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The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has los

The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet without cooling. I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient consumer chips, years after the M1.

paulmd 2y ago
It comes from the idea that apple didn’t advance significantly in M2 and M3, which are equally untrue, but equally pervasive. People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS… Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead. https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708 But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys. It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
stefan_ 2y ago
I don't understand what prompted you to bring up the M4 in a meticulously researched deep-dive on the Oryon architecture. The original article doesn't mention it once. Is this just flame bait?
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Thank you for saying it out loud. 100%. Seen a handful of very strange top comments this week that you usually wouldn't see on HN, I assume because of the holidays. i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversation.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    The ecosystem rewards it.
  - ksec 2y ago
    Also partly because it is hardware related. HN's hardware discussion has always been far worse than other tech site. And also why people should use the downvote button more often on post that shouldn't be sitting at the top.
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago
  The article does reference firestorm cores like those in M series chips. It’s also an obvious comparison, because the Oryon is the only other desktop class ARM chip not designed by ARM the company. This chip is what Microsoft will try to use to compete with M series chips of which the latest is the M4. Seems like the obvious competition
refulgentis 2y ago
> I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. I think...you? I read the article in full a few hours ago and didn't see anything like that. I skimmed it again, and also gave it a go of grepping TFA "lost", "talent" "trouble": 0 results (Chrome, command F).
m463 2y ago
if you tried to say "Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient chips" instead of qualifying it with "consumer" who would you be cutting out? I think "consumer" literally means people who consume things, instead of people who create things. Before detouring into "content creators", people who create things are frequently engineers and scientists, who apple does not target. Unfortunately, I think apple doesn't do general purpose computing. sigh.
ksec 2y ago
The article doesn't even mentioned M4. Dont know why you are bringing this up. Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most. They did't lost it all at the same time either. Many of them have been working on M2 and M3, some later ones may be on M4 before they left. Apple has a node advantage, which is in itself a separate discussion. This article is straightly about IPC. We didn't even go into Die Size and cost analysis.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most. Did you read this somewhere? I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find anything. Or do you have an inside source? The last that I knew/read, Johny Srouji was the key senior executive in the Apple CPU division. It looks like they continue to expand his R&D labs in Israel (according to a Wiki source). Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji
  - ksec 2y ago
    It is no secret that some of the chip design team left over the years. From the Nuvia / Qualcomm Oryon team to a few RISC-V CPU design IP companies has many ex-Apple design team. And this is specific to CPU only. There are many other moving parts in the whole SoC design. Which yes Apple is also expanding. Basically some media make a big deal out of some people left the Apple's CPU design.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      Like I said, I could not find any of your "some media". And what makes you think that Apple cannot attract (buy) replacement talent?
Sakos 2y ago
I think people generally expected larger improvements between iterations. Intel and AMD continue to deliver sizeable performance and efficiency gains every 1-2 years while it feels like the Apple M-series isn't getting comparable gains. It definitely seems like Apple has suffered significant enough brain drain in recent years that they're finding it difficult to iterate on the M1.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Hasn't each gen been like 20-30% performance? Isn't that better than what AMD and Intel have managed?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    20-30% per year may (I'm not sure) be better than what AMD and Intel have managed since the M1 came out, but it's definitely not as good as the 40-60% per year improvements that I remember when I was a kid. I'm anchored on those historical performance gains, so I'm naturally (and, I recognise, unreasonably) disappointed by "only" 20-30% improvements from Apple.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Not really? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/testing-apples-m3-pro-more-efficient-but-performance-is-a-step-sideways/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/testing-apples-m3-pr... I've been waiting for an upgrade to my M1 and I still haven't seen one worth spending that much money on. I'd rather just sink that into upgrading my Windows tower.
    - bhouston 2y ago
      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj3u1h7bSu4M8GMR9vC-mdgpo/edit?gid=0#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj... Single core performance went from 2300 with the M1 to 3800 with the M4. That is a huge improvement for my workflow (large TypeScript mono repositories) which is dependent a lot of single core performance (even with parallel builds, because one rarely re-builds everything, rather hot reloads.)
tedunangst 2y ago
You're only allowed to be the darling for one year or so. Then you suck again.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  So true. On HN, 15 mins is the time to expiry.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, because it needs to be behind the restrictive iPad OS AppStore walled garden where only code blessed by Apple can run. Until it's put in a machine that can run Linux, it's more of a benchmarking flex than actually increasing productivity compared to previous M generations or the ARM/X86 competition that allows you to run any OS.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the-ipad https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- turtlebits 2y ago
  The fact that Apple put a fast chip in a limited device doesn't detract from their engineering ability.
- gumby 2y ago
  > Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both. That’s definitely worth it to me.
- entropicdrifter 2y ago
  Asahi Linux runs great on all of the M-series Macs
  - awesomepeter 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dagmx 2y ago
The idea that Apple lost their most important talent came from SemiAnalysis. It’s a saucy idea so it spread from there without much backing. They’re a tech news blog mixed with heavy doses of dramatized conjecture. The primary author has written multiple times that Apple has lost lots of their key talent but has never been able to back it up beyond “I keep tabs on LinkedIn”. End of the day, tech folks like drama as much as the next person. Sites like that are the equivalent to celebrity focused tabloids.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
> I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Why are you saying this? The article doesn't seem to imply that? Apple isn't in any kind of trouble. But the gap between Apple and the competition does appear to be closing. Right now Apple's biggest advantage is they buy up all of TSMC supply for the latest node. They're always a little faster because they're always a node ahead. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is reasonably impressive from a CPU and x86 emulation perspective. The GPU hardware seems kinda sorta ok. But their GPU drivers are dog poop. Which is why they suck for Windows gaming. I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year. That could get interesting fast. All hail competition!
- hajile 2y ago
  The first 4 minute mile was revolutionary. It’s not ordinary today, but isn’t super surprising either. Apple bet big that we hasn’t hit the limits of how wide a machine can go. They created ARM64 to push this idea as it tries to eliminate things that make this hard. Everyone wrote off iPhone performance as mobile only and not really representative of performance on a “real” computer. M1 changed that and set the clock ticking. Once everyone realized it was possible, they needed to adjust future plans and start work on their own copy (with companies like Nuvia having a head start in accepting the new way of things due to leadership who believed in M1 performance). In the next few years, very wide machines will just be the way things are done and while they won’t be hyper common, they won’t be surprising either.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM? Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible, it took Qualcomm several years to catch up with ARMs cores (hence the title...). They even had to buy another company to accomplish that.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
Derbasti 2y ago
And that's exactly why it's so cool to see this in the Surface tablets. ...he writes, on his Snapdragon Surface tablet. (Also, I find it hella entertaining that a snapdragon is a cute little flower, martial naming notwithstanding)

paulmd 2y ago

It comes from the idea that apple didn’t advance significantly in M2 and M3, which are equally untrue, but equally pervasive. People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS… Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead. https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708 https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708 But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys. It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

stefan_ 2y ago

I don't understand what prompted you to bring up the M4 in a meticulously researched deep-dive on the Oryon architecture. The original article doesn't mention it once. Is this just flame bait?

refulgentis 2y ago
Thank you for saying it out loud. 100%. Seen a handful of very strange top comments this week that you usually wouldn't see on HN, I assume because of the holidays. i.e. more practicing rhetoric than contributing content, and/or, leaning on rhetorical strategies to do a more traditional definition of trolling circa early 2000s Slashdot. i.e. generate tons of replies by introducing a tangent that'll generate conversation.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  The ecosystem rewards it.
- ksec 2y ago
  Also partly because it is hardware related. HN's hardware discussion has always been far worse than other tech site. And also why people should use the downvote button more often on post that shouldn't be sitting at the top.
MobiusHorizons 2y ago
The article does reference firestorm cores like those in M series chips. It’s also an obvious comparison, because the Oryon is the only other desktop class ARM chip not designed by ARM the company. This chip is what Microsoft will try to use to compete with M series chips of which the latest is the M4. Seems like the obvious competition

refulgentis 2y ago

> I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. I think...you? I read the article in full a few hours ago and didn't see anything like that. I skimmed it again, and also gave it a go of grepping TFA "lost", "talent" "trouble": 0 results (Chrome, command F).

m463 2y ago

if you tried to say "Apple still makes the world’s most advanced and efficient chips" instead of qualifying it with "consumer" who would you be cutting out? I think "consumer" literally means people who consume things, instead of people who create things. Before detouring into "content creators", people who create things are frequently engineers and scientists, who apple does not target. Unfortunately, I think apple doesn't do general purpose computing. sigh.

ksec 2y ago

The article doesn't even mentioned M4. Dont know why you are bringing this up. Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most. They did't lost it all at the same time either. Many of them have been working on M2 and M3, some later ones may be on M4 before they left. Apple has a node advantage, which is in itself a separate discussion. This article is straightly about IPC. We didn't even go into Die Size and cost analysis.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> Apple has lost some or many of their chip design talent. Not All or Most. Did you read this somewhere? I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find anything. Or do you have an inside source? The last that I knew/read, Johny Srouji was the key senior executive in the Apple CPU division. It looks like they continue to expand his R&D labs in Israel (according to a Wiki source). Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji
- ksec 2y ago
  It is no secret that some of the chip design team left over the years. From the Nuvia / Qualcomm Oryon team to a few RISC-V CPU design IP companies has many ex-Apple design team. And this is specific to CPU only. There are many other moving parts in the whole SoC design. Which yes Apple is also expanding. Basically some media make a big deal out of some people left the Apple's CPU design.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Like I said, I could not find any of your "some media". And what makes you think that Apple cannot attract (buy) replacement talent?

Sakos 2y ago

I think people generally expected larger improvements between iterations. Intel and AMD continue to deliver sizeable performance and efficiency gains every 1-2 years while it feels like the Apple M-series isn't getting comparable gains. It definitely seems like Apple has suffered significant enough brain drain in recent years that they're finding it difficult to iterate on the M1.

TylerE 2y ago
Hasn't each gen been like 20-30% performance? Isn't that better than what AMD and Intel have managed?
- ben_w 2y ago
  20-30% per year may (I'm not sure) be better than what AMD and Intel have managed since the M1 came out, but it's definitely not as good as the 40-60% per year improvements that I remember when I was a kid. I'm anchored on those historical performance gains, so I'm naturally (and, I recognise, unreasonably) disappointed by "only" 20-30% improvements from Apple.
- Sakos 2y ago
  Not really? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/testing-apples-m3-pro-more-efficient-but-performance-is-a-step-sideways/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/testing-apples-m3-pr... I've been waiting for an upgrade to my M1 and I still haven't seen one worth spending that much money on. I'd rather just sink that into upgrading my Windows tower.
  - bhouston 2y ago
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj3u1h7bSu4M8GMR9vC-mdgpo/edit?gid=0#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj... Single core performance went from 2300 with the M1 to 3800 with the M4. That is a huge improvement for my workflow (large TypeScript mono repositories) which is dependent a lot of single core performance (even with parallel builds, because one rarely re-builds everything, rather hot reloads.)

tedunangst 2y ago

You're only allowed to be the darling for one year or so. Then you suck again.

throwaway2037 2y ago
So true. On HN, 15 mins is the time to expiry.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>The M4 is the highest single core CPU in the world and it’s in a ridiculously thin tablet That's kind of the problem. The world's most powerful CPU is put in the world's most expensive and thinnest Netflix machine lol. Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? All that power and I can't use it to compile the Linux kernel, I can't use it to play the latest Steam/GOG games, or run CAD simulations, because it needs to be behind the restrictive iPad OS AppStore walled garden where only code blessed by Apple can run. Until it's put in a machine that can run Linux, it's more of a benchmarking flex than actually increasing productivity compared to previous M generations or the ARM/X86 competition that allows you to run any OS.

jjtheblunt 2y ago
https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the-ipad https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linux-on-the...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
turtlebits 2y ago
The fact that Apple put a fast chip in a limited device doesn't detract from their engineering ability.
gumby 2y ago
> Was the previous "thicker" M3 iPad holding anyone back? Since I carry a laptop and an ipad, the lighter the better (I use them for different things, and often in concert). That MacBook Air is so powerful and so light that I sometimes have to check my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten one or both. That’s definitely worth it to me.
entropicdrifter 2y ago
Asahi Linux runs great on all of the M-series Macs
- awesomepeter 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dagmx 2y ago

The idea that Apple lost their most important talent came from SemiAnalysis. It’s a saucy idea so it spread from there without much backing. They’re a tech news blog mixed with heavy doses of dramatized conjecture. The primary author has written multiple times that Apple has lost lots of their key talent but has never been able to back it up beyond “I keep tabs on LinkedIn”. End of the day, tech folks like drama as much as the next person. Sites like that are the equivalent to celebrity focused tabloids.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

> I don’t understand where this idea that Apple has lost most of their chip design talent and is in trouble rhetoric is coming from. Why are you saying this? The article doesn't seem to imply that? Apple isn't in any kind of trouble. But the gap between Apple and the competition does appear to be closing. Right now Apple's biggest advantage is they buy up all of TSMC supply for the latest node. They're always a little faster because they're always a node ahead. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is reasonably impressive from a CPU and x86 emulation perspective. The GPU hardware seems kinda sorta ok. But their GPU drivers are dog poop. Which is why they suck for Windows gaming. I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year. That could get interesting fast. All hail competition!

hajile 2y ago
The first 4 minute mile was revolutionary. It’s not ordinary today, but isn’t super surprising either. Apple bet big that we hasn’t hit the limits of how wide a machine can go. They created ARM64 to push this idea as it tries to eliminate things that make this hard. Everyone wrote off iPhone performance as mobile only and not really representative of performance on a “real” computer. M1 changed that and set the clock ticking. Once everyone realized it was possible, they needed to adjust future plans and start work on their own copy (with companies like Nuvia having a head start in accepting the new way of things due to leadership who believed in M1 performance). In the next few years, very wide machines will just be the way things are done and while they won’t be hyper common, they won’t be surprising either.
Wytwwww 2y ago
> I hope AMD and Nvidia start to release ARM SoC designs for laptops/desktops next year Or AMD / Intel could just make more power efficient x86 core? What would they gain by switching to ARM? Also developing a competitive ARM core in less than a year is pretty much impossible, it took Qualcomm several years to catch up with ARMs cores (hence the title...). They even had to buy another company to accomplish that.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago

Derbasti 2y ago

And that's exactly why it's so cool to see this in the Surface tablets. ...he writes, on his Snapdragon Surface tablet. (Also, I find it hella entertaining that a snapdragon is a cute little flower, martial naming notwithstanding)