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The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more
by kstrauser 6d ago
The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more integer units” or something along those lines, and thinking, uh, isn’t that a good thing?
- JohnBooty 6d ago"You're only better than me at sports because you practice more and try harder!"
- pixl97 6d agoDepends on the expense trade off. If I get 10% more performance for 50% more cost it really depends on one's needs, for example.
- Rohansi 6d agoI am just saying it's not magic and x86 is capable of doing the same. Quad channel memory used to be more common in consumer hardware but now it looks like you don't even have the option anymore for desktops. AMD's Strix Halo was the first sign to reversing that (it has quad channel memory!) and hopefully we see more of that in the future.
- colejohnson66 6d agoAMD does market segmentation and limits consumer chips to dual-channel. You need to cough up the dough and get Threadripper for quad-channel. Or even more for Threadripper Pro to get octa-channel.
- Rohansi 6d agoAs I mentioned above AMD's Strix Halo has quad channel memory and is consumer level. But yes, other than that everything is segmented away.
- torginus 6d agoAfaik steam deck is quad channel, despite it being a pretty low end chip (with a decent GPU though)
- Rohansi 6d agoKind of but not really. DDR5 splits your typical 64-bit channel into two 32-bit subchannels meaning the bus width is not increased. These subchannels are not always advertised because it's a just a feature of DDR5. Actually adding more channels increases bus width, which is what meaningfully improves memory bandwidth.
- pdpi 6d agoThere's a qualitative difference between "they're doing a different thing" and "they're doing the same thing, tuned differently". GP is saying that this is a case of "they just tuned it differently". This distinction doesn't change what the performance numbers look like today, but it does inform what changes would be necessary for those numbers to look different tomorrow. E.g. Apple Silicon isn't fundamentally orders of magnitude more efficient than x86, they just used smaller features. Newer Intel and AMD chips made on equivalent processes _also_ get similar efficiency gains.
- sroussey 6d agoThere are AMD and Intel devices on similar process (not talking about A20Pro or M6 which are set to ship later this week), and they do not get the same gains. And honestly, they have historically had different markets. When the design is for only one customer, you don't need to generalize things, and those things you generalize to give different customers different options has costs. AMD will soon be a larger customer for TSMC than Apple (NVIDIA is already there) so Apple's pre-booking new processes is likely to be gone in the near future.
- Dylan16807 6d agoThe point is that "unified architecture" is a buzzword unrelated to what actually makes things fast.
- Rohansi 6d agoIt does make some things faster because you can share memory between CPU, GPU, etc. without copying. But not everything.