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Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

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

#81

Post by throwaway5959 »

yxhuvud wrote: post #74
throwaway5959 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple may maintain the lead, but it is done by throwing money at TSMC, not by having better technology by themselves. I'd prefer a situation where the TSMC let all of them have some access to the better node sizes as that would let the company with the better tech sell more.

I don’t see why the distinction would matter to the people it should matter the most to, Apple’s customers.

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

#82

Post by kaba0 »

mromanuk wrote: post #75
yxhuvud wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comparing currently available CPUs on the market is pretty fair.

Sure, but would you go as far to claim that X phone is so much better in battery, Y has no chance of catching up, when X just put a twice as big battery in their phone?

Like we just don’t know how much node size alone matters in the picture (or in the analogy, whether the improvement is only due to the bigger capacity battery vs better energy management at other places)

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

#84

Post by yxhuvud »

mromanuk wrote: post #75
yxhuvud wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comparing currently available CPUs on the market is pretty fair.

That is definitely true, but you can't reach any conclusion on the cost of the x86 baggage by comparing different process nodes. It has way too much influence on the end result to be ignored.

In a few months we will have both AMD and Apple on the same size, so we will finally get some idea of how the baggage compare then. It won't be a long situation, Apple will relatively soon after release a new on a smaller size again.

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

#85

Post by emidln »

chrisseaton wrote: post #36
norman784 wrote: post #24

I think if x86 get rid of their legacy instructions, they could reduce their core size, and a few side effects will be performance per watt gains and maybe also performance (smaller cores), and if you need the legacy instructions you could just emulate, most consumer PCs don't need those. That's the biggest difference with x86 and ARM, ARM got a lot of breaking changes with their versions, while x86 don't (I'm not su…

> I think if x86 get rid of their legacy instructions, they could reduce their core size Aren't those legacy instructions already emulated in microcode? I don't think they take up much physical footprint.

Yes. People bandying about "legacy x86" instructions miss this often. This isn't much different, conceptually, from Apple's Rosetta, except it's provided in microcode automatically rather than a discrete transform you need to run once and cache. This is very convenient for broad x86 backwards compatibility (e.g. I can run a Java 1.4 JVM and StarOffice or a libc.so.5 to play Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine on my 5900x). Can I run x86 apps, even ones from the last couple years on an M1 with no questions asked? Well, we abandoned local dockerized development at work because Docker for Mac's qemu couldn't hook into Rosetta and qemu alone couldn't handle JIT'd instructions from a jvm11[0]. Maybe that changes with the new MacOS version and the next version of Rosetta (there seems to be a Rosetta that works like qemu's binfmt_misc translators for Linux), but it's been missing for 2 years so far and caused me to do a bunch of work on remote dev capabilities in the meantime.

[0] Let me stop you right there before you suggest I recompile 15 years of operating systems, third party toolchains, and internal tools for ARM and then rebuild every intermediate container just so we can work around Rosetta shipping without necessary features. I know that you can ship a whole parallel stack of containers with ARM but that's not feasible in the slightest for anything but the most trivial use cases or entirely greenfield projects.

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

#86

Post by fortran77 »

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.

> That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents.

Exactly right! It always amazes me to see the bubble some people here live in (and that's the best possible interpretation of these sort of comments; the worst is that it's a coordinated/paid astroturf attempt) We just spec'd several new computers here and they're all Xeon/NVidia. Nothing else can meet our needs.

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

#87

Post by maccard »

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.

I dont fall in the "apple has changed the world" camp, but bear in mind what you're saying here - the flagship $1500 MSRP GPU is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device, with less than half the power usage. That's a pretty impressive feat for a first attempt.

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

#88

Post by maccard »

naillo wrote: post #79

Considering that no one with an apple M1 chip is gaming or training ML with it, I'm not even sure what it means that these are supposedly better. What are people even using the extra performance for? Keeping thousands of tabs open simultaneously?

We use it for compilation. The M1 Mac Pro we use is about 50% quicker than the i7 we had before it for an end to end compile of our project.

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

#89

Post by daneel_w »

uniqueuid wrote: post #22
daneel_w wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And M2 benchmarks aren't even out yet. The topic will be yet more interesting in the coming months.

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

My point is that benchmarking as a whole need a bit of time to mature with the help of real and diverse usage. Not just two weeks of GeekBench.

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

#90

Post by fxtentacle »

tambourine_man wrote: post #38
fxtentacle wrote: post #7

For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination. Also, I expect that the 5nm process is res…

Software changes much faster these days. We are all dealing with high abstraction layers and legacy x86/64 and even CUDA can be replaced without much disruption in most cases. If it’s proven that Apple can consistently provide better performance per watt per dollar and have enough chips available that people can actually buy, I think they can stand a chance to gain the AI market.

"even CUDA can be replaced without much disruption in most cases"

Tell that to AMD who's been missing out on the very lucrative government data-center market because they can't replace CUDA well enough. BTW, PyTorch and TensorFlow still ship without AMD support despite AMD's ROCm being around for 6 years now.

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