JustSomeGuy1

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  • More power with less: Apple's A13 Bionic is faster and more power efficient

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    melgross said:
    melgross 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.

    So, I assume that you do design chips for a living? Gee, you’re right, I don’t understand ANYTHING about any of this. And I guess you’re also right in essentially saying that Apple’s chip designers don’t know anything about this either.
    Um... Did you even read what I wrote? In general the posts of yours that I've read have shown much better comprehension of a wide range of subjects than a lot of the ranting ...people who show up here. But there are some subtle details that you appeared to be missing, based on what you wrote earlier, and I tried to fill them in. Primarily, you seemed to be conflating adding more cores within a single chip, versus supporting multiple chips in a single system. Those are two *very* different things (though AMD is blurring the lines a bit). You also compared multiple efficiency cores to a single performance core, which is a mistake, since it's about as easy to plug a perf core into the chip's bus/mesh as it is an efficiency core. Relatedly, it's likely that other components (ISP, NNP, enclave, etc.) do not participate on an equal level since their needs for memory access, cache coherency, etc. are so different, so swapping them for regular cores is not a simple cut and paste.

    As for Apple's silicon team: I don't think I've ever said anything negative about them, for the simple reason that they keep hitting it out of the park year after year. And in fact the key point I was making above is that they have *already completed* all the serious work they'd need to do to build chips that can beat everything the competition has to offer, from pads through laptops all the way through mainstream desktops. They know *everything* about this.

    BTW, there are other things neither of us touched on that Apple has yet to do (or at least, show its hand on) that are necessary for desktops and even laptops. For example, I/O on the Axx chips is very limited, as is appropriate for such a SoC. But you're going to want a pile of PCIe lanes coming off the CPU for a laptop, and even more for a desktop. If you're Apple, designing for the future, I imagine you'd want at least 32 PCIe lanes: 16 for graphics, 4 for SSD, 8 for Thunderbolt, and 4 for other miscellany. More would be better, and necessary if you have near-term desktop ambitions, while you could cut it in half using PCIe4 instead of PCIe3 - though I don't see Apple doing that, as their homegrown hardware always goes big, and I can't imagine them investing more in PCIe3 this late in the game.

    You know what I really want to see? How fast the Apple GPU design can get if you give it a giant pile of cores and 100 or 150 watts to play with. I don't think anyone (outside the Apple design team) has a clue how well it will scale. I'd be excited to find out, though.
    avon b7watto_cobraknowitall

  • More power with less: Apple's A13 Bionic is faster and more power efficient

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    melgross 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.

    watto_cobra

  • More power with less: Apple's A13 Bionic is faster and more power efficient

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    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.
    kevin keewatto_cobra

  • 'B Corp' leaders challenge Apple, others to become force for good

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    anton zuykov said:
    georgie01 said:
    No one anticipated the effect of plastic bags, and instead of learning from that error we just want to replace it with something else that will likely become a pollutant 
    Yeah..but even if US removes all its plastic pollution, say, from oceans, China alone pollutes 32 TIMES greater than what US could. In other words, when US decides to clean its act, it affects the world by less than 1 percent.  
    Math fail. Fact fail too, so good job.
    apple ][ said:
    Apple is doing just fine without any outside oversight and certification by a bunch of environmental loonies and political extremists.
    What letter did you read? Nobody said anything about outside oversight. They're claiming that they have a better model for long-term success and they're trying to persuade other people to consider it.

    The only loonies I see are the people who still want to pretend that there's nothing wrong with global climate change (or worse, that it's not happening).

    And what extremists, for that matter? You're looking at a bunch of people who are successfully running some corporations, who are saying that they can be successful taking a less toxic, short-sighted, short-term, winner-take-all view of economics. Put slightly differently, they're essentially saying that business can be a positive-sum game, not negative or zero-sum. In fact, that's the basis of all trade and commerce, hardly a controversial position.

    One of the biggest problems we face, nationally and globally, is that capitalism has been body-snatched and replaced with an alien that does a bad job of copying it. Oligolopoly, monopoly, monopsony, and a whole bunch of other things that distort the function of the free market. Maybe worse, the overconcentration of capital has created power centers large enough to seriously distort the political process. Any chance there is to reform some of the worst actors from within (or from the top) should be grabbed at with both hands, even if it is a long shot.

    And in case you're wondering, no, I don't think Apple is one of those "worst actors". Their corporate governance and behavior is astonishingly good, especially at their scale.
    seanismorris said:
    Maybe those same CEO’s should start giving.

    ”Using the stock-options-granted measure, the average compensation for CEOs of the 350 largest U.S. firms was $13.3 million in 2017, up 1.7 percent from $13.0 million in 2016. From 1978 to 2017, inflation-adjusted compensation based on realized stock options of the top CEOs increased 1,070 percent.Aug 16, 2018”
    Math fail again (in your quote: 13.0 * 1.017 != 13.3). The CEOs who wrote that letter are not the CEOs described in your quote. None of them, I believe, head a top-350 corporation. You also don't know what they give. (Nor do I - I'm not saying they're paragons of charity. I just have no data, and I'm pretty sure you don't either.)
    mubaili said:
    Without profits, Apple cannot sustainably support any env or social related objectives. Apple works in a fierce competing environment, and as such as should solely focus on making money, and probably should set up a separate entity to promote social and environment related objectives.
    Don't you realize that the two things you wrote contradict each other? If their sole focus is making money, then they aren't going to be setting up any entities to do anything (except make money).

    However, you've entirely missed the point of the letter. The point is not to ask big CEOs to be more charitable. The point is to change the way we (America, but especially CEOs and stockholders) look at the idea of making money. Right now, most companies (Apple being a very notable and unusual partial exception) have an extremely short-term and narrow-viewed focus. The contention of the writers of the letter is that that's NOT the best way to make money, long term. And they have a very good point. For example, if all your customers are broke or dead because of environmental disaster, you've going to have a tough time making your quarterlies. More subtly, if college is too expensive and difficult, because there's no political will to deal with ridiculous costs and debt issues, companies will not be able to find qualified workers to keep their businesses running.

    Put simply, if you want to be economically successful, you need a strong healthy economy full of active consumers (who consume sustainably, so the next generation survives to be the same). That's what they're saying.
    georgie01 said:
    We need to stop the selfish and entitled attitude which has diseased our culture. We need to value the basics—family, food, protection, personal responsibility, self control, respect, morality—and not live in such selfish indulgence.
    You and I agree about some things, and not others. You're not going to get *anything* you want, though, by moralizing. Stick to actual problems, and concrete solutions, and you might get somewhere.
    anantksundaram said:
    And, to add to the above, they could do one other thing: as the CEOs in this ad imply, the group of ~180 BRT-CEOs should propose to their boards that their currently publicly traded companies should be re-incorporated as B-Corps. 

    Here’s what will happen: It won’t be too long before they’re thrown out on their butts.  
    Of course. But you can take small incremental steps, and improve things over time. One of the most obvious and pressing is improving your environmental footprint. And despite the whining of insane planet-haters (which we have a few of here), that's a relatively easy sell as more and more people are waking up to the reality of a very dangerous future. No, GE (if it survives) is not going to become a B-corp next year. But even they could improve.
    gatorguydewme

  • Apple's iOS Contacts app claimed to be vulnerable to SQLite hack

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    macplusplus said:
    SQLite is not a full scale SQL RDBMS. As it name implies it is a small core offered to applications for their management of mundane data tasks, every developer is aware of that. If SQLite was threatening iOS security architecture Apple wouldn’t include it in iOS, remember how Flash has been made defunct by Apple. I bet that 4000 word report has a very short, say 40 to 400 word falsification from Apple engineers. “We exposed but they didn’t proceed” is not security nor engineering, it is marketing or sycophantism. “iOS security architecture is wrong, it must be implemented the way I have divinated after years long transcendental worshipping to ultimate singularity powers”. You wish... No one listens to you except click-freak media.
    This, and other head-in-the-sand responses, completely misses the point. *Many* things use SQLite on the Mac as well as iOS. (Tons of other software from tons of other vendors, too.) A lot of people are going to have to spend a lot of time checking code or rebuilding with a fixed SQLite.

    This could be a significant issue on the Mac because apps are so much less siloed. We'll see.

    As for the ostriches who think this is no big deal because the phone has to be unlocked: Maybe so. But you don't have enough info yet, not by a long shot. Contacts itself is just the tip of the iceberg.
    larryjwprismatics