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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?

#311

Post by aurareturn »

vient wrote: post #297
aurareturn wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting M4 die sizes from? M1 Pro is ~250mm2. M4 Pro likely increased in size a bit. So I estimated 300mm2. There are no official measurements but should be directionally correct. AMD's multicore passmark score is more than 40% higher. It's an out of date benchmark that not even AMD endorses and the industry does not use. Meanwhile, AMD officially endorses Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench. Let's use those.…

> TFLOPs are not the same between architectures. Shouldn't they be the same if we are speaking about same precision? For example, [0] shows M4 Max 17 TFLOPS FP32 vs MAX+ 395 29.7 TPLOFS FP32 - not sure what exact operation was measured but at least it should be the same operation. Hard to make definitive statements without access to both machines. [0] https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_16_cp...

M4 Max doesn't even disclose TFLOPS so no clue where that website got the numbers from.

TFLOPS can't be measured the same between generations. For example, Nvidia often quotes sparsity TFLOPS which doubles the dense TFLOPS previously reported. I think AMD probably does the same for consumer GPUs.

Another example is Radeon RX Vega 64 which had 12.7 TFLOPS FP32. Yet, Radeon RX 5700 XT with just 9.8 TFLOPS FP32 absolutely destroyed it in gaming.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#312

Post by brokencode »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #294
brokencode wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.

Arm exists, it is unknown how much tech apple gets from Arm.

Arm licenses their designs to everybody. They are okay, but you are never going to make market leading processors by using the Arm designs.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#313

Post by [deleted] »

BirAdam wrote: post #250

First, Apple did an excellent job optimizing their software stack for their hardware. This is something that few companies have the ability to do as they target a wide array of hardware. This is even more impressive given the scale of Apple's hardware. The same kernel runs on a Watch and a Mac Studio. Second, the x86 platform has a lot of legacy, and each operation on x86 is translated from an x86 instruction into RI…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#314

Post by zikduruqe »

devjab wrote: post #304
fafhnir wrote: post #201

I have the same experience here with my MacBook Air M1 from 2020 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. After three years, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro, 36GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. I use this as my main machine with 2 displays attached via a TB4 dock. I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP. The new machines are eith…

I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it. With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any…

Ha. Same here. My personal MBA M1/8GB just chugs along with whatever I need it to do. I have a T480 32GB linux machine at home that I love, but my M1 just does what I need it to do.

And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new machine, but I am not bottlenecked by anything on my current M1.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#315

Post by kldg »

For what it's worth -- and I'm not familiar with the Framework 13 -- but I did recently review a marketed-for-AI-workloads laptop with Ryzen 260 CPU and Nvidia 5060 laptop GPU, which shipped with Windows, and was curious how graphical Ubuntu with GNOME would run from a fresh install on it. It ran hot on simple tasks, with severely worse battery performance (from 11h runtime playing a local video stream via Firefox to 3.5h) and moderately worse total work output relative to Windows.

It runs Debian headless now (I didn't have particular use for a laptop in the first place). Not sure just how unpopular this suggestion'd be, but I'd try booting Windows on the laptop to get an idea of how it's supposed to run.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#316

Post by giantrobot »

skeezyboy wrote: post #261
jonwinstanley wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of t…

> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams. how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?

Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#317

Post by koala_man »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #101

Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life. If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find s…

I once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second.

Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#318

Post by twilo »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #185
ben-schaaf wrote: post #101

Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life. If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find s…

A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of t…

Apple purchased Palo Alto Semi which made the biggest difference. One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion… not that they make all that many of those anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#319

Post by stego-tech »

There’s a number of reasons, all of which in concert create the appearance of a performance gap between the two:

* Apple has had decades optimizing its software and hardware stacks to the demands of its majority users, whereas Intel and AMD have to optimize for a much broader scope of use cases.

* Apple was willing to throw out legacy support on a regular basis. Intel and AMD, by comparison, are still expected to run code written for DOS or specific extensions in major Enterprises, which adds to complexity and cost

* The “standard” of x86 (and demand for newly-bolted-on extensions) means effort into optimizations for efficiency or performance meet diminishing returns fairly quickly. The maturity of the platform also means the “easy” gains are long gone/already done, and so it’s a matter of edge cases and smaller tweaks rather than comprehensive redesigns.

* Software in x86 world is not optimized, broadly, because it doesn’t have to be. The demoscene shows what can be achieved in tight performance envelopes, but software companies have never had reason to optimize code or performance when next year has always promised more cores or more GHz.

It boils down to comparing two different products and asking why they can’t be the same. Apple’s hardware is purpose-built for its userbase, operating systems, and software; x86 is not, and never has been. Those of us who remember the 80s and 90s of SPARC/POWER/Itanium/etc recall that specialty designs often performed better than generalist ones in their specialties, but lacked compatibility as a result.

The Apple ARM vs Intel/AMD x86 is the same thing.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#320

Post by twilo »

skeezyboy wrote: post #261
jonwinstanley wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of t…

> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams. how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?

They bought Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2008 which is where all their ARM chip designs came from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

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