verne arase

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verne arase
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  • EU lawmaker wants Big Tech regulations to specifically target US firms

    verne araseverne arase
    Sounds like the EU want a trade war - perhaps we should target EU car companies like Fiat, Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen and medical equipment suppliers like Siemens.

    European companies were once relevant in tech, but that seems to have gone by the wayside - maybe it's not coincidence but the result of heavy handed administration by EU officials.

    Who the heck do EU administrators think they are - breaking up foreign companies. They are not administrators for the world and have no authority beyond their own borders.

    I think Volkswagen's board should be broken up and be subject to criminal prosecution for committing environmental testing fraud - but Volkswagen is not an American company and we can't do that.

    I remember when European companies like Phillips Electronics were relevant and heavily involved in things like optical media - and it's really sad to see European firms gone from the digital landscape - with only companies like Spotify who try to shortchange the artists responsible for their content as well as providers on whose platforms their service exists.
    pulseimagesbshankkillroyviclauyycwatto_cobra

  • Tile bemoans Apple AirTags launch, raises antitrust concerns

    verne araseverne arase
    Get used to it - now that Apple's achieve the scale and scope it has, every two bit company in the world who has a competing product will attempt to use overbearing government's antitrust units as a bludgeon against Apple.
    EsquireCatsjony0watto_cobra

  • Arm's new chip architecture will power future devices, possibly including Apple's

    verne araseverne arase
    cloudguy said:
    Wait what? I thought Apple was an ARM Holdings co-founder, had a permanent architectural license and their own custom design for PCs that was radically different from - and better than - the small core design for embedded systems that the ARM pushes for Cortex-A for smartphones and the somewhat better (but still not very good) Marvell and N1 core designs that are used on servers (which again aren't very good as they constitute 3% of the market, forcing Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. to also make their own core designs and causing Marvell, HP and most other ARM server vendors to drop out of the market leaving Ampere as the only player)? Even Fujitsu, who makes ARM supercomputers, relies on a custom design (a combination of the RISC license based on SPARC that they bought from Sun back in the day and things they licensed from ARM). 

    While the M1 chip has a single core score that rivals Intel Core i7 and i9, the best Cortex Core for PCs and mobile barely surpasses the Intel Pentium. (Qualcomm is hyping up the multicore score, but even there it takes 8 performance cores to merely rival the Geekbench 5 score for the quad core Intel i5). I thought that Apple having their own big core design that ARM Holdings can't come close to was why Nvidia's purchase of ARM Holdings is like "meh" for Apple as their custom CPU and GPU designs are much better - by several times - than Cortex, Mali (the ARM Holdings GPU) and even Nvidia (either their old GPU architecture or their new Ampere one) anyway.
    The best I've seen from ARM is the Cortex-X1 which is used in the Snapdragon 888 which at 5nm ran neck-and-neck with A11's 7nm Lightning cores - Lightning won overall but the X1 won at floating point. The 888 is a triple tier SoC with a single X1 at the top as its single, highest performance core, and I believe it's a five wide design.

    In 2008, Apple acquired PA Semi and worked with cash strapped Intrinsity and Samsung to produce a FastCore Cortex-A8; the frenemies famously split and Apple used their IP and Imagination's PowerVR to create the A4 and Samsung took their tech to produce the Exynos 3. Apple acquired Intrinsity and continued to hire engineering talent from IBM's Cell and XCPU design teams, and hired Johny Srouji from IBM who worked on the POWER7 line to direct the effort.

    This divergence from standard ARM designs was continued by Apple who continued to nurture and build their Silicon Design Team (capitalized out of respect) for a decade, ignoring standard ARM designs building their own architecture, improving and optimizing it year by year for the last decade.

    Whereas other ARM processor makers like Qualcomm and Samsung pretty much now use standard ARM designed cores - Apple has their own designs and architecture and has greatly expanded their own processor acumen to the point where the Firestorm cores in the A14 and M1 are the most sophisticated processors in the world with an eight wide processor design with a 690 instruction execution queue with a massive reorder buffer and the arithmetic units to back it up - which means its out-of-order execution unit can execute up to eight instructions _simultaneously._

    x86 processor makers are hampered by the CISC design and a variable instruction length. This means that at most they can produce a three wide design and even for that the decoder would have to be fiendishly clever, as it would have to guess where one instruction ended and the next began.

    There's a problem shared with x86-64 processor makers and Windows - they never met an instruction or feature they didn't like. What happens then is you get a build-up of crud that no one uses, but it still consumes energy and engineering time to keep working.

    AMD can get better single core speed by pushing up clocks (and dealing with the exponentially increased heat though chiplets are probably much harder to cool), and Intel by reducing the number of cores (the top of the 10 core 20 thread 10900K actually had to be shaved to achieve enough surface area to cool the chip so it at 14nm had reached the limits of physics). Both run so hot they are soon in danger of running into Moore's Wall.

    Apple OTOH ruthlessly pares underused or unoptimizable features.

    When Apple determined that ARMv7 (32 bit ARM) was unoptimizable, they wrote it out of iOS, and removed those logic blocks from their CPUs in two years, repurposing the silicon real estate for more productive things. Intel,  AMD, and yes even Qualcomm couldn't do that in a decade.

    Apple continues that with everything - not enough people using Force Touch - deprecate it, remove it from the hardware, and replace it with Haptic Touch. Gone.

    Here's another secret of efficiency - make it a goal. Last year on the A13 Bionic used in the iPhone 11s, the Apple Silicon Team introduced hundreds of voltage domains so they could turn off parts of the chip not in use. Following their annual cadence, they increased the speed of the Lightning high performance and the Thunder high efficiency cores by 20% despite no change in the 7nm mask size. As an aside, they increased the speed of matrix multiplication and division by six times (used in machine learning).

    This year they increased the speed of the Firestorm high performance and Icestorm high efficiency cores by another 20% while dropping the mask size from 7nm to 5nm. That's a hell of a compounding rate and explains how they got to where they are. Rumor has it they've bought all the 3nm capacity from TSMC for the A16 (and probably M2) next year.

    Wintel fans would deny the efficacy of the A series processors and say they were mobile chips, as if they used slower silicon with wheels on the bottom or more sluggish electrons.

    What they were were high efficiency chips which were passively cooled and living in a glass sandwich. Remove them from that environment where they could breathe more easily and boost the clocks a tad and they became a raging beast.

    People say that the other processor makers will catch up in a couple of years, but that's really tough to see. Apple Silicon is the culmination of a decade of intense processor design financed by a company with very deep pockets - who is fully cognizant of the competitive advantage Apple Silicon affords. Here's an article in Anandtech comparing the Firestorm cores to the competing ARM and x86 cores. It's very readable for an article of its ilk:


    Of course these are the Firestorm cores used in the A14, and are not as performant as the cores in the M1 due to the M1's higher 3.2 ghz clock speed.

    tmayjdb8167mobirdAlex_Vtenthousandthingswatto_cobrasphericlibertyforall

  • Apple 'M1X' chip specification prediction appears on benchmark site

    verne araseverne arase
    cloudguy said:
     
    With all due respect why do you believe that this is even possible? As I have stated numerous times, the idea that ARM is inherently superior to x86 was wishful thinking. If it were true, ARM would have more than 3% of the server market. As I have also stated, most of the benchmarking was skewed: it only compared the M1 to the Intel chips that it replaced in macOS devices. Those were mostly 2 and 4 core "mobile" chips. They were also outdated chips: 9th and 10th gen. There were already 11th gen Intel chips on the market when the M1 Macs were introduced.
    You can design any CPU with fixed length instructions much wider than a x86 CPU due to lower decoder complexity.

    M1 has 4 high performance Firestorm and 4 high efficiency Icestorm cores - it was designed for the low-end MacBook Air (fanless) and 13" MacBook Pro models as part of their annual spec bump.

    Rumor has it the M1x slated for later this year will have 8-16 Firestorm cores (depending on binning) and will be targeted at machines like the 14" and 16" MacBook Pros and possibly the low end iMac (and maybe a high end Mac Mini).

    In 2008, Apple acquired PA Semi and worked with cash strapped Intrinsity and Samsung to produce a FastCore Cortex-A8; the frenemies famously split and Apple used their IP and Imagination's PowerVR to create the A4 and Samsung took their tech to produce the Exynos 3. Apple acquired Intrinsity and continued to hire engineering talent from IBM's Cell and XCPU design teams, and hired Johny Srouji from IBM who worked on the POWER7 line to direct the effort.

    This divergence from standard ARM designs was continued by Apple who continued to nurture and build their Silicon Design Team (capitalized out of respect) for a decade, ignoring standard ARM designs building their own architecture, improving and optimizing it year by year for the last decade.

    Whereas other ARM processor makers like Qualcomm and Samsung pretty much now use standard ARM designed cores - Apple has their own designs and architecture and has greatly expanded their own processor acumen to the point where the Firestorm cores in the A14 and M1 are the most sophisticated processors in the world with an eight wide processor design with a 690 instruction execution queue with a massive reorder buffer and the arithmetic units to back it up - which means its out-of-order execution unit can execute up to eight instructions simultaneously.

    x86 processor makers are hampered by the CISC design and a variable instruction length. This means that at most they can produce a three wide general design and even for that the decoder would have to be fiendishly clever, as it would have to guess where one instruction ended and the next began.

    There's a problem shared with x86-64 processor makers and Windows - they never met an instruction or feature they didn't like. What happens then is you get a build-up of crud that no one uses, but it still consumes energy and engineering time to keep working.

    AMD can get better single core speed by pushing up clocks (and dealing with the exponentially increased heat though chiplets are probably much harder to cool), and Intel by reducing the number of cores (the top of 10 core 20 thread 10900K actually had to be shaved to achieve enough surface area to cool the chip so it at 14nm had reached the limits of physics). Both run so hot they are soon in danger of running into Moore's Wall.

    Apple OTOH ruthlessly pares underused or unoptimizable features.

    When Apple determined that ARMv7 (32 bit ARM) was unoptimizable, they wrote it out of iOS, and removed those logic blocks from their CPUs in two years, repurposing the silicon real estate for more productive things. Intel,  AMD, and yes even Qualcomm couldn't do that in a decade.

    Apple continues that with everything - not enough people using Force Touch - deprecate it, remove it from the hardware, and replace it with Haptic Touch. Gone.

    Here's another secret of efficiency - make it a goal. Last year on the A13 Bionic used in the iPhone 11s, the Apple Silicon Team introduced hundreds of voltage domains so they could turn off parts of the chip not in use. Following their annual cadence, they increased the speed of the Lightning high performance and the Thunder high efficiency cores by 20% despite no change in the 7nm mask size. As an aside, they increased the speed of matrix multiplication and division by six times (used in machine learning).

    This year they increased the speed of the Firestorm high performance and Icestorm high efficiency cores by another 20% while dropping the mask size from 7nm to 5nm. That's a hell of a compounding rate and explains how they got to where they are. Rumor has it they've bought all the 3nm capacity from TSMC for the A16 (and probably M2) next year.

    Wintel fans would deny the efficacy of the A series processors and say they were mobile chips, as if they used slower silicon with wheels on the bottom or more sluggish electrons.

    What they were were high efficiency chips which were passively cooled and living in a glass sandwich. Remove them from that environment where they could breathe more easily and boost the clocks a tad and they became a raging beast.

    People say that the other processor makers will catch up in a couple of years, but that's really tough to see. Apple Silicon is the culmination of a decade of intense processor design financed by a company with very deep pockets - who is fully cognizant of the competitive advantage Apple Silicon affords. Here's an article in Anandtech comparing the Firestorm cores to the competing ARM and x86 cores. It's very readable for an article of its ilk.

    Of course these are the Firestorm cores used in the A14, and are not as performant as the cores in the M1 due to the M1's higher 3.2 ghz clock speed.

    tmaytechconcsaarekhypoluxawatto_cobraDetnator

  • More Apple Silicon Macs, new Apple TV, and more: what to expect from Apple in early 2021

    verne araseverne arase
    I need a stronger Apple TV, one with more memory (and hopefully better memory management).

    The current model loses its mind often - I believe because it can't handle to amount of media I have it manage.

    Really, even Apple TV on my Mac doesn't handle my media well - I buy a lot of box sets of iTunes full series and redo the metadata because box set metadata sucks wind - then I'm faced with reimporting my media with the metadata changes (which works properly only if I hide the iTunes purchase [in which case watching from the cloud isn't available to my other Apple devices]).

    Really, there ought be an option of hiding media purchases only from a single Apple device.
    docno42