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Before reading article: I would like to know if this architecture will help Linux close to Apple architecture efficiencies.... After reading article: I suddenl

Before reading article: I would like to know if this architecture will help Linux close to Apple architecture efficiencies.... After reading article: I suddenly realize that CPUs will probably no longer pursue making "traditional computing" any faster/efficient. Instead, everything will be focused on AI processing. There are absolutely no market/hype forces that will prompt the investment in "traditional" computing optimization anymore. I mean, yeah, there's probably three years of planning and execution inertia, but any push to close the gap with Apple by ARM / AMD / Intel is probably dead, and Apple will probably stop innovating the M series.

Calwestjobs 1y ago
apple M4 vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. apple m4 vs AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 apple has to do something. im not sure intel cpus can have 196GB ram, or it is some mobile ram manufacturing limit, but i really want to have atleast 96GB in notebook, tablet.
- junon 1y ago
  Some Intel chips have a max of 192GiB. Others 4TiB. It depends on the chip, but there are definitely machines running terabytes of memory.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  M4 still has >2x better performance per watt than either of those chips. Of course they are pretty much ignoring desktop so they can’t really compete with AMD/Intel when power is not an issue but that’s not exactly new
  - guiriduro 1y ago
    Apple is ignoring desktop?
    - joshstrange 1y ago
      I guess that depends on your definition of “desktop”. What that really means (I think) is they aren’t using the power and cooling available to them in traditional desktop setups. The iMac and the Studio/Mini and yes, even the Mac Pro, are essentially just laptop designs in different cases. Yes, they (Studio/Pro) can run an Ultra variant (vs Max being the highest on the laptop lines) but the 2x Ultra chip so far has not materialized. Rumors say Apple has tried it but rather could get efficiencies to where they needed to be or ran into other problems connecting 2 Ultras to make a ???. The current Mac Pro would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad, it’s just “Mac Studio with expansion slots”. One would expect/hope that the Mac Pro would take advantage of the space in some way (other than just expansion slots, which most people have no use for aside from GPUs which the os can’t/won’t leverage IIRC).
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        I meant that Apple doesn’t really design or make desktop CPUs. Only oversized laptop ones (even if they are very good). Their most performant chip, the M3 Ultra is only a bit faster than the 14900k which you can gee for $400 these days.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    M4 has ">2x better performance per watt" than either Intel or AMD only in single-threaded applications or applications with only a small number of active threads, where the advantage of M4 is that it can reach the same or a higher speed at a lower clock frequency (i.e. the Apple cores have a higher IPC). For multithreaded applications, where all available threads are active, the advantage in performance per watt of Apple becomes much lower than "2x" and actually much lower than 1.5x, because it is determined mostly by the superior CMOS manufacturing process used by Apple and the influence of the CPU microarchitecture is small. While the big Apple cores have a much better IPC than the competition, i.e. they do more work per clock cycle so they can use lower clock frequencies, therefore lower supply voltages, when at most a few cores are active, the performance per die area of such big cores is modest. For a complete chip, the die area is limited, so the best multithreaded performance is obtained with cores that have maximum performance per area, so that more cores can be crammed in a given die area. The cores with maximum performance per area are cores with intermediate IPC, neither too low, nor too high, like ARM Cortex-X4, Intel Skymont or AMD Zen 5 compact. The latter core from AMD has a higher IPC, which would have led to a lower performance per area, but that is compensated by its wider vector execution units. Bigger cores like ARM Cortex-X925 and Intel Lion Cove have very poor performance per area.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      > where all available threads are active, the advantage in performance per watt of Apple becomes much lower Perhaps. But that’s an edge case, very few people run their laptop at 100% for any extended period of time.
- znpy 1y ago
  > but i really want to have atleast 96GB in notebook, tablet. in notebooks it's been possible for years. a friend of mine had 128gb (4x32gb ddr4) in his laptop about 4-6 years ago already. it was a dell precision workstation (2100 euros for the laptop alone, core i9 cpu, nothing fancy). Nowadays you can get 64gb individual ddr5 laptop ram sticks. as long as you can find a laptop with two ram sockets you can easily get 128b memory on laptops. regarding tablets... it's unlikely to be seen (<edit> in the near future</edit>). tablet OEMs tip their hats to the general consumer markets, where <=16gb ram is more than enough (and 96gb memory would cost more than the rest of the hardware for no real user/market/sales advantage)
- Etheryte 1y ago
  I think this largely misses the point. Power users, so most of the users on HN, are a niche market. Most people don't need a hundred gigs of RAM, they need their laptop to run Powerpoint and a browser smoothly and for the battery to last a long time. No other manufacturer is anywhere close to Apple in that segment as far as I'm concerned.
maz1b 1y ago
You think so? I posit that the deliverance of AI/ML (LLM/genAI) services and experiences are predicated upon "traditional computing" - so, there will be some level of improvement in this domain for at least quite some time longer.
tlb 1y ago
The 128- and 256-core ARM server chips (like from Ampere) are pushing server performance in interesting ways. They're economically viable now for trivially parallelizable things like web servers, but possibly game-changing if your problem can put that many general-purpose cores to work. The thing is, there aren't that many HPC applications for that level of parallelism that aren't better served by GPUs.
surajrmal 1y ago
It makes sense to focus. Efficiencies in CPU design are not going to see as large of an impact on user workloads as focused improvements on inference workloads. The average phone user will be happier for the longer battery life as the onslaught of ai workloads from software companies is likely not going to slow and battery life will be wrecked if nothing changes.

Calwestjobs 1y ago

apple M4 vs Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. apple m4 vs AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 apple has to do something. im not sure intel cpus can have 196GB ram, or it is some mobile ram manufacturing limit, but i really want to have atleast 96GB in notebook, tablet.

junon 1y ago
Some Intel chips have a max of 192GiB. Others 4TiB. It depends on the chip, but there are definitely machines running terabytes of memory.
wqaatwt 1y ago
M4 still has >2x better performance per watt than either of those chips. Of course they are pretty much ignoring desktop so they can’t really compete with AMD/Intel when power is not an issue but that’s not exactly new
- guiriduro 1y ago
  Apple is ignoring desktop?
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    I guess that depends on your definition of “desktop”. What that really means (I think) is they aren’t using the power and cooling available to them in traditional desktop setups. The iMac and the Studio/Mini and yes, even the Mac Pro, are essentially just laptop designs in different cases. Yes, they (Studio/Pro) can run an Ultra variant (vs Max being the highest on the laptop lines) but the 2x Ultra chip so far has not materialized. Rumors say Apple has tried it but rather could get efficiencies to where they needed to be or ran into other problems connecting 2 Ultras to make a ???. The current Mac Pro would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad, it’s just “Mac Studio with expansion slots”. One would expect/hope that the Mac Pro would take advantage of the space in some way (other than just expansion slots, which most people have no use for aside from GPUs which the os can’t/won’t leverage IIRC).
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      I meant that Apple doesn’t really design or make desktop CPUs. Only oversized laptop ones (even if they are very good). Their most performant chip, the M3 Ultra is only a bit faster than the 14900k which you can gee for $400 these days.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  M4 has ">2x better performance per watt" than either Intel or AMD only in single-threaded applications or applications with only a small number of active threads, where the advantage of M4 is that it can reach the same or a higher speed at a lower clock frequency (i.e. the Apple cores have a higher IPC). For multithreaded applications, where all available threads are active, the advantage in performance per watt of Apple becomes much lower than "2x" and actually much lower than 1.5x, because it is determined mostly by the superior CMOS manufacturing process used by Apple and the influence of the CPU microarchitecture is small. While the big Apple cores have a much better IPC than the competition, i.e. they do more work per clock cycle so they can use lower clock frequencies, therefore lower supply voltages, when at most a few cores are active, the performance per die area of such big cores is modest. For a complete chip, the die area is limited, so the best multithreaded performance is obtained with cores that have maximum performance per area, so that more cores can be crammed in a given die area. The cores with maximum performance per area are cores with intermediate IPC, neither too low, nor too high, like ARM Cortex-X4, Intel Skymont or AMD Zen 5 compact. The latter core from AMD has a higher IPC, which would have led to a lower performance per area, but that is compensated by its wider vector execution units. Bigger cores like ARM Cortex-X925 and Intel Lion Cove have very poor performance per area.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    > where all available threads are active, the advantage in performance per watt of Apple becomes much lower Perhaps. But that’s an edge case, very few people run their laptop at 100% for any extended period of time.
znpy 1y ago
> but i really want to have atleast 96GB in notebook, tablet. in notebooks it's been possible for years. a friend of mine had 128gb (4x32gb ddr4) in his laptop about 4-6 years ago already. it was a dell precision workstation (2100 euros for the laptop alone, core i9 cpu, nothing fancy). Nowadays you can get 64gb individual ddr5 laptop ram sticks. as long as you can find a laptop with two ram sockets you can easily get 128b memory on laptops. regarding tablets... it's unlikely to be seen (<edit> in the near future</edit>). tablet OEMs tip their hats to the general consumer markets, where <=16gb ram is more than enough (and 96gb memory would cost more than the rest of the hardware for no real user/market/sales advantage)
Etheryte 1y ago
I think this largely misses the point. Power users, so most of the users on HN, are a niche market. Most people don't need a hundred gigs of RAM, they need their laptop to run Powerpoint and a browser smoothly and for the battery to last a long time. No other manufacturer is anywhere close to Apple in that segment as far as I'm concerned.

maz1b 1y ago

You think so? I posit that the deliverance of AI/ML (LLM/genAI) services and experiences are predicated upon "traditional computing" - so, there will be some level of improvement in this domain for at least quite some time longer.

tlb 1y ago

The 128- and 256-core ARM server chips (like from Ampere) are pushing server performance in interesting ways. They're economically viable now for trivially parallelizable things like web servers, but possibly game-changing if your problem can put that many general-purpose cores to work. The thing is, there aren't that many HPC applications for that level of parallelism that aren't better served by GPUs.

surajrmal 1y ago

It makes sense to focus. Efficiencies in CPU design are not going to see as large of an impact on user workloads as focused improvements on inference workloads. The average phone user will be happier for the longer battery life as the onslaught of ai workloads from software companies is likely not going to slow and battery life will be wrecked if nothing changes.