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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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

#141

Post by kingosticks »

londons_explore wrote: post #100
crooked-v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sell…

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

Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.

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

#142

Post by NavinF »

londons_explore wrote: post #97
morpheuskafka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't false sharing (as in all your addresses hashing onto the same cache lines) still an issue for power-of-two sizes? You'd have to mess with padding to figure out what's fastest for each chip regardless of core count.

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

#143

Post by tarsinge »

solatic wrote: post #127
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? Apple is iPhone-izing (for lack of a better word) the rest of their product lines. If for the last ten years, the market hasn't really cared about the speed of the phone's processor within the same generation, but rather about physical differentiators (e.g. screen size, number of camera lenses, adding facial recognition), and the non-professional market is overwh…

> the non-professional market is overwhelmingly characterized by light-usage applications

I'm not sure social networks and most modern sites or apps qualifies as light-usage nowadays. Browsing Reddit or Facebook put my pro to its knees. The difference of CPU speed in phones is clearly visible for consumers (but maybe you don't notice it if you only use iPhones, because an SE from 2015 is still fast, but try an Android phone from that period).

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

#144

Post by yxhuvud »

titzer wrote: post #46
tyingq wrote: post #30

I remain interested in seeing how much of Apple's lead is the process size, and how much is engineering prowess. That is, would a more generic new ARM Neoverse on 5nm perform at roughly the same clip? I suppose AWS's Graviton 3 would be the first place to see that, or something close to it.

The CPU microarchitecture is truly a quantum leap ahead of x86 processors. The fixed-width nature of arm instructions means there's way more front-end bandwidth for decode, which can then feed a much larger out-of-order engine. Having memory so close is also a huge win. TBH, I don't know what wizardry they have managed to get power consumption so low, but wow. 15W TDP and trouncing desktop processors pulling 12x that…

That is the talk yes, but we don't know how much of the actual performance improvements is simply due to the lower process size. And process size is independent of if it is ARM or x86, but instead depends on manufacturers getting production slots in the chip foundries. Currently Apple is hogging up all the production capabilities of the smallest process that TSMC have.

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

#145

Post by ksec »

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.

Would you feel better if they called it A14X?

It is basically the same thing as what Intel is doing. Same Die, different binning, different naming. Same with Core count on AMD, same die, different binning on Cores and Clock Speed.

Apple doesn't bother do any of that because well it is complicated for consumers. I call it TDP Computing. You are limited by the TDP Design of the product. Not the Chip.

I am waiting to see Apple absolutely max out their SoC approach for Mac Pro.

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

#146

Post by pjc50 »

selcuka wrote: post #35
smiley1437 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of Arm designs OTHER than the M1 which are suitable for consumers? Yes, the M1 is a remarkable product and it will certainly make inroads against x86 on the desktop but it is from a single company. Will Apple M1 (2, 3 etc) replace all x86 devices in a decade? That’s hard to swallow. Now, if we see another Arm product released that ALSO kicks x86 butt, from another player, then maybe I’d believe a c…

Qualcomm is also entering the laptop segment with its 8cx platform [1]. While not a serious contender to M1 yet, it is comparable to an Intel i5 [2]. Samsung is also planning to release an Exynos laptop [3]. [1] https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon-8cx-gen-2-5g-co... [2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/snapdragon-8cx-vs-co... [3] https://www.engadget.com/samsung-exynos-amd-2200-windows-10-...

Qualcomm are terrible, though; rather than doing an M1 and competing on performance, they rely on cornering the mobile market with a patent portfolio.

They also have (fortunately) zero control over the downstream software, so they can't do Apple-style vertically integrated improvements.

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

#147

Post by Tade0 »

speedplane wrote: post #69

The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come. The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for com…

Moore's law is safe for at least two generations of chips, for which there are processes developed.

As we speak people are putting together 3nm(TSMC) designs, which will ship once the infrastructure is there.

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

#148

Post by rowanG077 »

izacus wrote: post #120
ipsum2 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lau…

Exactly, so what is the point here? How exactly is that different from Intel generations? Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It seems like there are performance differences there if they choose to install differently configured SoCs in different devices and even split them by pricing on the iMac. So, please, explain where's this big difference…

There are only two different M1 versions. The 7 GPU version and the 8 GPU version. All of the cpu cores are the same. All power envelopes are the same. That's much different then the vastly different form factors and power envelopes intel has.

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

#149

Post by soneil »

izacus wrote: post #120
ipsum2 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lau…

Exactly, so what is the point here? How exactly is that different from Intel generations? Why does Apple put different amount of cores and clocks into different products if the choice doesn't matter? It seems like there are performance differences there if they choose to install differently configured SoCs in different devices and even split them by pricing on the iMac. So, please, explain where's this big difference…

I've seen nothing to indicate different products have different clock speeds?

So far we're seeing two differentiators. One is the use of the 7-GPU bin to hit the bottom-of-the-range price point for each product family. The other is simply the different thermal characteristics of different products - the passively cooled Air & iPad Pro will thermally throttle earlier than the actively cooled MBP, iMac & mini.

The products aren't being differentiated in silicon, they're being differentiated in feature & format. My mother can tell me the difference between an iPad and a macbook without describing anything that she can't see with her own eyes.

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

#150

Post by klelatti »

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1.

It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1".

It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably).

I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years with only the obscure (to the general public) suffix changing from generation to generation.

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