4 ms·

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 Ma

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?

faeriechangling 2y ago
>The thing is that nobody else is really trying to make anything like an M3 Pro Well, AMD is indeed making their own M3 Pro, the Strix Halo. Which is going to achieve 4050/4060 performance in laptops that will again be cheaper and more power efficient for a lack of a Nvidia GPU. This is also a net addition to their lineup. AMD is a minority player in the laptop market, so it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to compete hard against Intel at every price segment, and they have clear competitive advantage and counter-positioning here against Intel/Nvidia/Apple.

faeriechangling 2y ago

>The thing is that nobody else is really trying to make anything like an M3 Pro Well, AMD is indeed making their own M3 Pro, the Strix Halo. Which is going to achieve 4050/4060 performance in laptops that will again be cheaper and more power efficient for a lack of a Nvidia GPU. This is also a net addition to their lineup. AMD is a minority player in the laptop market, so it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to compete hard against Intel at every price segment, and they have clear competitive advantage and counter-positioning here against Intel/Nvidia/Apple.