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Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. AMD is coming out with Strix Halo soon with a 256bit memory

Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. AMD is coming out with Strix Halo soon with a 256bit memory bus, on the high end we're also seen the niche ampere platform running Arm CPUs with 576-bit buses. PS5 uses a 256-bit bus and Series X a 320-bit bus, but they're using GDDR instead of DDR which increases costs and latency to optimise for bandwidth but there's no reason you couldn't design a laptop or steam deck that did the same thing. AMD has their MI300X which is using 192gb HBM3 over a 8192-bit bus. I don't think it's just apple going this way, and I do think that more and more of the market is going to be using this unified approach instead of the approach of having a processor and coprocessor separated over a tiny PCIe bus with separate DDR/GDDR memory pools. With portable devices especially, more and more every year I struggle to see how the architecture is justified when I see the battery life benefits of ridding yourself of all this extra hardware. LLM inferencing also creates a nice incentive to go APU because the dual processor architecture tends to result in excessive bandwidth and anemic capacity. Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. PCs with a discrete CPU and separate Nvidia GPUs have become a relatively smaller slice of the market despite that market segment having grown and Nvidia having a stranglehold upon it. The average game developed is not developed to run on a separate CPU and GPU monster beast - they're designed to run on a phone APU - and something like a Max processor is much more powerful than required to run the average game coming out.

resource_waste 2y ago
>Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. Wat This is like extremely incorrect. Its Nvidia. Yikes, your technoblabble at the start seemed like smart people talk but the meat and potatoes is off base.
- ProfessorLayton 2y ago
  Is it incorrect though? Mobile alone is 85B of the 165B market [1], not to mention that Nintendo's Switch is basically an android tablet with a mobile chipset. [1] https://helplama.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/history-of-gaming-industry.png https://helplama.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/history-of-g...
  - sudosysgen 2y ago
    To be fair, an Nvidia mobile chipset. Also, much of mobile gaming isn't exactly pushing the envelope of graphics, especially by revenue.
  - resource_waste 2y ago
    Yes, we arent using mobile gaming as an indicator of GPU growth/performance. This seems like some way to be like 'Well tecknicaklly', to justify some absurd argument that doesnt matter to anyone.
    - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
      >Yes, we arent using mobile gaming as an indicator of GPU growth/performance. Who's "we" because big tech has absolutely been touting GPU gains in their products for a long time now [1], driven by gaming. Top of the line iPhones can do raytracing now, and are getting AAA ports like Resident Evil. In what world is being over half of a 185B industry a technicality?. A lot of these advancements on mobile end up trickling up to their laptop/desktop counterparts (See Apple's M-series), which matters to non-mobile gamers as well. Advancements that wouldn't have happened if the money wasn't there. [1] https://crucialtangent.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/iphone5s-gpu-chart.png https://crucialtangent.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/iphone5s-...
kllrnohj 2y ago
> Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. It's very expensive to have a bus that wide, which is why it's so rarely done. Desktop GPUs have done it in the past ( https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?buswidth=512%20bit&sort=name https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?buswidth=512%20bit&so... ), but they all keep pulling back from it because it's too expensive. Apple can do it because they can just pay for it and know they can charge for it, they aren't really competing with anyone. But the M3 Max is also a stonking huge chip - at 92bn transistors it's significantly bigger than the RTX 4090 (76bn transistors). Was a 512-bit bus really a good use of those transistors? Probably not. Will others do it? Probably also no, they need to be more efficient on silicon usage. Especially as node shrinks provide less & less benefit yet cost increasingly more.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  512-bit is probably a bit extreme, but I can see 192-bit and 256-bit becoming more popular. At the end of the day, if you have a high-end APU, having a 128-bit bus is probably THE bottleneck to performance. It's not clear to me that it makes sense or costs any less to have two 128-bit buses on two different chips which you see on a lot of gaming laptops instead of a single 256-bit bus on one chip for the midrange market. M3 pro only used a mere 37 billion transistors with a 192-bit bus, so you can get wider than 128-bit while being economical about it. I'd love for there to be a 512-bit Strix Halo but it probably won't happen, it probably does not make business sense. I don't know if the comparison to GPUs necessarily tracks here because the price floor of having 8 chips of GDDR is a lot higher than having 8 chips of DDR.
  - nsteel 2y ago
    But isn't that GDDR option something like 3-4x the bandwidth? So you'd fit far fewer chips to hit the same bandwidth.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    Sure, which is why you see other midrange APUs use >128-bit buses, eg PS4 & PS5 are both 256-bit buses w/ GDDR. Similarly, ultra high end APUs like the Xeon Max are doing on-package HBM for truly monstrous memory bandwidth numbers. The thing is that nobody else is really trying to make anything like an M3 Pro, and I don't know if they even will. It's a really weird product. Big dies are expensive, hence everyone pushing towards chiplets. A really great spot to split up dies is between compute units that are largely independent - which the CPU & GPU actually are. There's a few workloads where unified memory helps, but most don't. So splitting those apart makes a ton of sense still. Then also if you push them hard to squeeze out all the performance you can, they both get very hot - so you want them physically far apart for cooling reasons. At which point you might as well just give them their own memory which can also be further specialized for their respective needs as one is latency biased and the other bandwidth biased. And now you're just back to traditional desktop architecture - it still makes just way too much sense for the high end. It makes sense for Apple since they focus almost exclusively on laptops and you get exactly the single mix of CPU & GPU they decide, just like it does for consoles where again they have a midrange power budget & a single CPU/GPU configuration over millions of units. But as soon as different product specializations show up and different workload demands are catered to, coupling the CPU & GPU like that kinda doesn't make sense?
talldayo 2y ago
> Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. They really don't? You're trying quite hard to conflate casual gaming with console and PC markets, but they obviously have very little overlap. Games that release for Nvidia and AMD systems almost never turn around and port themselves to Apple or Snapdragon platforms. I'd imagine the people calling themselves gamers aren't referring to their Candy Crush streak on iPhone. > something like a Max processor is much more powerful than required to run the average game coming out. ...well, yeah. And then the laptop 4080 is some 2 times faster than that: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  I mean I see tons of shooters (PubG, Fortnite, CoD, etc) and RPGs (Hoyaverse) seeing both mobile and PC releases and they're running on the same engine under the hood. I'm even seeing a few indie games being cross platform. Of course some games simply don't work across platforms due to input or screen size limitations, but Unity/Unreal are more than 3/4s of the market and can enable a release on every platform so why not do a cross-platform release if it's viable? I just see the distinction you're drawing as being arbitrary and old-fashioned and misses the huge rise of midcore gaming which is seeing tons of mobile/console/pc releases. I understand that a TRUE gamer would not be caught dead playing such games, but as more and more people end up buying APU based laptops to play their hoyaverse games, that's going to warp the market and cause the oppressed minority of TRUE gamers to buy the same products due to economies of scale.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    I don't even think it's a "true gamer" thing either. Besides Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 8, there are pretty much no examples of modern AAA titles getting ported to Mac and iPhone. The console/PC release cycle is just different. Some stuff is cross-platform (particularly when Apple goes out of their way to negotiate with the publisher), but most stuff is not. It's not even a Steam Deck situation where Apple is working to support games regardless; they simply don't care. Additionally, the majority of these cross-platform releases aren't quality experiences but gatcha games, gambling apps and subscription services. You're not wrong to perceive mobile gaming as a high-value market, but it's on a completely different level from other platforms regardless. If you watch a console/PC gaming showcase nowadays, you'd be lucky to find even a single game that is supported on iOS and Android. > so why not do a cross-platform release if it's viable? Some companies do; Valve famously went through a lot of work porting their games to MacOS, before Apple depreciated the graphics API they used and cut off 32-bit library support. By the looks of it, Valve and many others just shrug and ignore Apple's update treadmill altogether. There's no shortage of iOS games I played on my first-gen iPod that are flat-out depreciated on today's hardware. Meanwhile the games I bought on Steam in 2011 still run just fine today.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>The average game developed is not developed to run on a separate CPU and GPU monster beast - they're designed to run on a phone APU I love how performant mobile games are on desktop/laptop hardware assuming good ports, Star Rail and Princess Connect! Re:Dive for some examples. This will probably go away once mobile hardware gets so powerful there's no requirement for devs to be efficient with their resource usage, as has happened with desktop/laptop software, but god damnit I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

resource_waste 2y ago

>Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. Wat This is like extremely incorrect. Its Nvidia. Yikes, your technoblabble at the start seemed like smart people talk but the meat and potatoes is off base.

ProfessorLayton 2y ago
Is it incorrect though? Mobile alone is 85B of the 165B market [1], not to mention that Nintendo's Switch is basically an android tablet with a mobile chipset. [1] https://helplama.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/history-of-gaming-industry.png https://helplama.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/history-of-g...
- sudosysgen 2y ago
  To be fair, an Nvidia mobile chipset. Also, much of mobile gaming isn't exactly pushing the envelope of graphics, especially by revenue.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  Yes, we arent using mobile gaming as an indicator of GPU growth/performance. This seems like some way to be like 'Well tecknicaklly', to justify some absurd argument that doesnt matter to anyone.
  - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
    >Yes, we arent using mobile gaming as an indicator of GPU growth/performance. Who's "we" because big tech has absolutely been touting GPU gains in their products for a long time now [1], driven by gaming. Top of the line iPhones can do raytracing now, and are getting AAA ports like Resident Evil. In what world is being over half of a 185B industry a technicality?. A lot of these advancements on mobile end up trickling up to their laptop/desktop counterparts (See Apple's M-series), which matters to non-mobile gamers as well. Advancements that wouldn't have happened if the money wasn't there. [1] https://crucialtangent.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/iphone5s-gpu-chart.png https://crucialtangent.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/iphone5s-...

kllrnohj 2y ago

> Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. It's very expensive to have a bus that wide, which is why it's so rarely done. Desktop GPUs have done it in the past ( https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?buswidth=512%20bit&sort=name https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?buswidth=512%20bit&so... ), but they all keep pulling back from it because it's too expensive. Apple can do it because they can just pay for it and know they can charge for it, they aren't really competing with anyone. But the M3 Max is also a stonking huge chip - at 92bn transistors it's significantly bigger than the RTX 4090 (76bn transistors). Was a 512-bit bus really a good use of those transistors? Probably not. Will others do it? Probably also no, they need to be more efficient on silicon usage. Especially as node shrinks provide less & less benefit yet cost increasingly more.

faeriechangling 2y ago
512-bit is probably a bit extreme, but I can see 192-bit and 256-bit becoming more popular. At the end of the day, if you have a high-end APU, having a 128-bit bus is probably THE bottleneck to performance. It's not clear to me that it makes sense or costs any less to have two 128-bit buses on two different chips which you see on a lot of gaming laptops instead of a single 256-bit bus on one chip for the midrange market. M3 pro only used a mere 37 billion transistors with a 192-bit bus, so you can get wider than 128-bit while being economical about it. I'd love for there to be a 512-bit Strix Halo but it probably won't happen, it probably does not make business sense. I don't know if the comparison to GPUs necessarily tracks here because the price floor of having 8 chips of GDDR is a lot higher than having 8 chips of DDR.
- nsteel 2y ago
  But isn't that GDDR option something like 3-4x the bandwidth? So you'd fit far fewer chips to hit the same bandwidth.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  Sure, which is why you see other midrange APUs use >128-bit buses, eg PS4 & PS5 are both 256-bit buses w/ GDDR. Similarly, ultra high end APUs like the Xeon Max are doing on-package HBM for truly monstrous memory bandwidth numbers. The thing is that nobody else is really trying to make anything like an M3 Pro, and I don't know if they even will. It's a really weird product. Big dies are expensive, hence everyone pushing towards chiplets. A really great spot to split up dies is between compute units that are largely independent - which the CPU & GPU actually are. There's a few workloads where unified memory helps, but most don't. So splitting those apart makes a ton of sense still. Then also if you push them hard to squeeze out all the performance you can, they both get very hot - so you want them physically far apart for cooling reasons. At which point you might as well just give them their own memory which can also be further specialized for their respective needs as one is latency biased and the other bandwidth biased. And now you're just back to traditional desktop architecture - it still makes just way too much sense for the high end. It makes sense for Apple since they focus almost exclusively on laptops and you get exactly the single mix of CPU & GPU they decide, just like it does for consoles where again they have a midrange power budget & a single CPU/GPU configuration over millions of units. But as soon as different product specializations show up and different workload demands are catered to, coupling the CPU & GPU like that kinda doesn't make sense?

talldayo 2y ago

> Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. They really don't? You're trying quite hard to conflate casual gaming with console and PC markets, but they obviously have very little overlap. Games that release for Nvidia and AMD systems almost never turn around and port themselves to Apple or Snapdragon platforms. I'd imagine the people calling themselves gamers aren't referring to their Candy Crush streak on iPhone. > something like a Max processor is much more powerful than required to run the average game coming out. ...well, yeah. And then the laptop 4080 is some 2 times faster than that: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

faeriechangling 2y ago
I mean I see tons of shooters (PubG, Fortnite, CoD, etc) and RPGs (Hoyaverse) seeing both mobile and PC releases and they're running on the same engine under the hood. I'm even seeing a few indie games being cross platform. Of course some games simply don't work across platforms due to input or screen size limitations, but Unity/Unreal are more than 3/4s of the market and can enable a release on every platform so why not do a cross-platform release if it's viable? I just see the distinction you're drawing as being arbitrary and old-fashioned and misses the huge rise of midcore gaming which is seeing tons of mobile/console/pc releases. I understand that a TRUE gamer would not be caught dead playing such games, but as more and more people end up buying APU based laptops to play their hoyaverse games, that's going to warp the market and cause the oppressed minority of TRUE gamers to buy the same products due to economies of scale.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I don't even think it's a "true gamer" thing either. Besides Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 8, there are pretty much no examples of modern AAA titles getting ported to Mac and iPhone. The console/PC release cycle is just different. Some stuff is cross-platform (particularly when Apple goes out of their way to negotiate with the publisher), but most stuff is not. It's not even a Steam Deck situation where Apple is working to support games regardless; they simply don't care. Additionally, the majority of these cross-platform releases aren't quality experiences but gatcha games, gambling apps and subscription services. You're not wrong to perceive mobile gaming as a high-value market, but it's on a completely different level from other platforms regardless. If you watch a console/PC gaming showcase nowadays, you'd be lucky to find even a single game that is supported on iOS and Android. > so why not do a cross-platform release if it's viable? Some companies do; Valve famously went through a lot of work porting their games to MacOS, before Apple depreciated the graphics API they used and cut off 32-bit library support. By the looks of it, Valve and many others just shrug and ignore Apple's update treadmill altogether. There's no shortage of iOS games I played on my first-gen iPod that are flat-out depreciated on today's hardware. Meanwhile the games I bought on Steam in 2011 still run just fine today.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>The average game developed is not developed to run on a separate CPU and GPU monster beast - they're designed to run on a phone APU I love how performant mobile games are on desktop/laptop hardware assuming good ports, Star Rail and Princess Connect! Re:Dive for some examples. This will probably go away once mobile hardware gets so powerful there's no requirement for devs to be efficient with their resource usage, as has happened with desktop/laptop software, but god damnit I'll enjoy it while it lasts.