6 ms·

I can't wait to see benchmarks on these chips. Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what th

I can't wait to see benchmarks on these chips. Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now.

lp4vn 3y ago
Can someone explain to me how Apple managed to come from nowhere with a chip(M Series) that's competitive with the best chips from two companies(AMD and Intel) that have operated for decades exclusively in this field? Shouldn't AMD and Intel have an expertise that ideally would take decades and billions to be reached?
- wmf 3y ago
  It wasn't nowhere. M1 was based on A14. It's called A14 because it's the 14th generation Apple Silicon chip (although the early generations were designed by Samsung so maybe it's Apple's 10th generation chip design).
- wredue 3y ago
  You’re just seeing generalized platforms with history cruft vs walled garden controlled platforms. A program built for an intel and amd cpu 30 years ago runs today. That’s not true of M series.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    ARM64 and AMD64 are contemporaneous redesigns of the underlying architecture that got rid of a lot of cruft, so being ARM does not have an advantage there. One could argue that the more relaxed memory model of ARM gives a slight advantage, but that's a mixed bag. Even without that, all modern chips translate the ISA into internal ops, and that translation take such a miniscule fraction of chip area that ISA in 2024 has minimal effect on power and performance.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  By purchasing expertise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi This was the team that did the Digital Alpha & StrongARM.
  - 486sx33 3y ago
    Thank you !
  - FullyFunctional 3y ago
    and Montalvo, Intrincity, and probably more I don't know about. As always "the overnight success were years in the making".
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      And they've done so much hiring since the PASemi acquisition that probably every much CPU designed in the last 20 years is well represented on the Apple team.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Apple had been building its own mobile chips for a long time before releasing the m series. Their semi products absolutely did not come out of nowhere.
- choilive 3y ago
  Apple had a least a decade of experience designing chips for the iPhones/iPads etc. Oh and yes, they spent billions of $ on R&D for those as well.
- steve1977 3y ago
  In addition to what sibling comments already mentioned, also be aware that Apple was one of founding companies of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd (the company that became Arm Holdings plc), together Acorn Computers (which was the original A in ARM) and VLSI Technology. This was back in 1990. Before they switched to Intel x86, they were also involved in PowerPC, together with IBM and Motorola. So they are not coming from nowhere by any means.
- Sakos 3y ago
  In addition to the other points made here, it's well-known that Apple poached a lot of engineering talent from Intel and AMD.
wmf 3y ago
Yeah, it will be interesting to compare now that Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel are all on "4 nm" or "3 nm".
user_7832 3y ago
> Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now. Depending on what you're doing, modern AMD chips are very close to M series chips under load (specifically efficiency). The biggest issue is idle power is still higher. My amd framework (7840u) takes between 5-10watts idle unless I use something like the xtu tuner.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  5w cpu only? thats a lot. If whole laptop then ok.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    It's for the entire laptop, but it fluctuates rapidly and is realistically closer to 6-8w. Disclaimer, I have a USB charger with voltage/current readouts so these values are from observing that when fully charged, though AMD adrenalin reports very similar results.
    - eisa01 3y ago
      Are there any comparisons to Intel? Are they better on idle? Need to purchase a new business laptop soon
      - ac29 3y ago
        My 5 year old intel laptop routinely idles under 5W. Was 2-3W total system power draw (reported by battery) when I looked before writing this comment. This is with a 14nm chip, one would think the newer systems could hopefully do at least this well.
        SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
        Intels historically have colder idle, except for some very specfic AMDs such 5700G, which are _really_ efficient at idle.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Apple will still have a massive bandwidth advantage.
- Osiris 3y ago
  This is due to it essentially having 6 channel memory versus 2 channel memory for AMD/Intel? I would definitely like to see if the x86 industry could figure out how to include more channels while also not requiring 6-8 DIMMS to take advantage of it, like Thread Ripper. Something like dual channel on a single DIMM?
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I imagine they'll get it the same way Apple has done it with M series and AMD has done with MI300; by putting the RAM in the same package as the CPU. Doing so will break AMD's promise of 3 years of compatibility for AM5, so the change will either happen with Zen6 or they'll release a new range of chips called something other than Ryzen and sell Zen5 versions of both Ryzen and this new range. Intel & AMD are leaving too much performance and profit on the table not to do so eventually; IMO it's more a matter of when rather than if.
    - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
      It'll be interesting to see where this happens. I have to hand it to Apple, it's bold that they have on-package RAM that's so wide. (And then doubling and quadrupling whole core complex with tiling is a stunning move; Pro and Max.) Apple shipped a huge range at all once: a very capable mobile chip to a very beastly workstation grade chip. Intel's most notable attempt to me was Lakefield (2019), a Mobile Internet Device (MID) class (sub-laptop) chip that I quite liked. The 1+4 architecture wasnt very fast and it was a bit more power intense than the Snapdragons of the day that it had a modest-to-significsnt lead over. But I loved that it was like this tiny tiny package that you basically just had to add power to, and the on-package LPDDR4X-4266 was a very speedy offering for 2019. Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake mobile was shown in January, rocking tiled (doesn't look like a stacked/3D Foveros setup) on package ram. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-shows-lunar-lake-chip-nextgen-mobile-cpu-uses-onpackage-memory https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-... But both AMD and Intel already have big on-package ram cores. Intel's been shipping a "Max" Sapphire Rapids with 64GB HBM2e for a year (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-rapids-fourth-gen-xeon-cpus-and-ponte-vecchio-max-gpu-series https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-ra...). Like Apple's Ultra, it's a quad-tile with each CPU having a it's own HBMe stack. AMD's MI300A is basically a GPU where some of the tiles are instead CPUs but it too has 8 stacks of HBM3. I keep asking myself how & when & where is on-package ram going to arrive in. But there's already significant HBM presence in big cores! It didn't seem to make an huge difference for Sapphire Rapids; some help but unless one uses the expensive accelerators well there s probably not enough core to use it. Meanwhile MI300 is only just happening & more API focused. We have yet for on package ram to really be meaningful & available & making a difference like it did for Apple. But as your post says, it feels like an inevitability. Someone's gonna make a core that can do more or be better by having lower powered faster local ram. Part of my suspicion is that the market is resisting de-segmentation. The real issue is that Apple used on package ram to add many channels. Not of slow wise HBM memory, but mamy channels of DDR ram. These companies don't actually want to compete on throughout; they want throughput to be associated with $10k exotic chips. They are lament to build higher bandwidth more-channel consumer cores. That starts to change some next year with AMD's Strix Halo, a big APU with quad-channel ram. There's no on-package ram as far as I've heard, but once you start having that much board real estate & energy going to ram, it sure would be nice to get even more performance for less power & much less space. Damn I love on package setups. 2024 doesn't seem likely to offer much new or exciting, but 2025 has some possible signs for hope.
diffeomorphism 3y ago
Don't we already know that from M2 vs the 7000 chips?
PedroBatista 3y ago
Not aware of those "lots of people", but all I can say it's the node advantage it's very real, at least it has been because TSMC hasn't really made any major mistakes in the last few years. But real performance improvements post M1 didn't really match expectations. IMO the expectations Apple stated/implied in their usual marketing incantations are partly to blame, but they were the ones pumping the hype, so it's completely fair to charge them for that. Compute performance improvements of ~30% are OK and in line with everybody else, meaning they are dealing with the same reality as other companies, hence the "let down"
- caycep 3y ago
  Ignoring the fact that while doing that, there also happens to be a near 4090-level GPU and NPU and integrated memory on the M series chips on a die of approximately the same size...
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - xcv123 3y ago
    RTX 4090 has more than double the performance of the M2 Ultra https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/ https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd...
    - techie128 3y ago
      You're comparing a 600W system (450W TDP GPU + 150W TDP Intel Core i9-13900KS) with a 90W chip (CPU, GPU & NPU combined). You don't see anything remotely problematic with that comparison?
      - caycep 3y ago
        yeah, basically I think perspective is important to point out, when people are promoting the narrative "AMD has caught up to M1" but ignoring the fact it's not an Apples to Apples comparison. I'm sure 4090 can play cyberpunk with more FPS. And sure, I think the M series CPUs can eke out more single core performance if they devoted all 140 m2 of the die to CPU. But that's not what the M series chips are. Also, there's benchmarks like these: https://owehrens.com/whisper-nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-m1pro-with-mlx/ https://owehrens.com/whisper-nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-m1pro-with-m...
runjake 3y ago
What I've interpreted from the consensus is that Apple's M-series advantage primarily comes from the relatively large memory bandwidth due to it's unified memory architecture. Of course, it also has a very low performance-per-watt, comparatively speaking.
- FullyFunctional 3y ago
  That's WAY-oversimplifying it. There are so many compromises and design choices and not just "One Cool Trick". Generally speaking the M-series traded frequency for IPC by going for wider and much deeper reorder window. This is easier to do with Aarch64 than x86 and generally is more power efficient (but always the devil is in the details). The higher memory bandwidth doesn't do anything for ST perf.
- ksec 3y ago
  >Of course, it also has a very low performance-per-watt, comparatively speaking. It has the highest performance per Watt.
Mathnerd314 3y ago
There is a cinebench score leak, 15% increase multicore https://youtu.be/0ok_Ik3YqS0?t=407 https://youtu.be/0ok_Ik3YqS0?t=407, backed up by AMD slides https://youtu.be/ueXUoRw5LZk?t=849 https://youtu.be/ueXUoRw5LZk?t=849. It could be more after fine-tuning and stuff. Also https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/zen-5-discussion-epyc-turin-and-strix-point-granite-ridge-ryzen-8000.2607350/post-41158930 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/zen-5-discussion-epyc-t... says 40% increase single-core - even the poster says it seems absurdly high, but MLID says there are big improvements in AVX (which Cinebench tests), so likely it doesn't translate to other benchmarks.
sliken 3y ago
The perf/watt advantages of Apple's M1 series are quite a bit better than you'd expect from the process advantages. With that said the competition is gaining, a couple hope to match Perf and perf/watt of the M3. Some even mention the M3 pro. None mention the M3 max.

lp4vn 3y ago

Can someone explain to me how Apple managed to come from nowhere with a chip(M Series) that's competitive with the best chips from two companies(AMD and Intel) that have operated for decades exclusively in this field? Shouldn't AMD and Intel have an expertise that ideally would take decades and billions to be reached?

wmf 3y ago
It wasn't nowhere. M1 was based on A14. It's called A14 because it's the 14th generation Apple Silicon chip (although the early generations were designed by Samsung so maybe it's Apple's 10th generation chip design).
wredue 3y ago
You’re just seeing generalized platforms with history cruft vs walled garden controlled platforms. A program built for an intel and amd cpu 30 years ago runs today. That’s not true of M series.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  ARM64 and AMD64 are contemporaneous redesigns of the underlying architecture that got rid of a lot of cruft, so being ARM does not have an advantage there. One could argue that the more relaxed memory model of ARM gives a slight advantage, but that's a mixed bag. Even without that, all modern chips translate the ISA into internal ops, and that translation take such a miniscule fraction of chip area that ISA in 2024 has minimal effect on power and performance.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
By purchasing expertise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi This was the team that did the Digital Alpha & StrongARM.
- 486sx33 3y ago
  Thank you !
- FullyFunctional 3y ago
  and Montalvo, Intrincity, and probably more I don't know about. As always "the overnight success were years in the making".
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    And they've done so much hiring since the PASemi acquisition that probably every much CPU designed in the last 20 years is well represented on the Apple team.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Apple had been building its own mobile chips for a long time before releasing the m series. Their semi products absolutely did not come out of nowhere.
choilive 3y ago
Apple had a least a decade of experience designing chips for the iPhones/iPads etc. Oh and yes, they spent billions of $ on R&D for those as well.
steve1977 3y ago
In addition to what sibling comments already mentioned, also be aware that Apple was one of founding companies of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd (the company that became Arm Holdings plc), together Acorn Computers (which was the original A in ARM) and VLSI Technology. This was back in 1990. Before they switched to Intel x86, they were also involved in PowerPC, together with IBM and Motorola. So they are not coming from nowhere by any means.
Sakos 3y ago
In addition to the other points made here, it's well-known that Apple poached a lot of engineering talent from Intel and AMD.

wmf 3y ago

Yeah, it will be interesting to compare now that Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel are all on "4 nm" or "3 nm".

user_7832 3y ago

> Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now. Depending on what you're doing, modern AMD chips are very close to M series chips under load (specifically efficiency). The biggest issue is idle power is still higher. My amd framework (7840u) takes between 5-10watts idle unless I use something like the xtu tuner.

SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
5w cpu only? thats a lot. If whole laptop then ok.
- user_7832 3y ago
  It's for the entire laptop, but it fluctuates rapidly and is realistically closer to 6-8w. Disclaimer, I have a USB charger with voltage/current readouts so these values are from observing that when fully charged, though AMD adrenalin reports very similar results.
  - eisa01 3y ago
    Are there any comparisons to Intel? Are they better on idle? Need to purchase a new business laptop soon
    - ac29 3y ago
      My 5 year old intel laptop routinely idles under 5W. Was 2-3W total system power draw (reported by battery) when I looked before writing this comment. This is with a 14nm chip, one would think the newer systems could hopefully do at least this well.
      - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
        Intels historically have colder idle, except for some very specfic AMDs such 5700G, which are _really_ efficient at idle.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Apple will still have a massive bandwidth advantage.

Osiris 3y ago
This is due to it essentially having 6 channel memory versus 2 channel memory for AMD/Intel? I would definitely like to see if the x86 industry could figure out how to include more channels while also not requiring 6-8 DIMMS to take advantage of it, like Thread Ripper. Something like dual channel on a single DIMM?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  I imagine they'll get it the same way Apple has done it with M series and AMD has done with MI300; by putting the RAM in the same package as the CPU. Doing so will break AMD's promise of 3 years of compatibility for AM5, so the change will either happen with Zen6 or they'll release a new range of chips called something other than Ryzen and sell Zen5 versions of both Ryzen and this new range. Intel & AMD are leaving too much performance and profit on the table not to do so eventually; IMO it's more a matter of when rather than if.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    It'll be interesting to see where this happens. I have to hand it to Apple, it's bold that they have on-package RAM that's so wide. (And then doubling and quadrupling whole core complex with tiling is a stunning move; Pro and Max.) Apple shipped a huge range at all once: a very capable mobile chip to a very beastly workstation grade chip. Intel's most notable attempt to me was Lakefield (2019), a Mobile Internet Device (MID) class (sub-laptop) chip that I quite liked. The 1+4 architecture wasnt very fast and it was a bit more power intense than the Snapdragons of the day that it had a modest-to-significsnt lead over. But I loved that it was like this tiny tiny package that you basically just had to add power to, and the on-package LPDDR4X-4266 was a very speedy offering for 2019. Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake mobile was shown in January, rocking tiled (doesn't look like a stacked/3D Foveros setup) on package ram. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-shows-lunar-lake-chip-nextgen-mobile-cpu-uses-onpackage-memory https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-... But both AMD and Intel already have big on-package ram cores. Intel's been shipping a "Max" Sapphire Rapids with 64GB HBM2e for a year (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-rapids-fourth-gen-xeon-cpus-and-ponte-vecchio-max-gpu-series https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-ra...). Like Apple's Ultra, it's a quad-tile with each CPU having a it's own HBMe stack. AMD's MI300A is basically a GPU where some of the tiles are instead CPUs but it too has 8 stacks of HBM3. I keep asking myself how & when & where is on-package ram going to arrive in. But there's already significant HBM presence in big cores! It didn't seem to make an huge difference for Sapphire Rapids; some help but unless one uses the expensive accelerators well there s probably not enough core to use it. Meanwhile MI300 is only just happening & more API focused. We have yet for on package ram to really be meaningful & available & making a difference like it did for Apple. But as your post says, it feels like an inevitability. Someone's gonna make a core that can do more or be better by having lower powered faster local ram. Part of my suspicion is that the market is resisting de-segmentation. The real issue is that Apple used on package ram to add many channels. Not of slow wise HBM memory, but mamy channels of DDR ram. These companies don't actually want to compete on throughout; they want throughput to be associated with $10k exotic chips. They are lament to build higher bandwidth more-channel consumer cores. That starts to change some next year with AMD's Strix Halo, a big APU with quad-channel ram. There's no on-package ram as far as I've heard, but once you start having that much board real estate & energy going to ram, it sure would be nice to get even more performance for less power & much less space. Damn I love on package setups. 2024 doesn't seem likely to offer much new or exciting, but 2025 has some possible signs for hope.

diffeomorphism 3y ago

Don't we already know that from M2 vs the 7000 chips?

PedroBatista 3y ago

Not aware of those "lots of people", but all I can say it's the node advantage it's very real, at least it has been because TSMC hasn't really made any major mistakes in the last few years. But real performance improvements post M1 didn't really match expectations. IMO the expectations Apple stated/implied in their usual marketing incantations are partly to blame, but they were the ones pumping the hype, so it's completely fair to charge them for that. Compute performance improvements of ~30% are OK and in line with everybody else, meaning they are dealing with the same reality as other companies, hence the "let down"

caycep 3y ago
Ignoring the fact that while doing that, there also happens to be a near 4090-level GPU and NPU and integrated memory on the M series chips on a die of approximately the same size...
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  [flagged]
- xcv123 3y ago
  RTX 4090 has more than double the performance of the M2 Ultra https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/ https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd...
  - techie128 3y ago
    You're comparing a 600W system (450W TDP GPU + 150W TDP Intel Core i9-13900KS) with a 90W chip (CPU, GPU & NPU combined). You don't see anything remotely problematic with that comparison?
    - caycep 3y ago
      yeah, basically I think perspective is important to point out, when people are promoting the narrative "AMD has caught up to M1" but ignoring the fact it's not an Apples to Apples comparison. I'm sure 4090 can play cyberpunk with more FPS. And sure, I think the M series CPUs can eke out more single core performance if they devoted all 140 m2 of the die to CPU. But that's not what the M series chips are. Also, there's benchmarks like these: https://owehrens.com/whisper-nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-m1pro-with-mlx/ https://owehrens.com/whisper-nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-m1pro-with-m...

runjake 3y ago

What I've interpreted from the consensus is that Apple's M-series advantage primarily comes from the relatively large memory bandwidth due to it's unified memory architecture. Of course, it also has a very low performance-per-watt, comparatively speaking.

FullyFunctional 3y ago
That's WAY-oversimplifying it. There are so many compromises and design choices and not just "One Cool Trick". Generally speaking the M-series traded frequency for IPC by going for wider and much deeper reorder window. This is easier to do with Aarch64 than x86 and generally is more power efficient (but always the devil is in the details). The higher memory bandwidth doesn't do anything for ST perf.
ksec 3y ago
>Of course, it also has a very low performance-per-watt, comparatively speaking. It has the highest performance per Watt.

Mathnerd314 3y ago

There is a cinebench score leak, 15% increase multicore https://youtu.be/0ok_Ik3YqS0?t=407 https://youtu.be/0ok_Ik3YqS0?t=407, backed up by AMD slides https://youtu.be/ueXUoRw5LZk?t=849 https://youtu.be/ueXUoRw5LZk?t=849. It could be more after fine-tuning and stuff. Also https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/zen-5-discussion-epyc-turin-and-strix-point-granite-ridge-ryzen-8000.2607350/post-41158930 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/zen-5-discussion-epyc-t... says 40% increase single-core - even the poster says it seems absurdly high, but MLID says there are big improvements in AVX (which Cinebench tests), so likely it doesn't translate to other benchmarks.

sliken 3y ago

The perf/watt advantages of Apple's M1 series are quite a bit better than you'd expect from the process advantages. With that said the competition is gaining, a couple hope to match Perf and perf/watt of the M3. Some even mention the M3 pro. None mention the M3 max.