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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?

#171

Post by NobodyNada »

agsnu wrote: post #103
dmitrygr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple was also the first vendor to ship an ARMv8-A compatible chip; I'm sure there have been reports that they heavily influenced the design of AArch64 but I can't dig them out right now.

To back this up, here’s a Twitter thread from an Apple engineer: https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811

> arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches.

> Arm64 didn’t appear out of nowhere, Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes. When Apple began selling iPhones containing arm64 chips, ARM hadn’t even finished their own core design to license to others.

> ARM designed a standard that serves its clients and gets feedback from them on ISA evolution. In 2010 few cared about a 64-bit ARM core. Samsung & Qualcomm, the biggest mobile vendors, were certainly caught unaware by it when Apple shipped in 2013.

> Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided.

> M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago.

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

#172

Post by b20000 »

the main issue IMHO is that competitors are not choosing the right combination of cores and peripherals when designing SoCs. Apple is doing that much better.

for example i am not interested in 2x an A53 and 2x an A72. i want an octa core with the fastest A cores available. each time when i tried to find that i ended up in the server processor world with a price tag to match.

stuff like 4k video decoders and TPUs are of no interest to me. yet multiple i2s ports or TDM are missing on typical mobile SoCs.

AMD has some seriously interesting CPUs these days but unfortunately it seems hard to get access to parts if you are a small time device manufacturer…

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

#173

Post by NobodyNada »

ido wrote: post #148
johnklos wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ARM didn't start out as a shitpile of attempted backwards compatibility with an 8 bit CPU. The i8086 was made as an evolution of the i8080.

And it's also not really "nearly as old" considering how fast stuff developed in the early day - the first ARM CPUs launched in 1986, and the i8086 in 1978 - 8 years earlier.

Yeah, the processor world changed a LOT in those 8 years. Specifically, Berkley RISC and MIPS were developed, which ARM was based on.

In today’s world of “tick-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock” it’s easy to forget just how fast the semiconductor industry was moving during the 70’s-80’s. Just about every processor sold introduced a completely new architecture

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

#174

Post by jjtheblunt »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

that's absurd. fabrication depends on a design, and Apple has done years of research into low power performant designs, going back to be a cofounder of ARM.

Citation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_(company)#Founding

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

#175

Post by layer8 »

cowtools wrote: post #169
throwaway4good wrote: post #66

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.

I would imagine that any implementation of x86 would have to bear the weight of reverse-compatibility. With reverse comparability, the bad design decisions just compound, for example complicated stuff like memory synchronization https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=2956

Exactly. I wish it wasn’t the case, but x86 compatibility will always come at a cost, in particular due to memory semantics, but also I believe due to its complex ISA requiring more silicon.

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

#176

Post by bearjaws »

modeless wrote: post #114

You're looking in the wrong place. The magic comes from TSMC, not Apple. Apple's major innovation is in using their unrivaled bank account to pay TSMC for exclusivity on their newest fabrication technology. As competitors gain access to that TSMC technology they will match or beat Apple's performance. And if Intel succeeds in reclaiming the fabrication technology lead from TSMC (we'll see) then Intel will beat Apple'…

This is just absolutely incorrect.

Design is over half the battle, look at Qualcomm n5 performance vs Apple M1 on n5 performance.

It's not even comparable in anyway.

Even AMD 6900U struggles in many regards compared to M1 pro, and even more so at performance per watt.

For example Cinebench runs at 118% more power draw on the Ryzen at only a 11% multi-core performance advantage.

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

#177

Post by layer8 »

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…

X86 will always be slower because it has stricter memory ordering semantics.

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

#178

Post by pclmulqdq »

daneel_w wrote: post #26
pclmulqdq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple uses LPDDR RAM which is a very different protocol. It is actually faster than DDR, and this may be a big part of the performance difference. For obvious reasons, desktop CPUs cannot use LPDDR RAM, because you can't put it in DIMM form.

Are you really sure about that? I thought LPDDR is all about low power consumption - running at half the frequency but making up for it by twice the bus width, ending up at same performance but with an emphasis on the LOW POWER part of its name. Add.: or maybe I got it the wrong way around; smaller bus width but same performance due often being clocked faster. Either way I cannot find anything suggesting LPDDR offers…

LPDDR used to be about power consumption. It is not any more. DDR uses a lot of power for I/O and SERDES links to maintain a modular form factor, and LPDDR uses a lot less power by having worse signal integrity and lower swings.

They run the memory cells and the I/O faster, and as of LPDDR4 it is now significantly faster than the DDR memory products available.

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

#179

Post by kaba0 »

gary_0 wrote: post #158
dmitrygr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example: Decode. One of the things Apple CPUs keep being praised for is how wide they are. To be wide effectively and keep your execution units busy, you need a wide decoder. With aarch64 it is easy. Every instruction is 4 bytes on a 4 byte boundary. Want a 4-wide decoder? Ingest 16 bytes and copy-and-paste the same decoder 4 times. X86 instructions are variable-length: 1-15 bytes. And you do not know how long an…

And those bytes matter when most Intel CPU cores have only a few dozen KB of L1I cache. Interestingly, the M1 and M2 performance cores have a whopping 192KB of L1 instruction cache.

Isn’t it in part due to business reasons, namely that Apple is not a CPU vendor, it doesn’t have to turn a profit on chips so it can allow much larger die sizes and thus larger cache sizes as well. Is there something inherent in ARM here I’m missing?

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

#180

Post by freemint »

davidf18 wrote: post #163
lumost wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply don’t believe this is true enough to matter. If it was a simple case of paying ASML X billions for their equipment, then we’d see more TSMC competitors. It is entirely plausible TSMC co-developed some of ASML’s IP and has exclusivity - or that the tech to make a working process out of ASML machines is intrinsically hard.

The ASML EUV machines are extremely complicated and rate limited by the polishing of the Zeiss mirrors which require 9 months to manufacture. Zeiss is in the process of scaling up, but in the meantime the EUV machines are very much backordered and that supply limitation is partially responsible for the slowdown in the release of updated nodes. There is an update of the ASML machines which are far more complicated tha…

To continue the tree of suppliers. Zeiss SMT would be nothing without:

HAP GmbH Dresden, MBFZ Toolcraft GmbH, Corning Advanced Optics, AGC Inc, RUAG Space, Schmolz + Bickenbach, RORZE CORPORATION and GEWO Feinmechanik GmbH

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