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This is a seismic shift. Can Intel and the other players like AMD and Nvidia catch up to this peformace per watt that Apple has on their hands?
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 smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance.
Modern cpus being able to run dos software is certainly nice, but it’s probably preventing intel/amd from performing some aggressive restyling and optimisation/refactoring to their isa and its implementation in silicon.
Apple on the other hand happily deprecates its own os releases and the hardware supported. Software retro-compatibility is then achieved in software (rosetta and such)
Imho they can as long as they agree to drop some sort if retro-compatibility. Modern cpus being able to run dos software is certainly nice, but it’s probably preventing intel/amd from performing some aggressive restyling and optimisation/refactoring to their isa and its implementation in silicon. Apple on the other hand happily deprecates its own os releases and the hardware supported. Software retro-compatibility is…
What's the performance hit/wafer space for that today?
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…
No...
Back in the 90's, there were more contenders than just AMD and Intel. Apple was using PowerPC chips, and on the x86 side there were several other competitors. Sure, it's been a bit one-sided since Apple went the Intel route, Via faded into obscurity and Transmeta went belly-up, but something else re-appearing as a viable, competitive platform is neither unprecedented nor unexpected.
It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination.
Also, I expect that the 5nm process is responsible for a large part of the power savings in the M1. So I would expect an AMD CPU on TSMCs 5nm to be pretty close in terms of performance per watt. It's just that the mainstream market isn't willing to pay the premium price for 5nm yet. So AMD produces "good enough" at a price that people are happy to pay, which means they need to hold off on going 5nm for now.
For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination. Also, I expect that the 5nm process is res…
Riiight, but, OP isn't necessarily talking purely from an AI/ML use case.
Technology is created by people, and I believe a big chunk of Apple's silicon team left last year.
So I hope we will see good performance from non-vertically integrated cpus soon. ie companies offering devices using a Qualcom or whatever cpu, which can run windows, linux, etc, not just tied into the Apple ecosystem.
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…
There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. The observed performance gap is larger than what we can see happen between DDR4 and DDR5, and larger than what is expected to happen for AMD's and Intel's x86 between 7 and 5 nm.