There is one positive to all of this. Finally, we can stop listening to people who keep saying that Apple Silicon is ahead of everyone else because they have access to better process. There are now chips on better processes than M1 that still deliver much worse performance per watt.
Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#12I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up upgrade RAM / SSD / even mobo is worth some tradeoff to me, where my employers will just throw my MBP away in a few years).
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#13How much do you like the rest of the hardware? What price would seem OK for decent GUI software that runs for a long time on batter?
Am learning x86 in order to build nice software for the Framework 12 i3 13-1315U (raptor lake). Going into the optimization manuals for intel's E-cores (apparently Atom) and AMD's 5c cores. The efficiency cores on the M1 MacBook Pro are awesome. Getting debian or Ubuntu with KDE to run this on a FW12 will be mind-boggling.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#14There is one positive to all of this. Finally, we can stop listening to people who keep saying that Apple Silicon is ahead of everyone else because they have access to better process. There are now chips on better processes than M1 that still deliver much worse performance per watt.
Go down the rabbit hole of broken compiler settings for debian default builds, if you want to see how much low-hanging fruit we still have.
Who here would be interested in testing a distro like debian with builds optimized for the Framework devices?
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#15I may be out of date or wrong, but I recall when the M1 came out there was some claims that x86 could never catch up, because there is an instruction decoding bottleneck (instructions are all variable size), which the M1 does not have, or can do in parallel. Because of that bottleneck x86 needs to use other tricks to get speed and those run hot.
No one ever said that. The M1 was not the fastest laptop when it was introduced. It was a nice balance of speed/battery life/heat
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#16I may be out of date or wrong, but I recall when the M1 came out there was some claims that x86 could never catch up, because there is an instruction decoding bottleneck (instructions are all variable size), which the M1 does not have, or can do in parallel. Because of that bottleneck x86 needs to use other tricks to get speed and those run hot.
ARM instructions are fixed size, while x86 are variable. This makes a wide decoder fairly trivial for ARM, while it is complex and difficult for x86.
However, this doesn't really hold up as the cause for the difference. The Zen4/5 chips, for example, source the vast majority of their instructions out of their uOp trace cache, where the instructions have already been decoded. This also saves power - even on ARM, decoders take power.
People have been trying to figure out the "secret sauce" since the M chips have been introduced. In my opinion, it's a combination of:
1) The apple engineers did a superb job creating a well balanced architecture
2) Being close to their memory subsystem with lots of bandwidth and deep buffers so they can use it is great. For example, my old M2 Pro macbook has more than twice the memory bandwidth than the current best desktop CPU, the zen5 9950x. That's absurd, but here we are...
3) AMD and Intel heavily bias on the costly side of the watts vs performance curve. Even the compact zen cores are optimized more for area than wattage. I'm curious what a true low power zen core (akin to the apple e cores) would do.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#17There is one positive to all of this. Finally, we can stop listening to people who keep saying that Apple Silicon is ahead of everyone else because they have access to better process. There are now chips on better processes than M1 that still deliver much worse performance per watt.
Not sure why you'd think that, comparing a heterogeneous core architecture to a homogeneous one. Mobile Ryzen chips aren't designed for power efficiency, if you want a "fair" comparison then pull up a Big.little x86 chip or benchmark Apple's performance cores vs AMD's mobile chipsets.
Once you normalize for either efficiency cores or performance cores, you'll quickly realize that the node lead is the largest advantage Apple had. Those guys were right, the writing was on the wall in 2019.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#18I’ve been thinking a lot about getting something from Framework, as I like their ethos around relatability. However, I currently have an M1 Pro which works just fine, so I’ve been kicking the can down the road while worrying that it just won’t be up to par in terms of what I’m used to from Apple. Not just the processor, but everything. Even in the Intel Mac days, I ended up buying a Asus Zephyrus G14, which had nothing but glowing reviews from everyone. I hated it and sold it within 6 months. There is a level of polish that I haven’t seen on any x86 laptop, which makes it really hard for me to venture outside of Apple’s sandbox.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#19RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast? ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.
> RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast?
This hasn't been true for decades. Mainframes are fast because they have proprietary architectures that are purpose-built for high throughput and redundancy, not because they're RISC. The pre-eminent mainframe architecture these days (z/Architecture) is categorized as CISC.
Processors are insanely complicated these days. Branch prediction, instruction decoding, micro-ops, reordering, speculative execution, cache tiering strategies... I could go on and on but you get the idea. It's no longer as obvious as "RISC -> orthogonal addressing and short instructions -> speed".
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#20I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further. notebookch…
Framework is a bit behind the others in terms of cooling, apparently due to compromises needed to achieve modularity. However, a well-tuned Ryzen U in the latest ThinkPads is not that far from M chips in terms of computing power per Watt according to some benchmarks.
Most Linux distributions are not well tuned, because this is too device-specific. Spending a few minutes writing custom udev rules, with the aid of powertop, can reduce heat and power usage dramatically. Another factor is Safari, which is significantly more efficient than Firefox and Chromium. To counter that, using a barebones setup with few running services can get you quite far. I can get more than 10 hours of battery from a recent ThinkPad.