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An annoying thing people have done since Apple Silicon is claim that its advantages were due to Arm. No, not really. The advantage is Apple prioritizing effici

An annoying thing people have done since Apple Silicon is claim that its advantages were due to Arm. No, not really. The advantage is Apple prioritizing efficiency, something Intel never cared enough about.

wvenable 1y ago
By prioritizing efficiency, Apple also prioritizes integration. The PC ecosystem prefers less integration (separate RAM, GPU, OS, etc) even at the cost of efficiency.
- Panzer04 1y ago
  Eh, probably the biggest difference is in the OS. The amount of time Linux or Windows will spend using a processor while completely idle can be a bit offensive.
  - acdha 1y ago
    It’s all of the above. One thing Apple excels at is actually using their hardware and software together whereas the PC world has a long history of one of the companies like Intel, Microsoft, or the actual manufacturer trying to make things better but failing to get the others on-board. You can in 2025 find people who disable power management because they were burned (hopefully not literally) by some combination of vendors slacking on QA! One good example of this is RAM. Apple Silicon got some huge wins from lower latency and massive bandwidth, but that came at the cost of making RAM fixed and more expensive. A lot of PC users scoffed at the default RAM sizes until they actually used one and realized it was great at ~8GB less than the equivalent PC. That’s not magic or because Apple has some super elite programmers, it’s because they all work at the same company and nobody wants to go into Tim Cook’s office and say they blew the RAM budget and the new Macs need to cost $100 more. The hardware has compression support and the OS and app teams worked together to actually use it well, whereas it’s very easy to imagine Intel adding the feature but skimping on speed / driver stability, or Microsoft trying to implement it but delaying release for a couple years, or not working with third-party developers to optimize usage, etc. – nobody acting in bad faith but just what inevitably happens when everyone has different incentives.
    - p_ing 1y ago
      Windows 10 introduced memory compression. Here's a discussion from 2015 [0]. And one on Linux by IBM from 2013 [1]. But the history goes way back [2]. I don't know why that '8GiB is great!' -- no, no it isn't. Your memory usage just spills over to swap faster. It isn't more efficient (not with those 16KiB pages). [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/Seth-Juarez/Memory-Compression-in-Windows-10-RTM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/Seth-Juarez/Memory-C... [1] https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/tmc_sjennings_linuxcon2013.pdf https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#Ori...
      - achandlerwhite 1y ago
        He didn’t say 8 gigs is great but that you can get by with about 8 gigs less than equivalent on Windows.
      - tguvot 1y ago
        i think i had 20+ years ago servers with this https://www.eetimes.com/serverworks-rolls-out-chip-set-based-on-ibms-memory-compression-technology https://www.eetimes.com/serverworks-rolls-out-chip-set-based...
      - acdha 1y ago
        Yes, I'm aware that Windows has memory compression, so let's think about why it's less successful and Windows systems need more memory than Macs. The Apple version has a very high-performance hardware implementation versus Microsoft's software implementation (not a slam on Microsoft, they just have to support more hardware). The Apple designers can assume a higher performance baseline memory subsystem because, again, they're working with hardware designers at the same company who are equally committed to making the product succeed. The core Mac frameworks are optimized to reduce VM pressure and more Mac apps use the system frameworks, which means that you're paying the overhead tax less. Many Mac users use Safari instead of Chrome so they're saving multiple GB for an app which most people have open constantly as well as all of the apps which embed a WebKit view. Again, this is not magic, it's aligned incentives. Microsoft doesn't control Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm's product design, they can't force Google to make Chrome better, and they can't force every PC vendor not to skimp on hardware. They can and do work with those companies but it takes longer and in some cases the cost incentives are wrong – e.g. a PC vendor knows 99% of their buyers will blame Windows if they use slower RAM to save a few bucks or get paid to preload of McAfee which keeps the memory subsystem busy constantly so they take the deal which adds to their bottom line now.
- happycube 1y ago
  There's a critical instruction for Objective C handling (I forget exactly what it is) but it's faster than intel's chips even in Rosetta 2's x86 emulation.
  - wvenable 1y ago
    I believe it's the `lock xadd` instruction. It's faster when combined with x86 Total Store Ordering mode that the Rosetta emulation runs under.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Looking at objc_retain apparently it's a lock cmpxchg these days
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > By prioritizing efficiency, Apple also prioritizes integration. The PC ecosystem prefers less integration (separate RAM, GPU, OS, etc) even at the cost of efficiency. People always say this but "integration" has almost nothing to do with it. How do you lower the power consumption of your wireless radio? You have a network stack that queues non-latency sensitive transmissions to minimize radio wake-ups. But that's true for radios in general, not something that requires integration with any particular wireless chip. How do you lower the power consumption of your CPU? Remediate poorly written code that unnecessarily keeps the CPU in a high power state. Again not something that depends on a specific CPU. How much power is saved by soldering the memory or CPU instead of using a socket? A negligible amount if any; the socket itself has no significant power draw. What Apple does well isn't integration, it's choosing (or designing) components that are each independently power efficient, so that then the entire device is. Which you can perfectly well do in a market of fungible components simply by choosing the ones with high efficiency. In fact, a major problem in the Android and PC laptop market is that the devices are insufficiently fungible. You find a laptop you like where all the components are efficient except that it uses an Intel processor instead of the more efficient ones from AMD, but those components are all soldered to a system board that only takes Intel processors. Another model has the AMD APU but the OEM there chose poorly for the screen. It's a mess not because the integration is poor but because the integration exists instead of allowing you to easily swap out the part you don't like for a better one.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    > How much power is saved by soldering the memory or CPU instead of using a socket? A negligible amount if any; the socket itself has no significant power draw. This isn't quite true. When the whole chip is idling at 1-2W, 0.1W of socket power is 10%. Some of Apple's integration almost certainly save power (e.g. putting storage controllers for the SSD on the SOC, having tightly integrated display controllers, etc).
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > When the whole chip is idling at 1-2W, 0.1W of socket power is 10%. But how are you losing 10% of power to the socket at idle? Having a socket might require traces to be slightly longer but the losses to that are proportional to overall power consumption, not very large, and both CPU sockets and the new CAMM memory standard are specifically designed to avoid that anyway (primarily for latency rather than power reasons because the power difference is so trivial). > Some of Apple's integration almost certainly save power (e.g. putting storage controllers for the SSD on the SOC, having tightly integrated display controllers, etc). This isn't really integration and it's very nearly the opposite: The primary advantage here in terms of hardware is that the SoC is being fabbed on 3nm and then the storage controller would be too, which would be the same advantage if you would make an independent storage controller on the same process. Which is the problem with PCs again: The SSDs are too integrated. Instead of giving the OS raw access to the flash chips, they adhere a separate controller just to do error correction and block remapping, which could better be handled by the OS on the main CPU which is fabbed on a newer process or, in larger devices with a storage array, a RAID controller that performs the task for multiple drives at once. And which would you rather have, a dual-core ARM thing integrated with your SSD, or the same silicon going to two more E-cores on the main CPU which can do the storage work when there is any but can also run general purpose code when there isn't?
choilive 1y ago
In most cases, efficiency and performance are pretty synonymous for CPUs. The faster you can get work done (and turn off the silicon, which is admittedly a higher design priority for mobile CPUs) the more efficient you are. The level of talent Apple has cannot be understated, they have some true CPU design wizards. This level of efficiency cannot be achieved without making every aspect of the CPU as fast as possible; their implementation of the ARM ISA is incredible. Lots of companies make ARM chips, but none of them are Apple level performance. As a gross simplification, where the energy/performance tradeoff actually happens is after the design is basically baked. You crank up the voltage and clock speed to get more perf at the cost of efficiency.
- toast0 1y ago
  > In most cases, efficiency and performance are pretty synonymous for CPUs. The faster you can get work done (and turn off the silicon, which is admittedly a higher design priority for mobile CPUs) the more efficient you are. Somewhat yes, hurry up and wait can be more efficient than running slow the whole time. But at the top end of Intel/AMD performance, you pay a lot of watts to get a little performance. Apple doesn't offer that on their processors, and when they were using Intel processors, they didn't provide thermal support to run in that mode for very long either. The M series bakes in a lower clockspeed cap than contemperary intel/amd chips; you can't run in the clock regime where you spend a lot of watts and get a little bit more performance.
MindSpunk 1y ago
Apple also buys out basically all of TSMC's initial capacity for their leading edge node so generally every time a new Apple Silicon thing comes out it's a process node ahead of every other chip they're comparing to.
steve1977 1y ago
Also Apple has a ton of cash that it can give to TSMC to essentially get exclusive access to the latest manufacturing process.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Apple has a ton of cash that it can give to TSMC to essentially get exclusive access to the latest manufacturing process How have non-Apple chips on TSMC’s 5nm process compared with Apple’s M series?
cheema33 1y ago
> The advantage is Apple prioritizing efficiency, something Intel never cared enough about. Intel cared plenty once they realized that they were completely missing out on the mobile phone business. They even made X86/Atom chips for the phone market. Asus for example had some phones (Zenfone) with Intel X86 chips in them in the mid-2010s. However, Intel Atom suffered from poor power efficiency and battery life and soon died.

wvenable 1y ago

By prioritizing efficiency, Apple also prioritizes integration. The PC ecosystem prefers less integration (separate RAM, GPU, OS, etc) even at the cost of efficiency.

Panzer04 1y ago
Eh, probably the biggest difference is in the OS. The amount of time Linux or Windows will spend using a processor while completely idle can be a bit offensive.
- acdha 1y ago
  It’s all of the above. One thing Apple excels at is actually using their hardware and software together whereas the PC world has a long history of one of the companies like Intel, Microsoft, or the actual manufacturer trying to make things better but failing to get the others on-board. You can in 2025 find people who disable power management because they were burned (hopefully not literally) by some combination of vendors slacking on QA! One good example of this is RAM. Apple Silicon got some huge wins from lower latency and massive bandwidth, but that came at the cost of making RAM fixed and more expensive. A lot of PC users scoffed at the default RAM sizes until they actually used one and realized it was great at ~8GB less than the equivalent PC. That’s not magic or because Apple has some super elite programmers, it’s because they all work at the same company and nobody wants to go into Tim Cook’s office and say they blew the RAM budget and the new Macs need to cost $100 more. The hardware has compression support and the OS and app teams worked together to actually use it well, whereas it’s very easy to imagine Intel adding the feature but skimping on speed / driver stability, or Microsoft trying to implement it but delaying release for a couple years, or not working with third-party developers to optimize usage, etc. – nobody acting in bad faith but just what inevitably happens when everyone has different incentives.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    Windows 10 introduced memory compression. Here's a discussion from 2015 [0]. And one on Linux by IBM from 2013 [1]. But the history goes way back [2]. I don't know why that '8GiB is great!' -- no, no it isn't. Your memory usage just spills over to swap faster. It isn't more efficient (not with those 16KiB pages). [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/Seth-Juarez/Memory-Compression-in-Windows-10-RTM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/Seth-Juarez/Memory-C... [1] https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/tmc_sjennings_linuxcon2013.pdf https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#Ori...
    - achandlerwhite 1y ago
      He didn’t say 8 gigs is great but that you can get by with about 8 gigs less than equivalent on Windows.
    - tguvot 1y ago
      i think i had 20+ years ago servers with this https://www.eetimes.com/serverworks-rolls-out-chip-set-based-on-ibms-memory-compression-technology https://www.eetimes.com/serverworks-rolls-out-chip-set-based...
    - acdha 1y ago
      Yes, I'm aware that Windows has memory compression, so let's think about why it's less successful and Windows systems need more memory than Macs. The Apple version has a very high-performance hardware implementation versus Microsoft's software implementation (not a slam on Microsoft, they just have to support more hardware). The Apple designers can assume a higher performance baseline memory subsystem because, again, they're working with hardware designers at the same company who are equally committed to making the product succeed. The core Mac frameworks are optimized to reduce VM pressure and more Mac apps use the system frameworks, which means that you're paying the overhead tax less. Many Mac users use Safari instead of Chrome so they're saving multiple GB for an app which most people have open constantly as well as all of the apps which embed a WebKit view. Again, this is not magic, it's aligned incentives. Microsoft doesn't control Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm's product design, they can't force Google to make Chrome better, and they can't force every PC vendor not to skimp on hardware. They can and do work with those companies but it takes longer and in some cases the cost incentives are wrong – e.g. a PC vendor knows 99% of their buyers will blame Windows if they use slower RAM to save a few bucks or get paid to preload of McAfee which keeps the memory subsystem busy constantly so they take the deal which adds to their bottom line now.
happycube 1y ago
There's a critical instruction for Objective C handling (I forget exactly what it is) but it's faster than intel's chips even in Rosetta 2's x86 emulation.
- wvenable 1y ago
  I believe it's the `lock xadd` instruction. It's faster when combined with x86 Total Store Ordering mode that the Rosetta emulation runs under.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Looking at objc_retain apparently it's a lock cmpxchg these days
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> By prioritizing efficiency, Apple also prioritizes integration. The PC ecosystem prefers less integration (separate RAM, GPU, OS, etc) even at the cost of efficiency. People always say this but "integration" has almost nothing to do with it. How do you lower the power consumption of your wireless radio? You have a network stack that queues non-latency sensitive transmissions to minimize radio wake-ups. But that's true for radios in general, not something that requires integration with any particular wireless chip. How do you lower the power consumption of your CPU? Remediate poorly written code that unnecessarily keeps the CPU in a high power state. Again not something that depends on a specific CPU. How much power is saved by soldering the memory or CPU instead of using a socket? A negligible amount if any; the socket itself has no significant power draw. What Apple does well isn't integration, it's choosing (or designing) components that are each independently power efficient, so that then the entire device is. Which you can perfectly well do in a market of fungible components simply by choosing the ones with high efficiency. In fact, a major problem in the Android and PC laptop market is that the devices are insufficiently fungible. You find a laptop you like where all the components are efficient except that it uses an Intel processor instead of the more efficient ones from AMD, but those components are all soldered to a system board that only takes Intel processors. Another model has the AMD APU but the OEM there chose poorly for the screen. It's a mess not because the integration is poor but because the integration exists instead of allowing you to easily swap out the part you don't like for a better one.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  > How much power is saved by soldering the memory or CPU instead of using a socket? A negligible amount if any; the socket itself has no significant power draw. This isn't quite true. When the whole chip is idling at 1-2W, 0.1W of socket power is 10%. Some of Apple's integration almost certainly save power (e.g. putting storage controllers for the SSD on the SOC, having tightly integrated display controllers, etc).
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > When the whole chip is idling at 1-2W, 0.1W of socket power is 10%. But how are you losing 10% of power to the socket at idle? Having a socket might require traces to be slightly longer but the losses to that are proportional to overall power consumption, not very large, and both CPU sockets and the new CAMM memory standard are specifically designed to avoid that anyway (primarily for latency rather than power reasons because the power difference is so trivial). > Some of Apple's integration almost certainly save power (e.g. putting storage controllers for the SSD on the SOC, having tightly integrated display controllers, etc). This isn't really integration and it's very nearly the opposite: The primary advantage here in terms of hardware is that the SoC is being fabbed on 3nm and then the storage controller would be too, which would be the same advantage if you would make an independent storage controller on the same process. Which is the problem with PCs again: The SSDs are too integrated. Instead of giving the OS raw access to the flash chips, they adhere a separate controller just to do error correction and block remapping, which could better be handled by the OS on the main CPU which is fabbed on a newer process or, in larger devices with a storage array, a RAID controller that performs the task for multiple drives at once. And which would you rather have, a dual-core ARM thing integrated with your SSD, or the same silicon going to two more E-cores on the main CPU which can do the storage work when there is any but can also run general purpose code when there isn't?

choilive 1y ago

In most cases, efficiency and performance are pretty synonymous for CPUs. The faster you can get work done (and turn off the silicon, which is admittedly a higher design priority for mobile CPUs) the more efficient you are. The level of talent Apple has cannot be understated, they have some true CPU design wizards. This level of efficiency cannot be achieved without making every aspect of the CPU as fast as possible; their implementation of the ARM ISA is incredible. Lots of companies make ARM chips, but none of them are Apple level performance. As a gross simplification, where the energy/performance tradeoff actually happens is after the design is basically baked. You crank up the voltage and clock speed to get more perf at the cost of efficiency.

toast0 1y ago
> In most cases, efficiency and performance are pretty synonymous for CPUs. The faster you can get work done (and turn off the silicon, which is admittedly a higher design priority for mobile CPUs) the more efficient you are. Somewhat yes, hurry up and wait can be more efficient than running slow the whole time. But at the top end of Intel/AMD performance, you pay a lot of watts to get a little performance. Apple doesn't offer that on their processors, and when they were using Intel processors, they didn't provide thermal support to run in that mode for very long either. The M series bakes in a lower clockspeed cap than contemperary intel/amd chips; you can't run in the clock regime where you spend a lot of watts and get a little bit more performance.

MindSpunk 1y ago

Apple also buys out basically all of TSMC's initial capacity for their leading edge node so generally every time a new Apple Silicon thing comes out it's a process node ahead of every other chip they're comparing to.

steve1977 1y ago

Also Apple has a ton of cash that it can give to TSMC to essentially get exclusive access to the latest manufacturing process.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Apple has a ton of cash that it can give to TSMC to essentially get exclusive access to the latest manufacturing process How have non-Apple chips on TSMC’s 5nm process compared with Apple’s M series?

cheema33 1y ago

> The advantage is Apple prioritizing efficiency, something Intel never cared enough about. Intel cared plenty once they realized that they were completely missing out on the mobile phone business. They even made X86/Atom chips for the phone market. Asus for example had some phones (Zenfone) with Intel X86 chips in them in the mid-2010s. However, Intel Atom suffered from poor power efficiency and battery life and soon died.