of) the chips alone. That's pretty good, but the power consumption of the screen, cell radio, bluetooth, accelerometer, microphone, GPS - all of these add up to more than the power consumption by the chip. And not all of them, especially not the screen is going to be affected by TSMC's process change. Obviously there's many caveats here based on how each person uses their device. But the broad takeaway is - a 45% reduction in power consumption by Apple's chips doesn't result in a corresponding increase in battery life. We'll only know when the final product is shipped.

SpacePortKnight 4y ago
Do you have a link which shows the power consumption of all the components you mentioned? I've seen this comment over and over again, everytime an increase in processor efficiency is talked about and yet those gains usually do result in a very noticiable improvement on battery life.
- nindalf 4y ago
  No, it will have a massive impact on battery life. I only meant to say, a 50% decrease in consumption by CPU doesn't translate to doubling the battery life. All those other things matter too, so maybe it translates to 20-30% more. That's still massive!

ytch 4y ago

I've heard that (I'm not experts on this, so correct me if i am wrong) making SRAM is huge different than making processing units (ALU, FPU or others). But CPU needs both SRAM and processing units. Marking always show best case only, therefore the final product won't as good as the marketing numbers.

brailsafe 4y ago

It'll help make the lightest and smallest devices even more capable than any other competing laptop. After using my work issued 16" M2 Pro, my 2019 intel mbp is crawlin slow, particularly with Docker. Build times can always be faster, battery life always better, cooling efficiency better. The real life luxury of just being able to toss a 14" macbook pro that weighs almost nothing into your bag and have a savage development machine with up to 96gb of ram, no fan noise and minimal heat, great battery life, is very valuable. I've started noticing all the processes that really bog my intel mac down. Indexing, running out of ram, builds, etc.. I was pretty pessimistic about macs for a while, but it feels right now like when they started putting retina displays in them. My previous mac couldn't even smoothly play a 1080p YouTube video very well.

Loveaway 4y ago
Similar for me, caved in and bought a M2. It's great and all, gotta say though, not entirely happy with how unbearable the 2019 intel mbp has become. Yeah, it struggles with YouTube videos and fans are spinning in vacuum cleaner mode. But it didn't in 2019. I feel OS and software updates ruined it. Not what I expect after only about 3 years of use. (obviously it wasn't cheap either) Oh well, still gave Apple my money, just hope it's a special situation with the chipset transition and not the regular lifespan from now on.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  What browser are you running? My 2017 Mac runs 4k YouTube videos without a glitch in Safari.
  - coldcode 4y ago
    I prefer to use Brave to watch Youtube; it skips most of the ads automatically.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    I should have articulated that differently. What I meant to say was that the mac I had prior to my first Retina MBP (2013) couldn't run 1080p YT videos well. That model was a 2009 13", if memory serves. So I was just comparing the two transitional periods, whereby my Intel mac feels almost as limited as that 2009 machine did.

meindnoch 4y ago

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"

ChrisRR 4y ago
As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1
- meindnoch 4y ago
  >no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Doing development work on a 10 year old ThinkPad dramatically changed how I think about performance in my software. With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things
  - totetsu 4y ago
    I want my ps2 keyboard port back
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      USB doesn't have to be this slow. Some slowness is required, but not this much. (And USB3 doesn't have to be slower than PS2.) What we get is a result of nobody on the entire stack giving a shit. It's not a technological limitation.
    - 4y ago