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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#91

Post by londons_explore »

dehrmann wrote: post #50
kmeisthax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad Pro gets you an M1. This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business right now because they're just trying to get M1 silicon into as many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don't actually have an M2 (or even M1X)…

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

Binning requires more design work for the chip. I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly and probably they decided that hundreds of different bins for different types of defects wasn't worth the complexity if it meant delaying tape out for a few weeks. It also leads to extra product complexity (customers would be upset if some macbooks had hardware AES and others didn't, leading to some software being unusably slow seemingly at random).

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#92

Post by izacus »

ipsum2 wrote: post #90
izacus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that any different than having a single Intel generation scale all the way from low powered laptop SoCs to 12 core i9s though? After all, the M1s across devices aren't the same either - iMacs have different configuration from iPads, those have different amount of cores and clocks from Airs and MBPs as well. It seems like the difference is only in Apple vs. Intel marketing blurb.

Power consumption, number of cores, clock speed, etc.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say - M1s are differing in clock speed, number of cores and number of GPU cores across Apple products as well.

"M1" is basically equivalent to "Core i" designation from Intel - except that Apple just doesn't tell you about the other part.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#93

Post by ipsum2 »

speedplane wrote: post #76
nightowl_games wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.

> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue. The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months. Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in tw…

Moore's law is only about the number of transistors per chip doubling every 24 months, not about the performance. Seeing that the trend is still happening, Moore's law is not dead, as so many have claimed.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#94

Post by cecja »

akmarinov wrote: post #79
wmf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you see AMD put 8 cores in 15W.

That’s the thing, while we’re waiting on AMD, Apple is already half way through an M2/3

Yeah, if they had something on their hand they wouldn't put the same chip in everything.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#95

Post by londons_explore »

isomorphic wrote: post #62
dehrmann wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple's margins are already so high they don't care?

I believe that Apple is effectively doing some binning with the M1: The intro MacBook Air has one less GPU core than the higher-config version or the MacBook Pro. It would make sense if those were identically-made M1s where one GPU core didn't test well and thus had its fuses blown. Between the CPU and GPU, the GPU cores are almost certainly larger anyway; the GPU cores would therefore have higher probability of defe…

It should be possible to identify this from infrared images of the cores in operation.

If you find different sets of cores in use, you can be pretty sure it was binned...

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#96

Post by ipsum2 »

izacus wrote: post #92
ipsum2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power consumption, number of cores, clock speed, etc.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say - M1s are differing in clock speed, number of cores and number of GPU cores across Apple products as well. "M1" is basically equivalent to "Core i" designation from Intel - except that Apple just doesn't tell you about the other part.

No? That's the entire point of the article. The only difference is whether you get a 7 core or 8 core GPU.

> If you want to buy a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, Apple will sell you an M1. Want a Mac Mini? You get an M1. Interested in the iMac or the new iPad Pro? You get an M1. It’s possible that the M1 CPUs inside the iMac will have different thermal or clock behavior than those inside the systems Apple has already launched, but the company’s decision to eschew clock speed disclosures suggests that these CPUs differ only modestly.

> with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#97

Post by londons_explore »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #64
DenseComet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they do binning. For example, the M1 with 7 gpu cores vs 8 gpu cores.

That struck me as an extremely odd metric to differentiate products by, given its low relevance to non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs). Additionally, most people are going to think adding one more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its quite strange to see an odd number of cores.

It will have a far greater than 1/8th performance impact.

When data structures are power-of-two sizes, having 7 cores instead of 8 could halve performance, since the work gets split into 4 pieces and 3 cores sit idle.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#98

Post by whizzter »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #64
DenseComet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they do binning. For example, the M1 with 7 gpu cores vs 8 gpu cores.

That struck me as an extremely odd metric to differentiate products by, given its low relevance to non-technical users who don't know what a GPU core even is (except gamers, but they are not buying iMacs). Additionally, most people are going to think adding one more core is hardly worth the price upgrade, and its quite strange to see an odd number of cores.

Depends, remember that the 5nm processors overall are fairly new so we have no idea of yields. But if 1/5th of the processors are flawless, 1/5th have one faulty GPU and the rest have more errors (in either CPU or two or more GPU failures) then having twice the amount of CPU's available to sell (at a slightly lower pricepoint) might make perfect sense.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#99

Post by daniellarusso »

Corrado wrote: post #78
monkmartinez wrote: post #15

You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back eithe…

> The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen, lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this is t…

In high school, I worked a retail job for an office supply store, and one of the PC brands we would sell was Packard Bell.

We sold many different models with similar specs, and the main feature many of the potential buyers would be concerned with:

Will it fit with my current office furniture?

We sold both desktops and tower configurations, and the type of desk the computer would be used with was the determining factor in which model to buy.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#100

Post by londons_explore »

crooked-v wrote: post #18
monkmartinez wrote: post #15

You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back eithe…

> The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? They've only replaced the lower tier of Macbooks and iMacs with the current M1 board, which suggests to me that they're working on a variant with more CPU and GPU cores that will go into the higher tiers of those machines.

I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that.

Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1.

A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The same capacity would sell fewer products.

Apple probably earns more profits by simply selling more M1s, unless they can reserve substantially more fab capacity.

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