231–240 of 467 posts
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Every vendor does not have their own set of extensions. Different x86 chips have different extensions (from a pre-defined set) - I don't see panic about x86 fragmentation.
Is there any difference between AMD and Intel these days in terms of instructions other than AVX512?
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M1 is not RISC-V and I don't think CISC vs RISC is of any significance here. If naive bayes is really embarassingly parallel, SIMD+lots of cores help here of course. It is also probably highly optimized code that doesn't rely so significantly on OoO capabilities and can take advantage of the higher clock rate. Even Itanium was very good at numerical code.
What is the M1 then? https://medium.com/swlh/what-does-risc-and-cisc-mean-in-2020... confused.
Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…
There is more to a cloud than the chips. Having the cloud chip in your dev laptop wont mean you have the same memory/power/cooling/storage services. Code optimized on your laptop, despite having the same chip, wont necessarily run perfectly in the cloud.
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The base ISA is set by ARM, but every vendor has their own set of features turned on or off, and their own extensions, and potentially their own way of laying out memory mapped IO and identifying peripherals.
Every vendor does not have their own set of extensions. Different x86 chips have different extensions (from a pre-defined set) - I don't see panic about x86 fragmentation.
The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.
Imagine AWS launching ec2 instances with M1 chips!
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/announcin...
The bit about multicore not being as useful for development as production is a rather odd generalization. If you build large C++/Rust/Haskell/etc projects regularly, you want all the cores.
That was my thought there are plenty of development environments where more cores are required. The m1 is interesting but I don't think its going to scale as well as a lot of people desperately want to believe.
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Just a quick note, the MacBook Air is by no means "ultralight" even by Apple standards, 2017 MacBook for example was more than twice lighter. Thinkpad laptops are also measurably lighter than any current generation MacBook.
> more than twice lighter. Under half the weight?
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Well, Apple has managed to move all the way down to a 5nm process while Intel still hasn't made it past 14nm. AFAIK that's the largest limiting factor for Intel. I can't speak to why they have been stuck there for so long.
Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days, I’m currently typing this on a previous-gen Macbook Air with a 10nm Intel CPU. They’re definitely not stuck on 14nm.
There was a youtube video where the guy used a scanning electron microscope to compare gate sizes between 14nm intel and 7nm AMD and both were basically the exact same size.
The conclusion was that the term is useful only to compare a single companies product line against other offerings in that line (eg comparing Intel's 14nm to Intel's 20nm makes sense but comparing Intel to AMD based on node size is meaningless).
This kind of changes the narrative about the Intel/ AMD competition of late. For the past few years people have been suggesting AMD has been hitting it out of the park in terms of performance. This suggests that's not necessarily the case. AMD didn't have to hit it out of the park to humiliate Intel, they just needed to be competent. A professional ball club doesn't need a team of All Stars to embarrass a farm team.
Well note that this seems to be nearly all single-core (or low-core) benchmarks, whereas AMD's Ryzen performance recommendation has always been around its multithreaded performance, with its single-core performance called out specifically as being a compromise (until the 5000 series, anyway, which wasn't used here). Something like an ObjC or C++ compilation test would be very interesting here.
Considering that Apple won't sell their chips to anybody else, and the M2, M3, Mn could be increasingly faster than the x86 chips, how long before we start moving along this path? 1. Amazon, Google, Microsoft start building their own chips for their own clouds. The most efficient chip could translate into the cheapest cloud, or the fastest one at the same price. Their choice. 2. There will be N somewhat compatible AR…
It has nothing to do with their architecture. Here are the facts: The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. No surprise the M1 is faster. Most credit should go to TSMC for being able to manufacture 5nm chips.