4 ms·

Even compared to other ARM cores, Apple is in a league of its own.

• jsheard 2y ago
  They have a good silicon design team, but having so much money that they can just buy out exclusive access to TSMCs most advanced processes doesn't hurt either. The closest ARM competitor to the M4, the Snapdragon X Elite, is a full node behind on 4nm while Apple is already using 2nd generation 3nm.
  • nottorp 2y ago
    So then it should be comparable to the M1 or M2? Which isn't bad at all, if true. But is it, for the same power consumption?
    • philistine 2y ago
      For some benchmarks the Snapdragon is on par with the M3. But the weirdo tests I found online did not say which device they compared, since the M3 is available in fan-less machines, which limits its potential.
• tempest_ 2y ago
  Outside of Ampere(who are really more server focused) who else is designing desktop/laptop ARM cpus?
  • ttul 2y ago
    That’s a really fair point. I think it’s tough for anyone else to break into the consumer / desktop segment with ARM chips. Apple can do it because they control the whole stack.
  • wmf 2y ago
    Qualcomm and Nvidia.
    • dagmx 2y ago
      NVIDIA don’t have custom cores
      • wmf 2y ago
        What if I told you they don't need them.
        • dagmx 2y ago
          What if I told you that the rest of the context was about custom cores.
• IshKebab 2y ago
  They also have the advantage that they could break software compatibility with the M1, e.g. using 16 kB pages and 128 byte cache blocks.
  • dagmx 2y ago
    They do mixed page mode depending on the program running.