12 ms·
Apple's Cyclone Microarchitecture Detailed
- glasshead969 13y agoHere is the LLVM Commit the article refers to. https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/blob/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9b348b9ec2281169a48d2a/lib/Target/ARM64/ARM64SchedCyclone.td https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/blob/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9...
- doe88 13y agoAnd for those interested the whole commit and corresponding discussion thread on the LLVM-dev mailing list: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-March/thread.html#71574 http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-March/thread... https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/commit/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9b348b9ec2281169a48d2a https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/commit/7b837d8c75f78fe55...
- tdicola 13y agoVery cool analysis of the new chip. If I were Intel I would be more than a little concerned about what Apple is up to here. Would be very interesting to see what Cyclone can do in a proper laptop/desktop with more RAM.
- gatehouse 13y agoI'm impressed with Apple's work and it reaches all the way down to the user experience (I can play GTA San Andreas on my 5s), but the pace of Intel's research over the last 10 years has been absolutely demonic. I think for Apple to compete on that front would require an extreme investment. For example see the second chart here: http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/ http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-...
- fidotron 13y agoThe only reason for Intel's R&D spend over that time is that mobile chips are even more terrifying, especially once you factor in the compute capacity on the GPU. The memory bottleneck is the real problem, but once you start getting systems conceptually related to nVidia's Tegra K1 (or even the PS4 system architecture) where the CPU is relegated to a sort of system co-ordinator Intel are going to have a major headache and find themselves in that single threaded performance niche that kept the SPARC and POWERs of the world occupied prior to their decline.
- prewett 13y agospendING. "spend" is a verb, "spending" is a noun. (Yes, I know marketing says "ad spend" but it's still wrong)
- goldenkey 13y agoYou shouldn't even get a reply considering that you're comment is pedantic and prickly. But you're flat out wrong. The worst combination for a bafoon. nouninformal noun: spend; plural noun: spends 1. an amount of money paid for a particular purpose or over a particular period of time. "the average spend at the cafe is about $10 a head"
- sanxiyn 13y agoI guess Apple is plucking low hanging fruits, but speedup from Apple A6 to Apple A7 (spaced almost exactly a year) is about 50% in average, which corresponds to more than 2 years of speedup in recent Intel cores. I also note that this speedup was achieved without increasing clock, which is not the case for Intel.
- CJefferson 13y agoIt is easy to get closer to your competitors when you start so far behind them.
- gatehouse 13y agoIntel released a P4 @ 3.73GHz in 2004, and the i7-4771 is "only" 3.9GHz in single core mode (i.e. turbo), so that's only a slight increase in clock in the last decade. Sooner or later mobile processors are going to hit the power wall. I haven't looked into this lately but one thing that could provide a fixed and permanent benefit to mobile processors is the more modern instruction set.
- raverbashing 13y agoExcept the P4 was a very inefficient architecture which relied on clock speeds (and the power of Marketing) rather than actual computing power Especially the first P4s, those were awful. A Tualatin P3 @ 1.2/1.3GHz would be much faster than a P4 @ 1.4 or even 1.6
- sanxiyn 13y agoWell, P4's clock was achieved with 31-stage pipeline, which was a bad idea. If you compare with what came after P4, there was more than slight increase in clock.
- zokier 13y agoWillamette and Northwood (ie the original P4s) cores had 20 stage pipeline, compared to Nehalem with 24 stages and Sandy, Ivy and Haswell having 19 stages. And those Northwood cores reached 3.4GHz, compared to 3.8GHz of the infamous Prescott with it's 31 stages. That is fairly meager clockspeed increase, and based on that I'd argue that the extreme pipeline depth was not the major contributing factor in pushing the clockspeed of P4 higher.
- userbinator 13y agoI would be very interested to see some ARM results in that chart in the future; at the moment, all the RISCs there are pretty dismal. Not so long ago I remember doing some calculations on the SPEC results, normalising them to a single thread and clock frequency to determine the per-cycle efficiency of various CPUs, and x86 came out at least a factor of 2-3x ahead of the rest.
- fidotron 13y agoApple almost certainly have a MacBook Air based on one of these chips at prototype stage. There are many reasons in favour, including keeping negotiations with Intel over price interesting, but probably the main thing preventing them running with it would be an inability to manufacture the chips fast enough, which is a major concern in mobile land. This is why lots of Android devices exist in variations based on different chips as hedges by the device manufacturer on long term availability.
- BugBrother 13y agoThe volumes for desktop/laptop are almost trivial compared to the volumes for handheld. (At least for Apple.) So making the processors in volume for a Macbook Air would probably not be a problem. Also, Apple probably have little problem getting preferential treatment from manufacturers.
- masklinn 13y ago> The volumes for desktop/laptop are almost trivial compared to the volumes for handheld. (At least for Apple.) Yep. IIRC Apple ships something like 10 million laptops/year. They ship 3 times that in phones… every quarter
- sliverstorm 13y agoI would think porting OSX to ARM would be the real hurdle? Not undoable by any means, but the lion's share of the challenge.
- wiml 13y agoThe machine-specific parts of OSX already run on ARM in the form of iOS. Also remember Apple has already successfully made two or three architecture transitions already: m68k to PPC to i386 to x86_64.
- justincormack 13y agoAnd the (brief) PPC64 transition.
- sanxiyn 13y ago"Cyclone is a wide machine. It can decode, issue, execute and retire up to 6 instructions/micro-ops per clock." This is truly amazing. In comparison, Cortex-A15 can issue 3 instructions per cycle, for example.
- higherpurpose 13y agoNvidia's Denver is said to have 7. It's also rumored to have 2x the performance of Cortex A15. If it's true it could reach Sandy Bridge performance level either at first or 2nd gen (on FinFET 16nm) and Haswell/Broadwell level by 3rd gen (most people don't realize the performance between Haswell/Broadwell compared to Sandy Bridge is only like 15-20 percent, since Intel stopped focusing on performance). I also think in 2nd gen Denver SoC (2 process nodes from Tegra K1), Nvidia will have at least a 1 Tflops, possibly 1.2 Tflops GPU (Xbox One level).
- ChuckMcM 13y agoIt is interesting that in the 'chip wars' everyone went to Intel for their chips (or Motorola) and that allowed a lot of R&D to be re-couped. But as Apple is baking their own chips, what is the market for Nvidia's Denver? It has to compete with Broadcom, Samsung, and others for a fraction of the Android device pool? Challenging to justify the levels of R&D that Apple is applying without a predictable return. That said, I'm going to be watching for the Denver chip, it will be an interesting counter point to the A7.
- glasshead969 13y agoBy the time Denver based devices are on market, Apple will be releasing A8 based devices, so it will probably be competing with A8 rather than A7.
- rsynnott 13y ago> But as Apple is baking their own chips, what is the market for Nvidia's Denver? Essentially, Qualcomm's market.
- 13y ago
- szatkus 13y agoI wonder if Nvidia Denver could match with this chip.
- leejoramo 13y agoOn balance, I think that Apple would use most of the energy savings from reducing to 20nm for other things: longer life and lower weight for the battery, improvements in the camera, wireless, increased RAM.
- antimagic 13y agoIn the iPhone definitely. For the iPad, it already has more than adequate battery life (most people get several days use out of one before needing to recharge), so the extra clock speed could be used to handle multiple apps on-screen simultaneously (for example).
- raverbashing 13y agoI am thinking that this is looking up to be what the G5 aimed to be. Unfortunately the ARM architecture, even with those optimizations is probably slower "clock by clock" compared with x86/PPC But yes, I think this is something Apple is probably testing (Desktop Mac OSX on ARM)
- chucknelson 13y agoPretty impressive that Apple is capable of such CPU disruption with just a few small acquisitions. Is PA Semi the main reason for this, or could Apple have been building up a CPU design team for years before that acquisition?
- ddebernardy 13y agoIf memory serves, Cook mentioned that Apple's semiconductor division was larger than Intel during one of the last investor conference calls.
- sliverstorm 13y agoWhat? Apple has 80,000 employees. Intel has 105,000. So I doubt any Apple division is larger than Intel, if you catch my drift.
- MrVitaliy 13y agoI doubt all 105k Intel employees are hardware engineers. Half of them are probably sales.
- qq66 13y ago52% of Apple employees are in Apple Stores through the retail division.
- Theodores 13y agoMeanwhile ARM is just a couple of (thousand) guys in Cambridge, drinking tea and talking about the weather.
- sliverstorm 13y agoHe said 'bigger than Intel', not 'bigger than Intel's same department'
- bryanlarsen 13y agoIs a $270 million acquisition a small acquisition these days? Not to mention the fact that they acquired a team responsible for two large CPU disruptions: DEC Alpha and StrongARM. A third disruption is perhaps not so surprising.
- stonemetal 13y agoThere's little benefit in going substantially wider than Cyclone, but there's still a ton of room to improve performance. Didn't AMD, and Intel more or less say the same thing about 3 wide? No real benefit from going wider. Is that because of the differences in micro architecture or is it more about getting a little more performance without having to ramp the clock speed? What makes 6 wide good for ARM but not x86 or x64?
- fournm 13y agoThis is probably completely and utterly wrong as it's just a guess, but potentially the Thumb [1] instructions (small, limited subset of shorter instructions in ARM) might allow for a wider setup. Thumb instructions make a bunch of simplifying assumptions that might remove some of the issues with going wider. Not that I have any idea if Cyclone even supports them in the first place. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb
- wtallis 13y agoThe biggest wart on the ARM instruction set was the predicate attached to basically every instruction. That's gone in the 64-bit ARM ISA, so there's no need for a 64-bit Thumb (and there isn't one).
- jobu 13y agoIt really seems like Apple is ahead of the curve on mobile R&D. I wonder if they'll ever consider reselling some of these chips. It's unlikely Steve Jobs would've ever done it, but I'm not so sure about Tim Cook.
- kevinchen 13y agoApple bought PA Semi so they could be in charge of chip design and not have to share with anyone else. It's a competitive advantage, and Tim Cook isn't stupid. He won't license away a crown jewel for a few short-term dollars.
- rsynnott 13y agoPeople mightn't want to buy them if they did. These chips are _big_, which means that they're expensive to make. Apple can get away with it because their only costs are manufacture and licensing, and because they have high margins which can absorb a bit of a hit. If they were selling them, though, they'd presumably want to make a profit, and that profit would make the end product almost certainly the most expensive mobile chip on the market. From a marketing point of view, too, it'd be a hard sell in Android-land. Apple has been very careful to steer clear of spec-oriented marketing, but can you imagine the less-sophisticated enthusiast market's response to, say, the Galaxy S6 using a dual-core 1.3GHz chip instead of a quad-core 2GHz?
- jobu 13y agoWhat about something for the server market? I know some companies have been switching to ARM chips as a low-power alternative in large server farms. It seems a 64-bit chip might be a good fit in that market.
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoIMO it's unlikely. It seems like Apple has to go through a lot to meet their own manufacturing needs, so ramping up production just for third parties would put even more strain on the already-large demand. Plus, from a market standpoint, Cyclone was developed to meet Apple's own needs. To sell these chips would introduce a "demand" variable into the equation that I think would stifle development. At any rate, this is a really interesting topic because I think that Apple's oft-critized isolation actually worked much to its own benefit here.
- NextUserName 13y agoCongrats Apple for all your achievements. It is amazing what can be accomplished when you employ Chinese Engineers and manufacturers who's tech espionage (they steal trade secrets) is one of their best known traits/assets.
- axman6 13y agoProof? Even informed speculation? Apple have made several aquisitions in the last few years to give them the technology they need to make these sorts of developments. Even if some of the tech had been stolen, it would require a lot of work to put it into practice. I know I'm feeding the troll, but I couldn't help it; this is just too ridiculous.
- towski 13y agoWhat is a tock?
- stephencanon 13y agoLMGTFY: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock =)
- CodeWithCoffee 13y agoApple also uses a similar strategy with the iPhone. The iPhone 4 and 5 both made major form changes (retina display and screen shape) whereas the 4S and 5S were focussed on refinement (faster CPU, 64-bit CPU respectively). It has also been noted (possibly on the Accidental Tech Podcast, or somewhere similar) that a 'tick' year for the phone tends to be a 'tock' year for iOS and vice versa; iOS 5 and iOS 7 (released with the 4S and 5S respectively) were bigger changes than iOS 4 and 6.
- watersb 13y agoAnand also taught us that an iPad draws about as much power as an 11-inch MacBook Air. Configure an ARM platform with 8 GB of DDR3 DRAM and a PCIe-based SSD, and you may well blow the power budget versus the current Intel platform design. Intel has turned its attention to total platform power: moving the VRMs on-die, and also identifying third-party motherboard components which draw silly amounts of power. I think that Intel is on track here. Apple will of course push their design talent in order to deliver the best mobile devices they possibly can. But this does not necessarily mean a move away from Intel for a laptop or desktop.
- JTenerife 13y agoGood on Apple! That's the best that can happen to us customers. Even for an Android / Windows guy like me :-).