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Nice followup to your link: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter. Personally I d

by jorvi 1y ago

Nice followup to your link: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter. Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance. The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope: https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/1600x0/article-new/2022/03/m1-ultra-performance-chart.jpg https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/...

ohdeargodno 1y ago
[dead]
diddid 1y ago
I mean the M1 is nice but pretending that it can do in 110w what the 3090 does with 320w is Apple marketing nonsense. Like if your use case is playing games like cp2077, the 3090 will do 100fps in ultra ray tracing and an M4 Max will only do 30fps. Not to mention it’s trivial to undervolt nvidia cards and get 100% performance at 80% power. So 1/3 the power for 1/3 the performance? How is that smoking anything?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Apple fans drinking apple juice, nothing new with fans, sadly.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Indeed, like talking as if Apple mattered at all in server space, or digital workstations (studio is not a replacement for people willing to buy Mac Pros, which still keep being built with Intel Xeons).
exmadscientist 1y ago
Yes, Intel/AMD cannot match Apple in efficiency. But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance. (Apple marketing works very hard to convince people otherwise, but don't fall for it.) Apple gets very, very close, but they just don't get there. (As well, you might say they get close enough for practical matters; that might be true, but it's not the question here.) That gap, however small it might be for the end user, is absolutely massive on the chip design level. x86 chips are tuned from the doping profiles of the silicon all the way through to their heatsinks to be single-thread fast. That last 1%? 2%? 5%? of performance is expensive, and is far far far past the point of diminishing returns in turns of efficiency cost paid. That last 20% of performance burns 80% of the power. Apple has chosen not to do things this way. So x86 chips are not particularly well tuned to be efficient. They never have been; it's, on some level, a cultural problem. Could they be? Of course! But then the customers who want what x86 is right now would be sad. There are a lot of customers who like the current models, from hyperscalers to gamers. But they're increasingly bad fits for modern "personal computing", a use case which Apple owns. So why not have two models? When I said "doping profiles of the silicon" above, that wasn't hyperbole, that's literally true. It is a big deal to maintain a max-performance design and a max-efficiency design. They might have the same RTL but everything else will be different. Intel at their peak could have done it (but was too hubristic to try); no one else manufacturing x86 has had the resources. (You'll note that all non-Apple ARM vendor chips are pure efficiency designs, and don't even get close to Apple or Intel/AMD. This is not an accident. They don't have the resources to really optimize for either one of these goals. It is hard to do.) Thus, the current situation: Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak... which looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month. Will they continue on that path? Who knows! But many of their customers have historically liked this choice. And everyone else... isn't great at either.
- privatelypublic 1y ago
  Let's not forget- there shouldn't be anything preventing you from setting PL1 and PL2 power levels in linux or windows, AMD or Intel. Sometimes you can even set them in the Bios. Letting you limit just how much of that extra 20% power hogging perf you want.
michaelmrose 1y ago
RTX3090 is a desktop part optimized for maximum performance with a high-end desktop power supply. It isn't meaningful to compare its performance per watt with a laptop part. Saying it offers a certain wattage worth of the desktop part means even less because it measures essentially nothing. You would probably want to compare it to a mobile 3050 or 4050 although this still risks being a description of the different nodes more so than the actual parts.
- KingOfCoders 1y ago
  It's no comparison at all, the person who bought a 3090 in the 30xx days wanted max gaming performance, someone with an Apple laptop wants longer battery usage. It's like comparing an F150 with an Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make.
  - thechao 1y ago
    > It's like comparing an F150 with a Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make. ... maybe a Prius? Bruh.
ben-schaaf 1y ago
> Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance. Do not conflate battery life with core efficiency. If you want to measure how efficient a CPU core is you do so under full load. The latest AMD under full load uses the same power as M1 and is faster, thus it has better performance per watt. Snapdragon Elite eats 50W under load, significantly worse than AMD. Yet both M1 and Snapdragon beat AMD on battery life tests, because battery life is mainly measured using activities where the CPU is idle the vast majority of the time. And of course the ISA is entirely irrelevant when the CPU isn't being used to begin with. > The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope That chart is Apple propaganda. In Geekbench 5 the RTX 3090 is 2.5x faster, in blender 3.1 it is 5x faster. See https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-nvidia/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-... and https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/ https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- boxed 1y ago
  He said "per watt", that's still true. You just talked about max throughput, which no one is discussing.
  - ohdeargodno 1y ago
    It's not, because Apple purposefully lied on their marketing material. Letting a 3090 go on full blast brings it pretty much in line in perf/watt. Your 3090 will not massively thermal throttle after 30 minutes either, but the M1 Ultra will. So, yes, if you want to look good on pointless benchmarks, a M1 ultra ran for 1 minute is more efficient than a downclocked 3090.
KingOfCoders 1y ago
Why would they? They are dominated by gaming benchmarks in a way Apple isn't. For decades it was not efficiency but raw performance, 50% more power usage for 10% more performance was ok. "The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt" Gamers are not interested in performance-per-watt but fps-per-$. If some behavior looks strange to you, most probably you don't understand the underlying drivers.
- goalieca 1y ago
  > Gamers are not interested in performance-per-watt but fps-per-$. I game a decent amount on handheld mode for the switch. Like tens of millions of others.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    While others run PlayStation and XBox. The demographics aren't the same, nor the games.
  - KingOfCoders 1y ago
    I game a decent amount on table top games. Like tens of millions of others.
torginus 1y ago
There are just so many confounding factors that it's almost entirely impossible to pin down what's going on. - M-series chips have closely integrated RAM right next to the CPU, while AMD makes do with standard DDR5 far away from the CPU, which leads to a huge latency increase - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple CPUs (which have a mobile legacy) are much more efficient/faster at 'bursty' workloads - waking up, doing some work and going back to sleep - M series chips are often designed for a lower clock frequency, and power consumption increases quadratically (due to capactive charge/dischargelosses on FETs) Here's a diagram that shows this on a GPU: https://imgur.com/xcVJl1h https://imgur.com/xcVJl1h So while it's entirely possible that AArch64 is more efficient (the decode HW is simpler most likely, and encoding efficiency seems identical): https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-07-28/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-0...? It's hard to tell how much that contributes to the end result.
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  > M-series chips have closely integrated RAM right next to the CPU, while AMD makes do with standard DDR5 far away from the CPU, which leads to a huge latency increase 2/3rds the speed of light must be very slow over there
  - torginus 1y ago
    I mean at 2GHz, and 2/3c, the signal travels about 10cm in 1 clock cycle. So it's not negligible, but I suspect it has much more to do with signal integrity and the transmission line characteristics of the data bus. I think since on mobile CPUs, the RAM sits right on top of the SoC, very likely the CPUs are designed with a low RAM latency in mind.
    - christkv 1y ago
      I think the m chips have much wider databus so bandwith is much higher as well as lower latency?
      - 1y ago
aredox 1y ago
>Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. Why would they spend billions to "catch up" to an ecological niche that is already occupied, when the best they could do - if the argument here is right that x86 and ARM are equivalent - is getting the same result? They would only invest this much money and time if they had some expectation of being better, but "sharing the first place" is not good enough.
- samus 1y ago
  The problem is that they are slowly losing the mobile markets, while their usual markets are not growing as they used to. AMD is less vulnerable to the issues that arise from that because they are fabless, and they could pivot entirely to GPU or non-x86 markets if they really wanted to. But Intel has fabs (very expensive in terms of R&D and capex) dedicated to products for desktop and server markets that must continue to generate revenue.
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    The markets didn't really budge. Apple only grew 1% in the traditional PC market (desktop/notebook) over the last 5 years and that's despite a wave of new products. The snapdragons are below 1%...
    - samus 1y ago
      And that's fine for them since they have also have their mobile platform, which is arguably more important at this point.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    The question remains: Why would they spend billions only to "catch up"? That means, even after the investment is made and they have a product that is just as good, there is still no compelling technical reason for the customer to buy Intel/AMD over the other alternatives that are just as good, so their only possible avenue to attract customers is to drive the price into the ground which is a losing proposition.
whatagreatboy 1y ago
Even Jim Keller says that instruction decode is the difference, and that saves a lot of battery for ARM even if it doesn't change the core efficiency at full lot.
ChoGGi 1y ago
> The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope: https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/ https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/... I see it's measuring full system wattage with a 12900k which tended to use quite a bit of juice compared to AMD offerings. https://gamersnexus.net/u/styles/large_responsive_no_watermark_/public/inline-images/GN%20Mega%20Charts%20%28LTS%29%20Power%20Consumption%20%40%20EPS12V%20Rails%20Blender%205-Min%20%28Ryzen%205K%2C%20Intel%2010%2C%2011%2C%20%26%2012%29%20GamersNexus%20%2811_30_2023%29_2.png.webp https://gamersnexus.net/u/styles/large_responsive_no_waterma...
robotnikman 1y ago
> Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency A big reason for this, at least for AMD, is because Apple buys all of TSMC's latest and greatest nodes for massive sums of money, so there is simply none left for others like AMD who are stuck a generation behind. And Intel is continually stuck trying to catch up. I would not say its due to x86 itself.

by jorvi 1y ago

ohdeargodno 1y ago

[dead]

diddid 1y ago

I mean the M1 is nice but pretending that it can do in 110w what the 3090 does with 320w is Apple marketing nonsense. Like if your use case is playing games like cp2077, the 3090 will do 100fps in ultra ray tracing and an M4 Max will only do 30fps. Not to mention it’s trivial to undervolt nvidia cards and get 100% performance at 80% power. So 1/3 the power for 1/3 the performance? How is that smoking anything?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
whatevaa 1y ago
Apple fans drinking apple juice, nothing new with fans, sadly.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Indeed, like talking as if Apple mattered at all in server space, or digital workstations (studio is not a replacement for people willing to buy Mac Pros, which still keep being built with Intel Xeons).

exmadscientist 1y ago

Yes, Intel/AMD cannot match Apple in efficiency. But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance. (Apple marketing works very hard to convince people otherwise, but don't fall for it.) Apple gets very, very close, but they just don't get there. (As well, you might say they get close enough for practical matters; that might be true, but it's not the question here.) That gap, however small it might be for the end user, is absolutely massive on the chip design level. x86 chips are tuned from the doping profiles of the silicon all the way through to their heatsinks to be single-thread fast. That last 1%? 2%? 5%? of performance is expensive, and is far far far past the point of diminishing returns in turns of efficiency cost paid. That last 20% of performance burns 80% of the power. Apple has chosen not to do things this way. So x86 chips are not particularly well tuned to be efficient. They never have been; it's, on some level, a cultural problem. Could they be? Of course! But then the customers who want what x86 is right now would be sad. There are a lot of customers who like the current models, from hyperscalers to gamers. But they're increasingly bad fits for modern "personal computing", a use case which Apple owns. So why not have two models? When I said "doping profiles of the silicon" above, that wasn't hyperbole, that's literally true. It is a big deal to maintain a max-performance design and a max-efficiency design. They might have the same RTL but everything else will be different. Intel at their peak could have done it (but was too hubristic to try); no one else manufacturing x86 has had the resources. (You'll note that all non-Apple ARM vendor chips are pure efficiency designs, and don't even get close to Apple or Intel/AMD. This is not an accident. They don't have the resources to really optimize for either one of these goals. It is hard to do.) Thus, the current situation: Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak... which looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month. Will they continue on that path? Who knows! But many of their customers have historically liked this choice. And everyone else... isn't great at either.

privatelypublic 1y ago
Let's not forget- there shouldn't be anything preventing you from setting PL1 and PL2 power levels in linux or windows, AMD or Intel. Sometimes you can even set them in the Bios. Letting you limit just how much of that extra 20% power hogging perf you want.

michaelmrose 1y ago

RTX3090 is a desktop part optimized for maximum performance with a high-end desktop power supply. It isn't meaningful to compare its performance per watt with a laptop part. Saying it offers a certain wattage worth of the desktop part means even less because it measures essentially nothing. You would probably want to compare it to a mobile 3050 or 4050 although this still risks being a description of the different nodes more so than the actual parts.

KingOfCoders 1y ago
It's no comparison at all, the person who bought a 3090 in the 30xx days wanted max gaming performance, someone with an Apple laptop wants longer battery usage. It's like comparing an F150 with an Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make.
- thechao 1y ago
  > It's like comparing an F150 with a Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make. ... maybe a Prius? Bruh.

ben-schaaf 1y ago

> Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance. Do not conflate battery life with core efficiency. If you want to measure how efficient a CPU core is you do so under full load. The latest AMD under full load uses the same power as M1 and is faster, thus it has better performance per watt. Snapdragon Elite eats 50W under load, significantly worse than AMD. Yet both M1 and Snapdragon beat AMD on battery life tests, because battery life is mainly measured using activities where the CPU is idle the vast majority of the time. And of course the ISA is entirely irrelevant when the CPU isn't being used to begin with. > The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope That chart is Apple propaganda. In Geekbench 5 the RTX 3090 is 2.5x faster, in blender 3.1 it is 5x faster. See https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-nvidia/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-... and https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/ https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
boxed 1y ago
He said "per watt", that's still true. You just talked about max throughput, which no one is discussing.
- ohdeargodno 1y ago
  It's not, because Apple purposefully lied on their marketing material. Letting a 3090 go on full blast brings it pretty much in line in perf/watt. Your 3090 will not massively thermal throttle after 30 minutes either, but the M1 Ultra will. So, yes, if you want to look good on pointless benchmarks, a M1 ultra ran for 1 minute is more efficient than a downclocked 3090.

KingOfCoders 1y ago

Why would they? They are dominated by gaming benchmarks in a way Apple isn't. For decades it was not efficiency but raw performance, 50% more power usage for 10% more performance was ok. "The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt" Gamers are not interested in performance-per-watt but fps-per-$. If some behavior looks strange to you, most probably you don't understand the underlying drivers.

goalieca 1y ago
> Gamers are not interested in performance-per-watt but fps-per-$. I game a decent amount on handheld mode for the switch. Like tens of millions of others.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  While others run PlayStation and XBox. The demographics aren't the same, nor the games.
- KingOfCoders 1y ago
  I game a decent amount on table top games. Like tens of millions of others.

torginus 1y ago

There are just so many confounding factors that it's almost entirely impossible to pin down what's going on. - M-series chips have closely integrated RAM right next to the CPU, while AMD makes do with standard DDR5 far away from the CPU, which leads to a huge latency increase - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple CPUs (which have a mobile legacy) are much more efficient/faster at 'bursty' workloads - waking up, doing some work and going back to sleep - M series chips are often designed for a lower clock frequency, and power consumption increases quadratically (due to capactive charge/dischargelosses on FETs) Here's a diagram that shows this on a GPU: https://imgur.com/xcVJl1h https://imgur.com/xcVJl1h So while it's entirely possible that AArch64 is more efficient (the decode HW is simpler most likely, and encoding efficiency seems identical): https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-07-28/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-0...? It's hard to tell how much that contributes to the end result.

formerly_proven 1y ago
> M-series chips have closely integrated RAM right next to the CPU, while AMD makes do with standard DDR5 far away from the CPU, which leads to a huge latency increase 2/3rds the speed of light must be very slow over there
- torginus 1y ago
  I mean at 2GHz, and 2/3c, the signal travels about 10cm in 1 clock cycle. So it's not negligible, but I suspect it has much more to do with signal integrity and the transmission line characteristics of the data bus. I think since on mobile CPUs, the RAM sits right on top of the SoC, very likely the CPUs are designed with a low RAM latency in mind.
  - christkv 1y ago
    I think the m chips have much wider databus so bandwith is much higher as well as lower latency?
    - 1y ago

aredox 1y ago

>Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. Why would they spend billions to "catch up" to an ecological niche that is already occupied, when the best they could do - if the argument here is right that x86 and ARM are equivalent - is getting the same result? They would only invest this much money and time if they had some expectation of being better, but "sharing the first place" is not good enough.

samus 1y ago
The problem is that they are slowly losing the mobile markets, while their usual markets are not growing as they used to. AMD is less vulnerable to the issues that arise from that because they are fabless, and they could pivot entirely to GPU or non-x86 markets if they really wanted to. But Intel has fabs (very expensive in terms of R&D and capex) dedicated to products for desktop and server markets that must continue to generate revenue.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  The markets didn't really budge. Apple only grew 1% in the traditional PC market (desktop/notebook) over the last 5 years and that's despite a wave of new products. The snapdragons are below 1%...
  - samus 1y ago
    And that's fine for them since they have also have their mobile platform, which is arguably more important at this point.
- 9rx 1y ago
  The question remains: Why would they spend billions only to "catch up"? That means, even after the investment is made and they have a product that is just as good, there is still no compelling technical reason for the customer to buy Intel/AMD over the other alternatives that are just as good, so their only possible avenue to attract customers is to drive the price into the ground which is a losing proposition.

whatagreatboy 1y ago

Even Jim Keller says that instruction decode is the difference, and that saves a lot of battery for ARM even if it doesn't change the core efficiency at full lot.

ChoGGi 1y ago

> The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope: https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/ https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/... I see it's measuring full system wattage with a 12900k which tended to use quite a bit of juice compared to AMD offerings. https://gamersnexus.net/u/styles/large_responsive_no_watermark_/public/inline-images/GN%20Mega%20Charts%20%28LTS%29%20Power%20Consumption%20%40%20EPS12V%20Rails%20Blender%205-Min%20%28Ryzen%205K%2C%20Intel%2010%2C%2011%2C%20%26%2012%29%20GamersNexus%20%2811_30_2023%29_2.png.webp https://gamersnexus.net/u/styles/large_responsive_no_waterma...

robotnikman 1y ago

> Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency A big reason for this, at least for AMD, is because Apple buys all of TSMC's latest and greatest nodes for massive sums of money, so there is simply none left for others like AMD who are stuck a generation behind. And Intel is continually stuck trying to catch up. I would not say its due to x86 itself.