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Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

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Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#81

Post by [deleted] »

h0l0cube wrote: post #49
oneplane wrote: post #23

It'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…

> Intel can probably make faster stuff than they currently do but then their customers (PC manufacturers for instance)n would have to modify all their stuff This is a crucial point. It's a coordination problem. Drivers only need to be made for those components that Apple choose for their system vs the multitude combinations of GPU boards, drive systems, motherboard chips, wifi etc etc. that exist for a modern PC. The…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#82

Post by muterad_murilax »

yagya wrote: post #38
silly-silly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody writes i386 code anymore though, Apple mostly support x86-64 from 10 years ago.

And i386 support was removed in macOS Mojave anyway.

macOS Catalina, actually.

Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#83

Post by bcrl »

cma wrote: post #55
titzer wrote: post #53

I think the M1 chip finally proves the inherent design superiority of RISC over CISC. For years, Intel stayed ahead of all other competitors by having the best process, clockspeeds, and the most advanced out-of-order execution. By internally decoding CISC to RISC, Intel could feed a large number of execution ports to extract maximum ILP. They had to spend gobs of silicon for that: complex decoding, made worse by the…

Other things helping are forced >=16Kb page sizes, and massive L1 caches (M1 has 4X Zen 3's L1 data cache and 3X the L1 instruction cache; how much of that cache size is enabled by new process node and larger page sizes vs just lack of x86 decode I don't know).

L1 cache size is driven by the target clock frequency. Apple is not aiming for 5+GHz, whereas both Intel and AMD cores can turbo above 5GHz these days.

Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#84

Post by mickdaisy »

> How did Tesla manage to create this when GM has been making cars for decades and that is the singular focus of the company?

(replaced the subjects with auto-industry corollaries)

I think it's the power of vertical integrations. When you aren't cobbling together a bunch of general-purpose bits for general-purpose consumers, you don't have to pay as many taxes. Sort of like SRP in software - a multi-purpose function is going to become super bloated and expensive to maintain, compared to several single-purpose alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principl...

Vertical integration is like taking horizontally-integrated business units and refactoring them per SOLID principles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#85

Post by 67868018 »

Koiwai wrote: post #45

Several comments mentioned Apple M1 doesn't need to support legacy, but Rosetta 2's support for amd64(yes I choose this term over x86-64) is beyond great, and I looked into that specifically a while ago, some mention Apple had something designed specifically for amd64 emulation, So I'm against that point.

amd64 is the correct term. It's amd's instruction set; they were the first to do it. The BSDs call it amd64, it's only Linux being the odd duck calling it x86_64

Re: Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel?

#87

Post by lukeh »

jibcage wrote: post #26
Groxx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a small note, as far as I can tell the PPC -> x86 version of Rosetta was at least partly licensed from "Transitive Corporation" by Apple, not entirely in-house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit . I have no idea about Rosetta2 though.

Transitive was acquired by Apple, I imagine Rosetta 2 was the product of many of the same engineers.

Transitive was acquired by IBM, not Apple. I believe some engineers ended up at Apple though.
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