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Apple is slightly pulling away. AMD's top desktop chips were on par with M1/M2/M3 1T but now they cannot match even M4 despite releasing a new design (Zen 5) th

Apple is slightly pulling away. AMD's top desktop chips were on par with M1/M2/M3 1T but now they cannot match even M4 despite releasing a new design (Zen 5) this year. It's partially because AMD is on a two year cadence while Apple is on approximately a yearly cadence. And AMD has no plans to increase the cadence of their Zen releases. 2020 - M1, Zen 3 2021 - ... 2022 - M2, Zen 4 2023 - M3 2024 - M4, Zen 5 Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close.

rbanffy 2y ago
> Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close. Indeed. Anything that approaches Apple performance does so at a much higher power consumption. Which is no biggie for a large-ish desktop (I often recommend getting middle-of-the-road tower servers for workstations).
- MBCook 2y ago
  Don’t thermals basically explode non-linearly with speed? It’s possible Apple’s chips could be dramatically faster if they were willing to use up 300W. I remember seeing an anecdote where Johny Srouji, the chief Apple Silicon designer, said something like the efficiency cores get 90% of the performance of the performance cores at like 10% of the power. I don’t remember the exact numbers but it was staggering. While the single core wouldn’t be as high, it sounded as if they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I’m now imagining an “M4 Hot” for the next MacPro with an Intel Xeon W power budget. > they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power. Intel and AMD did that with their latest data-center chips to compete with Ampere and AWS’s Graviton. I’d love to build a workstation out of one such beast.
    - MBCook 2y ago
      Yeah it makes a lot of sense for servers. For normal desktop/laptop users who don’t need much parallelism it would just be wasted silicon.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        > For normal desktop/laptop users NEVER call me that ;-)!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kuschku 2y ago
Well, the two major factors for the quality of a CPU are the node its made on and the architecture. If you want to evaluate the quality of two different architectures, you should be comparing samples on the same fab node. M1 and Zen 4 were on the same node, and M3 and Zen 5 are on the same node. In both cases they're within spitting distance of one another. The majority of Apple's advantage is just Apple paying for early access to TSMC's newest node.

rbanffy 2y ago

> Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close. Indeed. Anything that approaches Apple performance does so at a much higher power consumption. Which is no biggie for a large-ish desktop (I often recommend getting middle-of-the-road tower servers for workstations).

MBCook 2y ago
Don’t thermals basically explode non-linearly with speed? It’s possible Apple’s chips could be dramatically faster if they were willing to use up 300W. I remember seeing an anecdote where Johny Srouji, the chief Apple Silicon designer, said something like the efficiency cores get 90% of the performance of the performance cores at like 10% of the power. I don’t remember the exact numbers but it was staggering. While the single core wouldn’t be as high, it sounded as if they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I’m now imagining an “M4 Hot” for the next MacPro with an Intel Xeon W power budget. > they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power. Intel and AMD did that with their latest data-center chips to compete with Ampere and AWS’s Graviton. I’d love to build a workstation out of one such beast.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    Yeah it makes a lot of sense for servers. For normal desktop/laptop users who don’t need much parallelism it would just be wasted silicon.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > For normal desktop/laptop users NEVER call me that ;-)!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kuschku 2y ago

Well, the two major factors for the quality of a CPU are the node its made on and the architecture. If you want to evaluate the quality of two different architectures, you should be comparing samples on the same fab node. M1 and Zen 4 were on the same node, and M3 and Zen 5 are on the same node. In both cases they're within spitting distance of one another. The majority of Apple's advantage is just Apple paying for early access to TSMC's newest node.