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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?

#501

Post by spixy »

shermantanktop wrote: post #407
stego-tech wrote: post #319

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…

Intel chose and stuck with backcompat as a strategy. They could, tomorrow, split their designs into legacy hardware and modern hardware. They didn’t, but Apple has done breaking generational change many times. Apple also has a particular advantage in owning the os and having the ability to force independent developers to upgrade their software, which make incompatible updates (including perf optimizations) possible.

Intel also wanted to break backcompat and start fresh with Itanium but it failed.

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

#502

Post by vlod »

veidr wrote: post #490
kwimajs wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I haven't done any research on this, but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time. My laptop has 32 GB of RAM and an i7-14700H processor, with Linux Mint installed. I'm more than happy with its performance, especially considering I bought it for a price that was very cheap for the market. I wonder what specs a MacBook would need to give me similar performance. For example, on Linux with 32…

I don't know for sure, either, but I suspect any recent Macbook with 16GB RAM would be a significant upgrade over 14700H. I don't like macOS, so in recent years, I only use it on laptop (which for me is like, a few on-site meetings per year, plus a few airplane flights). What infuriates me is that my mid-tier Mac laptop for those use cases is now significantly faster than any Linux workstation I can possibly buy... a…

I really hoped that Asahi Linux had progressed. I want to use Linux on apple hardware.

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

#503

Post by [deleted] »

shermantanktop wrote: post #407
stego-tech wrote: post #319

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…

Intel chose and stuck with backcompat as a strategy. They could, tomorrow, split their designs into legacy hardware and modern hardware. They didn’t, but Apple has done breaking generational change many times. Apple also has a particular advantage in owning the os and having the ability to force independent developers to upgrade their software, which make incompatible updates (including perf optimizations) possible.

[deleted]

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

#504

Post by JustExAWS »

hajile wrote: post #493
JustExAWS wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought people stopped believing this around 2005 when Apple users finally had to admit that PPC was behind x86. Even though this was the case for the most part during the entire history of PPC Macs (I owned two during these years) https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Cheese and Chips makes some bad arguments in that article. Their claim that ARM decoders are just as complex wasn't true then and is even less true now. ARM reduced decoder size 75% from A710 to A715 by dropping legacy 32-bit stuff. Considering that x86 is way more complex than 32-bit ARM, the difference between an x86 and ARM decoder implementation is absolutely massive. They abuse the decoder power paper (and that…

Fair enough.

And don’t forget that Apple can do things like completely remove all of the hardware that supports 32 bit code and tell developers to just deal with it.

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

#507

Post by bsenftner »

hajile wrote: post #470
bsenftner wrote: post #257

Well, there is a major architectural reason why the entire M-series appears to be "so fast" and that is the unified memory, which completely eliminates the buffer-to-buffer data copying that is probably over half of what a non-unified memory architecture chip is doing at any given time. M-series chips have an architecture that completely eliminates data copying, just reference the data where it is, and you're done.

Apple made a big deal about this, but other iGPUs have done this for years.

It's not just the GPU memory, it's also I/O memory. That speeds up a lot: just update the pointer to where the memory is, no copying out of I/O memory.

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

#508

Post by impure-aqua »

novok wrote: post #415
koala_man wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Safari team explicitly targets perf as a target. I just wish they weren't so bad about extensions and adblock and I'd use it as my daily driver. But those paper cuts make me go back to chromium browsers all the time.

I find Orion has similar power efficiency but avoids those papercuts: https://kagi.com/orion/

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

#509

Post by brokencode »

skeezyboy wrote: post #323
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.

cpu yes, but what about the rest of the iphone?

They design much more in house than any other smartphone brand, except maybe Samsung.

CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…

They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.

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

#510

Post by ljosifov »

Plenty of excellent comments about the companies - e.g. Apple vertical closed mobile 1st, while Microsoft horizontal open desktop 1st; decades of work by many thousands of people went into optimising many tiny advantages, aka tricks - but can't help but think back of pre-history. Where Intel was always more-is-more, while ARM was always less-is-more. Intel was winning for the longest time. Never expected to see non-x86 competitive single core integer performance tbh. And in the pre-pre-history, one generation further back, tiny 6502 1MHz and mostly totally 8 bit only, could about keep up with Z80 4MHz and his almost-aspiring-to 16 bit registers. Always made me wonder somewhat - "whut, how come??"
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