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

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

#191

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #153

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…

> staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set It's easy to take for granted how unusual it was the WinTel hegemony happened at all. As a fan of the breathtaking diversity of classic 80s desktop computing (Amiga, Atari, C64, Spectrum, MSX, etc), I lamented the steamroller of WinTel beige-box homogenization as it paved over so many divergent evolutionary branches. Yet the fact I can still instal…

An underrepresented point of view, certainly. As a software developer at a small game publisher, our idea of hell was a dozen incompatible platforms, none of which had a decisive advantage over the others, few of which could be ignored if the company were to prosper, and all of which were just different enough to tie up resources for porting that were badly needed for product development.

Wintel made a lot of good things possible that simply could never have happened in a fragmented market.

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

#192

Post by maccard » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #130

maccard wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compilation is just fast for me. A 100% increase in speed won't make a real difference. (Except when I compile an entire project from scratch, which I almost never do.)

I work on a medium sized project. A full rebuild is about 25 minutes on the M1 Mac and was about 55 minutes on the i7 Mac mini we used before. The "normal" build (what most developers have to face semi-regularly) is about 15 minutes on the Intel and about 4 on the M1. (I checked our CI numbers and can't explain the discrepancy sorry but I would guess the M1 Mac is quicker linking and the link time dominates).

Our CI does clean builds once a week, and the other builds somewhat regularly. Reducing the feedback loop by 10 minutes for a developers post merge check is a huge win IMO.

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

#193

Post by MomoXenosaga » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

But can it run Crysis?

Apple is pretty much a no go for gaming.

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

#194

Post by tdsanchez » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

Most of the performance advantage of Apple silicon is that it puts CPU, GPU and all memory (that is typically VRAM and DRAM in traditional architectures) millimeters from primary DRAM. When competing purveyors start do this with their own clever packaging, they will start to approach Apple’s mips/watt.

Emulation on M1 is outstanding. The spatial locality of main memory nullifies emulation penalty. Apple has come close to what Transmeta tried to do.

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

#195

Post by jmiskovic » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:17 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #60

defactoPun wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I dont think there's need for a personal attack here. Even though they might not be 87% faster, they are still quite significantly faster for an ultrabook and they do deliver the battery life. So I guess the OP's question can be taken as, could intel or amd or OEMs achieve the performance to power ration soon ?

This is precisely the right reformulation of the actual question. Apple's competitors are already ahead of of Apple in terms of pure performance. "Catching up" is only a thing if you care about the performance/power ratio.

Yes, but the performance/power is extremely important for laptops. As a long time Linux user I'm seriously considering migrating to Mac just for the laptop staying cool and silent after hours operating on battery.

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

#196

Post by gaudat » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

freemint wrote: post #180

davidf18 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It sounds fun looking at how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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

#197

Post by spoonjim » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

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'…

Wrong, the majority of Apple’s thermal efficiency comes from superior design which in turn comes from the fact that they were able to design it from the ground up with no backwards compatibility requirements (since they don’t have any customers of the chip besides themselves).

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

#198

Post by hnlmorg » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #138

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much more modern ARM architecture ARM is nearly as old as x86 and has had just as many evolutions in architecture as x86.

Classic ARM mode has been removed. Only ARMv8 is supported now.

The existence of 8086 instructions doesn’t slow AMD64 instructions.

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

#199

Post by postalrat » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

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.

It wasn't their first attempt. Apple has been making chips for their phones for years.

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

#200

Post by fxtentacle » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #167

fxtentacle wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"You can post obviously absurd scores" does not logically lead to the conclusion "therefore none of the scores can be trusted."

"You can post obviously absurd scores" makes it more difficult to believe a very good score for a very new device that has mostly been criticized in reviews: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/m2-macbook-pro-perfo...