That's roughly 3.4B transistors/in^2
Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
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Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#62I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…
> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components. I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.) If that follows as a…
The issue with power efficiency, speed, and price is that it's even harder to measure than transistor density. Furthermore, I think metrics that measure the technological progress of the silicon manufacturing are a useful tool for enriching comparisons of chips. Yes, numbers like cache sizes (or transistor density) aren't what people ultimately need/want, they want speed, but it still helps them compare chips. Improvements of the underlying process alone could lead to improvements of power efficiency, speed, and price.
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#63I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…
These things aren't _really_ two-dimensional. They're not really three-dimensional either, but they are objects built out of layers of two-dimensional things. When you measure number of transistors per unit area you will inevitably see something more dense than the "number of 5nm square in a millimeter of area". It's the silicon equivalent of measuring one's BMI.
Video games used to call their pseudo-3d display 2.5D, or if they were feeling fancy, isomorphic.
There is a little freedom in the Z axis, but not very much. But if speed of light matters to performance, then a chip design that increases the z axis decreases the euclidean distance between any two gates, which should (or at least could) matter to performance, right?
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I made a tiny transistor but to avoid leakage/interference or melting the transistor, I had to surround it by a bunch of empty silicon. There are lots and lots of cases where this could not be called a success. I hesitate to say there are none, because I'm sure some task that is highly sensitive to latency might potentially benefit, but if you build the whole chip that way, it would actually be a regression…
Sure but, despite the extra space around any individual transistor, you're still shoving 49% more transistors into the same overall amount of space. Then everything benefits and no one cares about the node name.
> you're still shoving 49% more transistors into the same overall amount of space
What I fear is that we've hit the point where this is no longer a safe assumption. That we will be having people chase feature size numbers that don't actually result in a proportional increase in chip density.
Transistors per square millimeter is closer to a measure we actually care about (speed of light and clock speed) instead of a bench number that doesn't measure anything except perhaps instructions per watt.
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#65I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…
The funny thing is is this isn't really Apple's achievement. It's TSMC's achievement. It's also Intel's failure in that they failed to get a similar process working on schedule.
Yes, but Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and countless others use the same fabs or at least have access to the same fabs. It's Apple's engineering and design.
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple doesn't have an exclusive on 5 nm; it's also being used by Kirin 9000, Snapdragon 875, some Exynos, and a future Dimensity SoC.
I'm not sure how to square that claim with this sort of article: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm...
I believe it's about the remaining fab capacity that was available at that time
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many professionals are using iPad Pro for audio e.g. DAW and video e.g. editing.
What DAW are they using? I use my iPad as a remote for Presonus Studio One sometimes, but I couldn't consider using it as the recording system itself, since the AU and VST accessibility isn't there. I would also use my iPad as a synthesiser (eg. Magellan) but then record the audio to a "real" computer, ie the Mac, via a recording interface.
GarageBand is enough for a lot of people. There’s also Cubasis and Gadget 2 (which is more synth focused).
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#68I think this is cool if they’re the future of the Mac, but aren’t these chips just wasted in the iPad? I say this as an iPad Pro (1st-gen) owner ... it’s already way more processing power than I can really use, because after trying for months to get a sensible workflow going (mostly based around Pythonista, Editorial and RealVNC) I’ve relegated it to a OneNote and Netflix machine. What’s the point other than the cool…
Having a more-powerful-than-necessary CPU has many benefits, here are some: - Less heat produced > allows for smaller heatsinks and, as a result, smaller devices or bigger components - Performance bottlenecks become less likely - Features like 120hz display refresh rate become possible without the user noticing degradation - Faster OS boot and app starts - Ability to do more work locally vs using a server (see the ma…
Battery life. The faster a task is completed (at a given power cost) the sooner the CPU can go back to standby.
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#69I was curious just how many chips per wafer they net. From this 2018 article[1], it appears to be ~530 at 5nm, which would be $32ea if that yield is accurate. The same article estimated 7nm chips came out to $18ea. Apparently, R&D spend went up 50% from 7nm to 5nm. I'm curious to see how many flavors of the A14 Apple cooks up given the comparatively high die cost. [1] https://wccftech.com/apple-5nm-3nm-cost-transisto…
This might be one of the reasons they're transitioning to Apple Silicon, as it will allow them to justify the raising R&D costs over a wider array of products.
Are Mac volume numbers even a rounding error relative to mobile devices?
Re: Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²
#70I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2. The usual "node" figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn't care less about "feature" size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed "node" of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That's two orders of magnitude more dense than…
> straightforward top line number 134e6/mm^2
Even that number is not so straightforward.
Tr/mm^2 = 0.6 * (NAND2 Tr)/mm^2 + 0.4 * (Scan Flip-fop Tr)/mm2