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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#151

Post by KptMarchewa »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #62
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I think the @simonh "domination" point is that Apple has dominated the mobile phone CPU PROFITABILITY landscape, not the SALES landscape, and I for one feel @simonh has a valid point.

If you're talking about CPU profitability, then look at Qualcomm profits, not Xiaomi.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#152

Post by UncleEntity »

baybal2 wrote: post #27

The question is "Would they, and do they need it?" For as long as it can't run Windows, it's not a competitor. A mass market chip will never survive the yield on such extremely large dies. Most of mass market chips will be many times smaller physically to make money. Apple does not make money on these chips.

> Apple does not make money on these chips.

You really believe that they treat their hardware as a loss leader when they are primarily a hardware company?

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#153

Post by mrandish »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

> staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set

It's easy to take for granted how unusual it was the WinTel hegemony happened at all. As a fan of the breathtaking diversity of classic 80s desktop computing (Amiga, Atari, C64, Spectrum, MSX, etc), I lamented the steamroller of WinTel beige-box homogenization as it paved over so many divergent evolutionary branches. Yet the fact I can still install and run mass market consumer software products released in the mid-90s on Windows 11.

Yes, a high price was paid in both silicon and OS software to sustain such extraordinary backward compatibility - and is still being paid. While the utility of running circa-Win 95 software today in minimal, it's pretty amazing and I think the underlying stability in APIs, user interfaces and peripheral interfaces had under-appreciated positive impacts on the rapid prolife ation of desktop computing across society. Remember that the landline phone and cable companies initially envisioned the "home computer" to a be little more than a dumb terminal consumers would rent like a telephone handset. We're fortunate that vision failed when the commoditization of PCs allowed the home "internet terminal" to be a full user-owned and controlled computer with significant local processing and storage.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#154

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zinekeller wrote: post #113
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I'm sorry but I have to label this as a bad-faith attack. "dominates" in this context means being the fastest available, not necessarily that most people will buy that. It's like saying "the i9/Ryzen 7 dominates" and then answering with "most people buys Celerons/Athlons". You need to read the context of the conversation: it is about performance domination and not usershare domination.

And yet this subthread is filled with several people who have yet a 3rd (maybe even a 4th) interpretation. I don't dispute that yours could be the intended one, but let's not pretend that it's completely clear.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#155

Post by bee_rider »

paulmd wrote: post #119
bee_rider wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could we define a slowdown or speedup in YoY performance improvements, for the M2? It is the first successor.

Despite the M1 moniker, Apple has been doing in-house silicon for about 7 generations now - they started with A7 iirc, and M1 is part of the A14 generation, and M2 is part of the A15 generation. M1 is what would have traditionally been called an "A14X", meaning wider GPU than the phone-sized SOC. So there are basically 8 generations of YoY comparisons to make. M2 is not a particularly large jump as these generations…

Sure, but since they've moved into an entirely different class of device, I don't think the A series establishes a very useful baseline. I mean, scaling the phone/tablet type chip up to laptop/desktop class must have made them bump into some bottlenecks that previously looked infinitely wide. Depending on how difficult those bottlenecks are to clear, we could see some years with quick progress, some years with not so much.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#157

Post by cowtools »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #100
rob74 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

IMHO a major enabler for this is LLVM. I think it's significantly reduced the time / cost / difficulty in rolling out a new instruction set architecture.

Are the GCC cross-compilers for ARM64 not sufficient? We're not talking about some niche, new architecture here like RISCV or WASM.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#158

Post by gary_0 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #104
kaba0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know whether that x86 backward compatibility is all that problematic? If I’m not mistaken, it is only used as a “public API” even in current CPUs, and on a microcode level it doesn’t have as much relevance.

For example: Decode. One of the things Apple CPUs keep being praised for is how wide they are. To be wide effectively and keep your execution units busy, you need a wide decoder. With aarch64 it is easy. Every instruction is 4 bytes on a 4 byte boundary. Want a 4-wide decoder? Ingest 16 bytes and copy-and-paste the same decoder 4 times. X86 instructions are variable-length: 1-15 bytes. And you do not know how long an…

And those bytes matter when most Intel CPU cores have only a few dozen KB of L1I cache. Interestingly, the M1 and M2 performance cores have a whopping 192KB of L1 instruction cache.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#160

Post by nixgeek »

spenvo wrote: post #150
modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

Even there, it looks like Samsung is on track to beat TSMC to mass production of 3nm chips: https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-starts-3-nan...

By this logic, you believe Samsung Exynos will be competitive with Apple’s A16 when it launches later this year? If it’s all in the process size - you’d expect this to be true but I’m betting A16 will continue the trend of Apple Silicon being dramatically superior.
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