Only supporting 8G RAM may help too.
16GB. Still not enough though.
Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#32https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 My 10,000' view understanding: - Small feature size. M1 is a 5nm process. Intel is struggling to catch up to TSMC's 7nm process - more efficient transistors. 7nm uses finFet. M1 probably uses GAAFET, which means you can cram more active gate volume in less chip footprint. This means less heat and more speed - layout. M1 is optimized for Apple's use case. General purpose c…
Thanks for the link to the old HN item. Missed it the first time. Seems like having the ability to control the entire SoC helped apple take a lot of decisions specific to how they wanted to use the chips.
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#33stop posting your ads here. go to 9gag faggot
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#34https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 My 10,000' view understanding: - Small feature size. M1 is a 5nm process. Intel is struggling to catch up to TSMC's 7nm process - more efficient transistors. 7nm uses finFet. M1 probably uses GAAFET, which means you can cram more active gate volume in less chip footprint. This means less heat and more speed - layout. M1 is optimized for Apple's use case. General purpose c…
Can you explain what you mean by Apple's use case vs general purpose chips?
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#35It's not just the M1's design, it's what they don't have to do: no need to support anything legacy. You can't change the x86 ISA to the point where it makes a huge difference because it would no longer run x86 code. Intel can probably make faster stuff than they currently do but then their customers (PC manufacturers for instance) would have to modify all their stuff as well and they don't want to, or at least, won't…
They fully support i386 via Rosetta 2 though. The real explanation is Intel has been complacent and lazy. We had 5 generations of the same chip. Enough is enough.
Nobody writes i386 code anymore though, Apple mostly support x86-64 from 10 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#36I just wanted to point out that it is not Apple out of the blue made a chip better than Intel's. They have also been designing chips for quite a while. The APL0098 chip that was used in the original iPhone was introduced back in 2007.
Right the M1 is based on A14 - the iPhone/iPad chip. It’s just the first PC one based on that architecture. Making top of the line mobile chips has given them a huge efficiency leg up. The SoC also gives big gains compared to a traditional separation of memory modules and CPUs
SoC doesn't make as large of a difference as you'd think. The only place you really get hammered is if your moving a lot of memory between separate memory domains.
As a real world example the X360 had a unified memory architecture and PS3 had a split along system/gpu. From a CPU performance perspective they were pretty close(although the SPUs in the PS3 could really go if you vectorized your data for them appropriately).
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#37Innovators Dilemma. I think you need to look at this from another angle. Yes, Apple did make some excellent choices, but the market was Intel's to lose. The difference in the chips isn't limited to the 5nm, memory pooling, etc etc. Look at the base x86 vs ARM core architecture, and that is where you'll see the problem Intel had. I'm sure there were discussions inside Intel which went along the lines of one person arg…
Time to move on to the apple bandwagon :) I've been a mac user for 10 years and it felt like Apple completely lost the plot with their laptops from 2015-2019. Glad to see them make a come back and do what they do best -- Make excellent hardware and operating systems.
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They fully support i386 via Rosetta 2 though. The real explanation is Intel has been complacent and lazy. We had 5 generations of the same chip. Enough is enough.
Nobody writes i386 code anymore though, Apple mostly support x86-64 from 10 years ago.
And i386 support was removed in macOS Mojave anyway.
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#39https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 My 10,000' view understanding: - Small feature size. M1 is a 5nm process. Intel is struggling to catch up to TSMC's 7nm process - more efficient transistors. 7nm uses finFet. M1 probably uses GAAFET, which means you can cram more active gate volume in less chip footprint. This means less heat and more speed - layout. M1 is optimized for Apple's use case. General purpose c…
Can you explain what you mean by Apple's use case vs general purpose chips?
The M1 does one thing: run MacOS and MacOS apps. They can control the vast majority of the compiled code that will be run on the chip - unlike an x86 platform where the exact same architecture is used for desktops, servers and everything in between - including Linux, windows, and Mac.
Specifically there is a reference counting optimization on the M1 that dramatically helps performance of compiled Swift apps - something only worthwhile if you know the majority of what the chip will ever do is run swift apps.
Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?
#40Lots of other comments point out the vertical integration. For raw single-thread performance: 1. ARM64 is a fixed-width instruction set, so their frontend can decode more instructions in parallel. 2. They got one honking monster of an out-of-order execution engine. (630 entries), which feed: 3. 16 execution ports.
I don't fully grasp assembly, instruction sets, and how CPUs work so pardon the silly questions. I think I understand 1) as since they know the width they can more accurately divide the instructions to more parallel executers (whatever they are - the execution ports?) 2) I believe this allows more "pre-work" to get done before it's actually needed, but then the "pre-work" just chills until 3) these things do the work…
Yup, you've got the basic ideas. Hennessy and Patterson's books are the standard rec. "Computer Organization and Design" one is version more targeted at developers, and "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is more focused on CE's or people that will be getting more into the guts.