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Well, I'm out of my depth, but it doesn't seem entirely inaccurate to say their their node advantage allowed them to sort of throw lots of hardware (transistors

Well, I'm out of my depth, but it doesn't seem entirely inaccurate to say their their node advantage allowed them to sort of throw lots of hardware (transistors) at the problem. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. For a list of relative transistor counts among CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count Perhaps more to the point, I think the onus would be on somebody who claims Apple is doing something uniquely spectacular with their chips, other than simply capitalizing on a massive transistor count and power efficiency advantage made possible by their node advantage. By the way, I'm not knocking what Apple has achieved. I recently upgraded from an 2018 Intel MBP to a 2021 M1 Max MBP. And, holy smokes. This thing is fast and it is effortlessly fast. I have been running all 10 cores pretty hard for the job I'm currently doing. I am absolutely beyond impressed. But, from an engineering standpoint, it's definitely worth wrapping our heads around what Apple has and has not achieved here. I don't think they have any magic fairy dust or special sauce.

acdha 3y ago
That quote is kind of the point: nobody would say that Apple didn’t effectively take advantage of the new process nodes but they didn’t _just_ take an off-the-shelf ARM core and run it n% faster, they also did significant work which has made their chips faster than those stock designs even on the same process. Android phones tend to be 4-5 years behind iPhone hardware because even when their chips are made on the same process as the older iPhone, they aren’t the same designs and by all accounts Apple’s design team is outperforming ARM, Qualcomm (prior to the Nuvia acquisition, we’ll see how much that shifts when they ship), and Samsung. Changing something like the execution width of a processor isn’t like adding “-n 8” to a build script, it has huge ripple effects throughout the design and that’s expensive to do. The underlying challenge here is vertical integration: Apple can invest more in chip design not just on the CPU but also balancing with accelerators for things like AI or media processing, security, etc. because they work closely across the OS and app teams to see what they need & make sure it’s actually used (if they add a new coprocessor to reduce need for certain CPU features, it’s priority 1 for the next OS release). Microsoft and Intel or Samsung/Qualcomm and Google work together, of course, but they have different goals and budgets, they need to support multiple companies worth of corporate overhead on the same sale, and they can’t focus too much on any one deal because they need to hedge their bets. This cuts the other way, of course: Apple’s stuff is best at the mobile and up to mid-range, but beyond that if you need more than a certain amount of RAM or features like advanced virtualization, they don’t have an alternative the way Google can choose between AMD and Intel for GCP with no concern about affecting the Pixel lineup. We’ll see whether Apple stumbles badly enough for this to matter.

acdha 3y ago

That quote is kind of the point: nobody would say that Apple didn’t effectively take advantage of the new process nodes but they didn’t _just_ take an off-the-shelf ARM core and run it n% faster, they also did significant work which has made their chips faster than those stock designs even on the same process. Android phones tend to be 4-5 years behind iPhone hardware because even when their chips are made on the same process as the older iPhone, they aren’t the same designs and by all accounts Apple’s design team is outperforming ARM, Qualcomm (prior to the Nuvia acquisition, we’ll see how much that shifts when they ship), and Samsung. Changing something like the execution width of a processor isn’t like adding “-n 8” to a build script, it has huge ripple effects throughout the design and that’s expensive to do. The underlying challenge here is vertical integration: Apple can invest more in chip design not just on the CPU but also balancing with accelerators for things like AI or media processing, security, etc. because they work closely across the OS and app teams to see what they need & make sure it’s actually used (if they add a new coprocessor to reduce need for certain CPU features, it’s priority 1 for the next OS release). Microsoft and Intel or Samsung/Qualcomm and Google work together, of course, but they have different goals and budgets, they need to support multiple companies worth of corporate overhead on the same sale, and they can’t focus too much on any one deal because they need to hedge their bets. This cuts the other way, of course: Apple’s stuff is best at the mobile and up to mid-range, but beyond that if you need more than a certain amount of RAM or features like advanced virtualization, they don’t have an alternative the way Google can choose between AMD and Intel for GCP with no concern about affecting the Pixel lineup. We’ll see whether Apple stumbles badly enough for this to matter.