knowitall

JustSomeGuy1 said:

melgross said:

JustSomeGuy1 said:

knowitall said:

Really impressive especially the power savings and switching of active areas, Kudos to the design team.
The new Ad13 iMac will be a blast.
But Teslas FSD chip is currently 12 times faster (73 TOPS vs A13 6 TOPS?) which makes clear Tesla has a design team (only a few people I understood) that can easily match Apples.
So I expect much room for improvement for the A14 and its desktop version the Ad14 next year.
Exciting times, it must be difficult working at Intel now.

Edit: note the TOPS (not TFLOPS)

Tesla's chip is much faster than Apple's at running, say, resnet 50. But it's MUCH slower than Apple's at running any normal app.

You're failing to distinguish between different types of TOPS. Tesla's achievement is notable but not nearly in the same category as Apple's. In principle, it's not all that hard to add more TOPS, if you're talking about tensor/matrix ops, vectors, NNI, GPU, etc. Those ops (and OPS) are all easily parallelized. Further, you fail to recognize the hard limits placed by the power and cooling budgets for each chip. Tesla is entirely focused on video image recognition, so they need massive NN processing. They have the power budget of a car - not unlimited, by a long shot, but still... the battery in a Tesla is a little bigger than the battery in an iPhone! Whereas Apple is building a much more general-purpose chip, and specifically one with extraordinary traditional integer (and FP) OPS. That's a MUCH MUCH harder problem to solve, as it's extremely difficult to extract parallelism from conventional software (that is, pretty much every app that isn't doing AR or a few other very specific things).

So far, Apple has in the last couple of years kicked *everyone's* ass at that, inside their domain (low-power chips). Nobody even comes close. And if you look carefully at what they've done, you can build a fairly convincing case that they've already built every part necessary to beat Intel at their own game (fast high-power multicore chips), they just don't want to sell those yet.

The biggest open question is this: Can Apple build a ring/mesh/whatever connecting 8-16 high-performance cores in a reasonable power budget? As I've written previously about the A12X, they've *already done this*. So they can, right now today, build something competitive with Intel's best mainstream desktop CPU (the 8-core i9-9900). Whether or not they can actually bet it will depend on whether or not they can clock up. And we know more about that than we did a few months ago, as we can see AMD pushing the same process to around 4.3 GHz tops, about 4.1 comfortably. We still don't know if the A13's pipeline is long enough to sustain this sort of speed, or how easy it would be for Apple to change it enough, but the performance crown there seems easily within their grasp.

Going to more cores is the biggest question mark. The ring or mesh good enough to handle 8 cores really well may not be enough to handle 12 or 16 cores. But the only machines where that would matter is the iMac Pro and the desktop Mac Pro. And I don't think anyone expects those to transition to ARM as early as the laptops.

Apple has already gone to 4 cores in the A12x, 5 cores when counting the efficiency cores together. I don’t see why they can’t remove some unneeded sections from the chips that duplicate functions that don’t need to be duplicated, and run two of these, I suppose now, A13x chips together. Apple has the ability to do it however they think best, as they control the IP.

That's not how it works. You don't see why, because you don't design chips for a living. The story is both better and worse than you think.

About core count: Since the efficiency and fast cores can (and do!) all run simultaneously, Apple has with the A12X demonstrated that whatever they're using to connect all those cores (almost certainly a ring bus, but just possibly some sort of more complex mesh) is capable of handling not just 4 or 5, but 8 cores. "Efficiency" or not, the bus has to handle the same kind of work- all cores have to have cache coherency, equal access to main RAM, etc. Doing this at low enough power, with that many cores, is the big trick that will be key to winning on the desktop - and they've managed to do it well enough to work in an iPad. That's very impressive. We don't know if that architecture will extend to more cores than that, and that's an open question. It may be completely inappropriate for more than 8 cores. But still, 8 cores will get you a VERY long way today.

Now, you talked about trimming "unneeded sections" from the chips. That's not likely to help very much. Most of those "unneeded sections" probably do not participate on the bus/mesh on an equal basis with the scalar cores, because why would they bother? However, nobody knows for sure, because Apple doesn't tell, and Andrei over at AT (the only person I know of who's gained deep insight into the chips and published about them) only has so much time to go poking at the innards with clever software and more clever analysis. So it's vaguely possible that they already have a big-time mesh architecture or multi-ring-bus (like newer and older XCC Xeons, respectively) already, which would be amazing. But it's very unlikely, as the power draw would be incredibly difficult to deal with.

Lastly, it's not at all simple to "run two chips together". If you're thinking about 2S systems like typical Xeons... then you need significant logic to get them to play nicely together and with RAM and the rest of the system. And you'd need to do really major surgery on the A12/13/whatever. On the other hand, if you're thinking about a chiplet setup like AMD's... then it's the same deal with slightly different details. In both cases, you don't know that the secret sauce Apple's using will carry over well. For example, one of the biggest factors in the massive speedups seen in the A12 is apparently the cache architecture and the large L3. If you took that out and stuck it in a central chiplet (like AMD ZEN) you'd probably take a massive perf hit. This is all moderately wild speculation, but the point is, it's not a slam dunk. I personally believe that if the decide to do it, they will embarrass the crap out of everybody else. But I'm skeptical that they'll bother any time soon.

tl;dr: As I've said before, they *already* have shown the ability to go neck-and-neck with Intel's top mainstream chips. If they wanted to fight over the HEDT and Xeons, they could probably do a great job, but it seems unlikely that they'll bother in the near future. They've already got everything they need for every laptop segment, excepting only people who need x64 Windows (or Linux) virtualization at native speed.

JustSomeGuy1 said:

knowitall said:

Really impressive especially the power savings and switching of active areas, Kudos to the design team.
The new Ad13 iMac will be a blast.
But Teslas FSD chip is currently 12 times faster (73 TOPS vs A13 6 TOPS?) which makes clear Tesla has a design team (only a few people I understood) that can easily match Apples.
So I expect much room for improvement for the A14 and its desktop version the Ad14 next year.
Exciting times, it must be difficult working at Intel now.

Edit: note the TOPS (not TFLOPS)

Tesla's chip is much faster than Apple's at running, say, resnet 50. But it's MUCH slower than Apple's at running any normal app.

You're failing to distinguish between different types of TOPS. Tesla's achievement is notable but not nearly in the same category as Apple's. In principle, it's not all that hard to add more TOPS, if you're talking about tensor/matrix ops, vectors, NNI, GPU, etc. Those ops (and OPS) are all easily parallelized. Further, you fail to recognize the hard limits placed by the power and cooling budgets for each chip. Tesla is entirely focused on video image recognition, so they need massive NN processing. They have the power budget of a car - not unlimited, by a long shot, but still... the battery in a Tesla is a little bigger than the battery in an iPhone! Whereas Apple is building a much more general-purpose chip, and specifically one with extraordinary traditional integer (and FP) OPS. That's a MUCH MUCH harder problem to solve, as it's extremely difficult to extract parallelism from conventional software (that is, pretty much every app that isn't doing AR or a few other very specific things).

So far, Apple has in the last couple of years kicked *everyone's* ass at that, inside their domain (low-power chips). Nobody even comes close. And if you look carefully at what they've done, you can build a fairly convincing case that they've already built every part necessary to beat Intel at their own game (fast high-power multicore chips), they just don't want to sell those yet.

The biggest open question is this: Can Apple build a ring/mesh/whatever connecting 8-16 high-performance cores in a reasonable power budget? As I've written previously about the A12X, they've *already done this*. So they can, right now today, build something competitive with Intel's best mainstream desktop CPU (the 8-core i9-9900). Whether or not they can actually bet it will depend on whether or not they can clock up. And we know more about that than we did a few months ago, as we can see AMD pushing the same process to around 4.3 GHz tops, about 4.1 comfortably. We still don't know if the A13's pipeline is long enough to sustain this sort of speed, or how easy it would be for Apple to change it enough, but the performance crown there seems easily within their grasp.

Going to more cores is the biggest question mark. The ring or mesh good enough to handle 8 cores really well may not be enough to handle 12 or 16 cores. But the only machines where that would matter is the iMac Pro and the desktop Mac Pro. And I don't think anyone expects those to transition to ARM as early as the laptops.

mld53a said:

For all those people saying this is obvious, the question is was this obvious back in June of 1999? What is obvious today may not have been obvious back then. 

I am aware of at least one other patent similar to this that also has an early priority/filing date. And several companies that infringe this patent as well. It’s obvious now but not so much back then. 

brucemc said:

hammeroftruth said:

bc2009 said:

Kinda hard to make the argument that the iPhone 11 is better in every way than the iPhone X when it still does not have some features of iPhone X (including an OLED screen and a 2x zoom lens).  Also, you repeatedly say the price of iPhone 11 is $650 when it is really $699.

iPhone 11 is a great value for all the technology you get (just like iPhone XR was last year), but an article that repeatedly harps on how others were wrong should get some basic things right (including the grammar in the title).

This article reads like a diatribe from somebody who can't wait to say "I told you so" to the whole internet and then proceeded to hastily pound the keyboard as fast they could.

DED IMHO has gone from commentator to Apple apologist.

I don’t remember the writer of Roughly Drafted turning a blind eye to Apple’s shortcomings. 

The reality is right now, there aren’t a lot of people who will be willing to pay $1k for a smartphone, whether it’s Apple or Samsung. Just read some of the comments on sites that are reviewing the Samsung Note 10, especially the 5G version. 

Apple had to do something to get more people to upgrade rather than hold on to their devices even longer.  Dropping the price of the iPhone 11 $50 cheaper than the XR was a start, including a free year of Apple TV+ family helps, but there are still plenty of iPhone users who are not loyal to Apple and this is what affects the bottom line. 

In the days days before the iPhone, Apple loyalists were the ones keeping Apple profitable, and in turn Apple made products we loved.
Once the iPhone was released, people
who never bought anything Apple were flashing their devices around as if they were a status symbol of their wealth, taste or intelligence. It’s popularity was it’s attraction, not it’s ease of use, or how powerful it can be. 

Apple was addicted to the attention and started  releasing more and more products that while were still attractive to Apple loyalists, they also had things that they didn’t like about them, like soldered memory and hard drives and plenty of quality programs that dealt with issues that Apple should have predicted. It didn’t affect sales, Apple was like a bear catching salmon during spawning season, it just can’t miss. 

Now, people are still weary of trusting Apple after that stupid battery replacement program. 
They don’t want to upgrade for 1k or even $700. You can try to spin it and give the customer the monthly cost because that’s more  palatable, but customers are not stupid. They played that game already with the carriers.

There are millions of iphone users who don’t really use their device to its potential and they are realizing that. This is why they are willing to abandon Apple and buy a cheap android phone.

So now Apple has to win their business all over again. Apple retail isn’t prepared to explain why an iPhone is better than other devices. They don’t have Apple loyalists as employees anymore, they have more people who think it’s cool to work there but don’t know enough about Apple products.   

Wow...an Apple II fan...been all downhill since 1979 eh...