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Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#32Kind of sad to think about this - Why does marketing dept not actually show these and instead put up a cartoonized version of Apple's chips [1]? That's in every keynote. This is a rhetorical question, the real mystery is why does an average consumer want to see unreal things to convince them its cooler/better? You'd think seeing actual die shots would be more convincing to average consumer, but they love marketing th…
They do have a shot on https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (the first non-logo image) which looks like it matches up (you'll need to rotate one by 180°). So it's not like they're hiding it or actively avoiding it. It apparently just doesn't suit their needs.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#33How does one identify which regions of a die-shot is the CPU or GPU? Are the structures on silicon easily recognizable from such pictures? How far can someone with time and money go towards reverse engineering a chip from such pictures?
For very old chips reverse engineering is relatively easy; here's one example: http://www.righto.com/2020/04/inside-am2901-amds-1970s-bit-s... For modern chips you need an electron microscope and there are a lot of metal layers to deal with.
You don't need an electron microscope to discern large-scale repeated structures like CPU and GPU cores, or to tell the difference between random logic and highly regular memory arrays (usually cache, but sometimes you can see microcode or register files if you look at a small enough area). An electron microscope is only useful if you want to fully reverse-engineer the entire circuit schematic, but that's overkill for basically any purpose except manufacturing your own clone.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a technical consumer I don’t know why I would want to see the actual die shots - it really doesn’t tell me anything at all. The graphics they put on slides or marketing sites aren’t supposed to be technical reference material, usually it’s just about conveying the idea of a SoC or performance improvements, or relative sizes, or whatever.
The inquiry I am making is more general - infantilization of consumers and the idea of dumbing things down for consumers like they're blobs of meat with cash to spare. You don't need to see the cartoonized version of it either. May be its easier as a schematic to explain? Not sure. A list of M1's features would work equally well. I think its just marketing pizzaz.
There is a list of features here:
Or are you looking for more detail, like the width of the decode pipeline or depth of the reorder buffer?
I would think that a majority of software engineers don’t know what those are, fewer still would understand the significance compared other chips.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#35[deleted]
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#36Kind of sad to think about this - Why does marketing dept not actually show these and instead put up a cartoonized version of Apple's chips [1]? That's in every keynote. This is a rhetorical question, the real mystery is why does an average consumer want to see unreal things to convince them its cooler/better? You'd think seeing actual die shots would be more convincing to average consumer, but they love marketing th…
[deleted]
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#37Kind of sad to think about this - Why does marketing dept not actually show these and instead put up a cartoonized version of Apple's chips [1]? That's in every keynote. This is a rhetorical question, the real mystery is why does an average consumer want to see unreal things to convince them its cooler/better? You'd think seeing actual die shots would be more convincing to average consumer, but they love marketing th…
The other discussion here recently about how Apple is very silo'd internally is relevant: the marketing department very likely doesn't have access to real die photos.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#38Kind of sad to think about this - Why does marketing dept not actually show these and instead put up a cartoonized version of Apple's chips [1]? That's in every keynote. This is a rhetorical question, the real mystery is why does an average consumer want to see unreal things to convince them its cooler/better? You'd think seeing actual die shots would be more convincing to average consumer, but they love marketing th…
They do have a shot on https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (the first non-logo image) which looks like it matches up (you'll need to rotate one by 180°). So it's not like they're hiding it or actively avoiding it. It apparently just doesn't suit their needs.
The degree to which they hype UMA (a term of art within the PC industry for decades) on that page is amusing --- if Intel did the same sort of marketing for its integrated GPUs, they would almost certainly be laughed at.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have a shot on https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (the first non-logo image) which looks like it matches up (you'll need to rotate one by 180°). So it's not like they're hiding it or actively avoiding it. It apparently just doesn't suit their needs.
The degree to which they hype UMA (a term of art within the PC industry for decades ) on that page is amusing --- if Intel did the same sort of marketing for its integrated GPUs, they would almost certainly be laughed at.
This is consumer marketing; “people who have a solid grasp of fundamental SoC architecture” are not the target audience.
Re: Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cache, GPU, Secure Enclave, Neural processors, peripheral controllers. GPU takes the lion’s share.
The Cache, GPU, and NPU are all already labeled in the image. The Secure Enclave is a good one to point out that is in the unlabeled space. Certainly some non-DDR peripherals are in the unlabeled space, but it would be neat to have a more comprehensively labeled diagram. I wouldn't expect most peripherals to take up so many transistors compared to the processor cores.
There's probably 4 lanes of pcie to connect the nvme ssd to, a couple more lanes to run the thunderbolt controllers, 2-3 usb controllers + a hub to connect the keyboard and touchpad, an audio dac and some thermal and power usage monitoring. They might even put the ethernet controller that shoes up on the Mac mini in there.