Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#61

Post by sharikous » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

The M1 is packed to the brim with top of the class technology (lower node, big ROB, big caches, fast buses, very complex prefetching and branch prediction...) and has the advantage that it was basically wrote from scratch during a decade or so from simple mobile level processors to full grade CPU, but it is not magic. Competitors can certainly catch up in some years

A lot of their best engineers left and joined the competition and a whole lot depends on them. The second thing that needs to happen is a serious restructuring of existing processors, to the point of rewriting parts from scratch. It will take some time but there are companies with the budget and the know how to do it.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#62

Post by stevenjgarner » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

simonh wrote: post #18

Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments…

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I think the @simonh "domination" point is that Apple has dominated the mobile phone CPU PROFITABILITY landscape, not the SALES landscape, and I for one feel @simonh has a valid point.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#63

Post by XCSme » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #55

> achieves 87% of the performance of the Intel 12900K and Nvidia RTX 3090 combined This sounds insane (not in a good way). A 3090 destroys M1 Ultra in tasks like machine learning, 3090 being 5x-10x faster than the M1 Ultra.

Also, just stumbled upon this recent video[0] taking on the Apple marketing/graphs for the M1 ultra and testing their claims.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCs27cNz6_k

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#64

Post by belltaco » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

dav43 wrote: post #59

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.

I read “dominates” as has the “dominate share of the profits for the industry”. Not dominates shipments.

By that metric Microsoft utterly dominates the web server market.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#65

Post by datavirtue » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

user_named wrote: post #47

Perhaps the competition will instead come from China. Xiaomi, OPPO both make their own chipset now.

No worries, next president will just ban them.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#66

Post by throwaway4good » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

I don't think there is a technical reason why a chip based on the x86 ISA could not be just as efficient as one based on Apple's ARM-variation.

And AMD (and probably Intel soon) has access to the same process technology as Apple so I think it is only a matter of time before you will see a catch up.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#67

Post by alberth » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

1. Apple literally pays billions to TSMC to build a new fab

2. So Apple gets exclusive rights to those new fabs for the first 2 years

3. As a result, Apple gets access to the latest performance benefits of the newest nodes 2 years before anyone else

4. Additionally, since Apple chips are SoC - EVERYTHING (gpu, memory controller, memory, cpu, etc) gets fabbed on thr newest highest performing node. This has never been done before because even Nvidia latest chips, due to cost, are typically in 4 year old nodes, along with memory controllers etc.

You can’t underestimate the massive benefit of having the entire SoC fabbed on a node that no other company can gain access too for 2+ years

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#68

Post by devoutsalsa » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #28

uniqueuid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are absolutely out, because the M2 MBP is publicly available. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15482594

Oh so the M2 is a lot slower than Samsung phones? Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G = 2147483647 multi-core score https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15129294 But only 8928 multi-core for the new M2. Or maybe that page is kinda unreliable?

Regardless of how fast the phone is, it’s gonna throttle way down under any heavy load, unless you keep it super cool.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#69

Post by datavirtue » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #39

Quoted post unavailable.

The first thing I did with my M1 MBP was fire up my game of choice for the last twelve years. It performed adequately, and respectably, but the performance is not equal to my Nvidia 1060/70. Still, I shut off my modern i5+Nvidia desktop that day and haven't turned it on since.

MBP is too damn fast (holy shit the build times!!) and too damn quiet to go back. The M1 put the i5 in a headlock and had it begging for mercy without the slightest bit of effort.

Re: Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

#70

Post by throwaway5959 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

yxhuvud wrote: post #52

rob74 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Intel and AMD have the major disadvantage of having (or, let's say, wanting) to maintain x86 backward compatibility - which means not only staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set of the Intel 8086, but also with the whole line of CPUs that came after it. All this ballast makes it harder for them to build an energy-efficient CPU. By contrast, Apple was able to just create a new CPU bas…

How about waiting until the competitors is actually on the same process node size until declaring the x86 baggage to costly? Most of all, Apple is currently in the lead because they threw money on TSMC to get a virtual monopoly on the smallest node size. How much of that which will remain once the competitors are comparable is an unknown at this point.

What if Apple maintains a lead in process mode though? 3 nm while Intel is at 5, 2 nm while Intel is at 3, etc. I’m glad they have competition from more than just AMD and wish all three the best.