Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 323 posts

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

#91

Post by fxtentacle »

sph wrote: post #37
fxtentacle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That number is 2^31-1, the maximum number representable as a signed 32bit integer. Sounds like someone managed to push their fake Geekbench score. "Text compression: 22.8 TB/s". How long does the battery last though?

Yes, that's what I wanted to say. Geekbench scores aren't that trustworthy.

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

#92

Post by nottorp »

leguminous wrote: post #45
TruthWillHurt wrote: post #39

Quoted post unavailable.

Intel's stated TDPs are not accurate representations of how much power a chip actually uses. You can see in some of these Blender benchmarks the 12900k hitting >230W average: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-12900k-an... It's very workload-dependent, so it's difficult to say how much power a chip will draw in general. It's clear that Intel is still a bit of an energy hog, though.

- both Intel and AMD lie about TDP now, Intel much more than AMD

- 225 W is for the M1 Ultra Mac Studio, whole system power consumption - that includes powering the TB peripherals if they exist

- Intel numbers are just the CPU (not even including the chipset) and will only happen if you don't cool it enough and it has to throttle

So yes, I'd rather have a M1 (probably a Pro would be enough) on my desk than an i9 under it. But I am weird and like cool and quiet, not larger numbers.

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

#93

Post by yxhuvud »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #81
yxhuvud wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responding to a claim that Apple would keep their lead due to x86 baggage. It matters for the truthiness for that claim, it doesn't matter for how much stuff Apple will sell.

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

#94

Post by XCSme »

maccard wrote: post #87
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.

> is less than an order of magnitude quicker than a $2000 (total) device

Isn't the M1 Ultra Mac studio starting at $3999 MSRP?

Also, enthusiasts are usually willing to pay 2x the price for even just 2x the performance.

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

#95

Post by XCSme »

maccard wrote: post #87
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.

I am not saying their chip isn't impressive, just that they are clearly lying/deceiving in their marketing.

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

#96

Post by mromanuk »

kaba0 wrote: post #82
mromanuk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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)

Yes, that's what interesting about this, how did they achieved the performance gap

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

#97

Post by alberth »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

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…

> Apple was able to just create a new CPU based on the much more modern ARM architecture

Is that accurate?

x86 launched in 1978. (64bit in 2003).

ARM launched in 1985. (64bit in 2011).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

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

#98

Post by hnlmorg »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

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…

> much more modern ARM architecture

ARM is nearly as old as x86 and has had just as many evolutions in architecture as x86.

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

#99

Post by dmitrygr »

alberth wrote: post #97
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…

> Apple was able to just create a new CPU based on the much more modern ARM architecture Is that accurate? x86 launched in 1978. (64bit in 2003). ARM launched in 1985. (64bit in 2011). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

X86-64 INCLUDES all the legacy cruft of x86-32 and x86-16 and is thus 44 years old. Aarch64 in Apple chips doesn’t include A32 and is thus 11 years old. It is indeed a large age difference.

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

#100

Post by CoastalCoder »

rob74 wrote: post #23
uniqueuid wrote: post #2

The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…

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…

IMHO a major enabler for this is LLVM.

I think it's significantly reduced the time / cost / difficulty in rolling out a new instruction set architecture.

Post reply on HN