Fun seeing washed up “ consultants” out there trying to push back the sea of Apple Silicon performance that is going to wash over x86
Some are saying that the M1 chip is not an Apple design at all and that they 'bought' it in. Oh well, it takes all sorts does it not?
Well, if it makes them feel better about things then they can go right ahead believing that.
Not really going to make any difference though is it?
I guess what they could do is start GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay someone to claim that they've been doing all Apple's chip design from their fold-down table in the dining room.
Finally, of course Apple's 5nm M1 is going to outperform Intel's 14nm Core i5. But when Intel's Core i5 is also 14nm in about 3 years (if they hire TSMC to make the chips) or 5 years (if they make the chips themselves)? Then we will see whose performance will wash over whose. Apple will have some advantages, namely the inherent efficiency of RISC vs ISA as well as Apple's strategy of maximizing performance from each core as opposed to Intel's - and everyone else's - strategy of maximizing cores. But Intel also has a performance attribute of their own: the densest core design in the industry. Meaning that a 10nm Intel design is the equivalent of a 7nm Apple one. So when Intel does get to a 5nm design, it will be the equivalent of a 3nm Apple one. So, we shall see ...
Could have, should have, would have...
Fact is that Intel has spent the last 5 years stagnating and both AMD and now Apple have called them out on it. You might like your Intel shares, but it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to...
And, btw, the microarchitecture of this 8th generation Apple part blows Intel out of the water. 8-wide decode, 6 times the L1 cache (at lower latency), twice the re-order buffer, etc etc. They have been able to get away with a much wider design than Intel and still drive it to high clock speeds upending the conventional wisdom that you can only get high clock rates with a narrow design. Granted the M1 will likely not top 3.5GHz, (obvioulsy the MBA will be lower than the MBP), but doing that with such a wide design is the secret of their significant horsepower. Also it will undoubtedly be true that, granted the limitations of the memory @16GB, the wide and fast access to memory (and to GPU) will also be a significant factor in performance.
For Intel, the train has left the station and they are trying to run after it....
Don’t overlook the unified memory architecture that Apple can deploy, (as they own the whole stack) this will save 2x on a lot of common functions!
How so?
2 ways - Firstly, it's a much wider and deeper memory bus due to not have to following the narrow ISA interface constraints. Secondly, it is clear that Apple has some "magic" in it's chips with regards to memory. Anandtech thinks it's some sort of really smart pre-fetch, but the reality is that memory intensive benchmarks (429.mcf and 471.omnetpp) on Apple's existing (mobile) chips show huge performance advantage against other Arm chips when using the same LPDDR4X/LPDDR5 memory.
The same is true (same or better scores) when benchmarked against "desktop" processors *Ryzen 5950X, and Intel 1185G7. Note this testing is for the mobile A14 part, the M1 is a different beast, particularly with regards to its wattage. The A14 mobile part has a device power consumption of 5W, whereas the Intel 1185G7 is over 20w, and the Ryzen 5 almost 50w. The launch graphic that Apple showed with the M1, had a peak wattage of around 18 watts.
Fun seeing washed up “ consultants” out there trying to push back the sea of Apple Silicon performance that is going to wash over x86
Some are saying that the M1 chip is not an Apple design at all and that they 'bought' it in. Oh well, it takes all sorts does it not?
Well, if it makes them feel better about things then they can go right ahead believing that.
Not really going to make any difference though is it?
I guess what they could do is start GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay someone to claim that they've been doing all Apple's chip design from their fold-down table in the dining room.
The first true Apple design was the A4. This is the 8th generation of 64 bit design. They have led the mobile SOC space since at least the a5, and the A7 (the first 64bit design) was years ahead of anyone else.
This is all Apple, one of the giveaways is how secretive they are, and also how much they stress "SOC" performance - they are not building discrete CPUs as their competitors do (noting that AMD and Intel have no choice due to the constraints with the ISA), they are building SOC with as much specialisation and as much integration as they can.
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Not really going to make any difference though is it?
I guess what they could do is start GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay someone to claim that they've been doing all Apple's chip design from their fold-down table in the dining room.
Fact is that Intel has spent the last 5 years stagnating and both AMD and now Apple have called them out on it. You might like your Intel shares, but it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to...
And, btw, the microarchitecture of this 8th generation Apple part blows Intel out of the water. 8-wide decode, 6 times the L1 cache (at lower latency), twice the re-order buffer, etc etc. They have been able to get away with a much wider design than Intel and still drive it to high clock speeds upending the conventional wisdom that you can only get high clock rates with a narrow design. Granted the M1 will likely not top 3.5GHz, (obvioulsy the MBA will be lower than the MBP), but doing that with such a wide design is the secret of their significant horsepower. Also it will undoubtedly be true that, granted the limitations of the memory @16GB, the wide and fast access to memory (and to GPU) will also be a significant factor in performance.
For Intel, the train has left the station and they are trying to run after it....
The same is true (same or better scores) when benchmarked against "desktop" processors *Ryzen 5950X, and Intel 1185G7. Note this testing is for the mobile A14 part, the M1 is a different beast, particularly with regards to its wattage. The A14 mobile part has a device power consumption of 5W, whereas the Intel 1185G7 is over 20w, and the Ryzen 5 almost 50w. The launch graphic that Apple showed with the M1, had a peak wattage of around 18 watts.
This is all Apple, one of the giveaways is how secretive they are, and also how much they stress "SOC" performance - they are not building discrete CPUs as their competitors do (noting that AMD and Intel have no choice due to the constraints with the ISA), they are building SOC with as much specialisation and as much integration as they can.