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ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

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Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#4
Anandtech's deep dive into Apple's Firestorm big cores is definitely worth reading if you are interested in how the chips that use their ARM implementation are different.

>On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline. The FP rename registers here seem to land at 384 entries, which is again comparatively massive. The four 128-bit NEON pipelines thus on paper match the current throughput capabilities of desktop cores from AMD and Intel, albeit with smaller vectors. Floating-point operations throughput here is 1:1 with the pipeline count, meaning Firestorm can do 4 FADDs and 4 FMULs per cycle with respectively 3 and 4 cycles latency. That’s quadruple the per-cycle throughput of Intel CPUs and previous AMD CPUs, and still double that of the recent Zen3, of course, still running at lower frequency. This might be one reason why Apples does so well in browser benchmarks (JavaScript numbers are floating-point doubles).

Vector abilities of the 4 pipelines seem to be identical, with the only instructions that see lower throughput being FP divisions, reciprocals and square-root operations that only have an throughput of 1, on one of the four pipes.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#5
The M1 has 8 instruction decoders while every Intel processor maxes out at 4. This enables many more instructions in flight than on Intel.

The M1 can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle than an x86 processor can.

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#9
Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well.

Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?

Re: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

#10

Considering the positive reception of the M1, I'd like to see the cases where the M1 does sorely lose to the Intel chip as the post alludes to. The SIMD sounds promising in that regard, but I don't know processor technology that well. Does anyone know where the Intel chip greatly outdoes the M1?

Running x86 code? :)
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